A Prescott Valley
for Everyone

Everyone Here Was New Once

Prescott Valley is a good place because of the people in it.

The businesses we like, the schools our kids go to, the church parking lot that fills on Sunday, the guy who has fixed your truck for eleven years. None of that existed before somebody built the homes that let people settle here.

Whether you arrived in a moving truck last spring, retired here in 2019, or were born at the hospital over in Prescott, every one of us got here because this town made room. It built houses, ran water lines, platted streets, and welcomed people who wanted to stay.

So why have we decided that now, of all times, is when the gate closes?

What It Takes to Buy Here

Here is the state of it, in numbers the Town paid for and published itself.

The average single-family home here has risen 91 percent since 2016, an increase of $233,000, with most of that jump landing in a single year when prices went up 24 percent (Town of PV, 2025). Wages did nothing of the kind (St. Louis Fed, 2026).

If you want to know what a housing shortage feels like from the inside, it feels like checking listings for four years and watching the number at the bottom get further away every time you look.

Who That Is Happening To

It is happening to people across this county, not just in Prescott Valley but also Chino Valley, Prescott and Dewey-Humboldt. That is not four different towns with different markets; it is one regional housing market behaving the same way everywhere inside it. In 2021 the local magazine 5enses put faces to it, and nothing since has made the pattern gentler.

These stories are very different. A young mother who cannot rent a two-bedroom, and a working realtor who sold a big house and cannot buy a small one. An educator who never moved here, and a school district that cannot fill its classrooms. One is trying to rent anything at all. One is trying to buy less than she sold.

Every one of these people lost to this housing market.

And the Person Who Will Take Care of You

If you retired here, this next part is for you.

Depending on which release you read, somewhere between 28 and 30 percent of Prescott Valley residents are over the age of sixty-five, against about 19 percent for Arizona as a whole (U.S. Census QuickFacts). A town like this does not run on its retirees alone. It runs on the home health aide who arrives at nine to help somebody get dressed and check they have eaten. It runs on the nursing assistant doing the lifting a daughter cannot do from two hours away in Phoenix. It runs on the paramedic saving lives at two in the morning and the physical therapist who spends six weeks getting somebody walking again.

Home health and personal care aides earn a national median of $17.21 an hour, about thirty-six thousand dollars a year, with the lowest paid tenth under $25,600 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The Town's study does not break out that job locally, but it does put a Yavapai County nursing assistant, a closely related role, at a median of $38,572 (Town of PV, 2025).

A town where nearly three in ten residents are over sixty-five has made it financially impossible for the people who will care for them to live here.

That is already visible. Yavapai College, which trains this county's nurses, nursing assistants and police officers, has watched new hires turn down jobs or leave within a year because they could not find housing they could afford, and has started putting up RV pads and tiny homes to hold onto them (The Prescott Times).

None of that is the fault of anybody who moved here. Selling a house and retiring somewhere quieter is a reasonable thing to do, and the people who did it are neighbors now. But a town cannot import the people who need care and price out the people who give it, and expect that to hold.

This Is a Policy Choice, Not a Fact of Nature

Prices did not rise because the desert decided to charge more.

They rose because for decades this town has made it easy to build one thing: a single detached house on a large lot. Homes like that cost what they cost. One family carries the whole price of the land, so the house gets built big enough to justify it, and the arithmetic lands at the $489,000 average the Town reports (Town of PV, 2025).

Everything cheaper has been quietly ruled out. Not banned outright, usually. Just made slow enough, uncertain enough and expensive enough to permit that nobody bothers.

Say you own a corner lot in the older part of town and you want to put up four townhouses. You will need a survey, engineering drawings, a traffic study, a drainage plan, application fees and a spot on a hearing calendar months out. Every one of those costs roughly what it costs for a two-hundred-unit subdivision, because a traffic study does not get cheaper when the building gets smaller (Terner Center).

Spread that across two hundred buyers and it disappears into the price. Spread it across four and the project never gets submitted. Those four townhouses do not get voted down. They never reach a vote, and nobody in town ever learns they were considered.

None of that was inevitable. All of it was written down by people, in rooms, on purpose, which means it can be written differently.

What the Town Loses While We Wait

If you bought here fifteen years ago and your mortgage is comfortable, none of this looks like your problem. Here is how it reaches you anyway, and why halting construction would reach you faster.

Start with the growth nobody disputes. The Town's study projects Prescott Valley will add more than twelve thousand people by 2040 (Town of PV, 2025). Those people are coming whether the town approves new homes or not. The real question is whether the growth arrives with housing or without it. Growth without new supply is just more of the problem the town already has: demand climbs, the existing homes get bid up, and the buyers with the most money win them while the workforce is priced further out. Growth with new supply is the version where prices ease instead of climbing and the people who work here can still afford to stay. New supply still brings prices down when demand is rising; it is the only thing that pushes the other way at all. Without it, and without homes aimed at the workforce in particular, prices stay right where they are now.

The jobs make this concrete, and not the way a booster would tell it. Prescott Valley's largest employment sector is health care, and most of the rest is retail, construction and service work (Data USA / Census). These are the jobs that keep a town running: the nurses and aides, the firefighters, the people who stock the stores and build the houses. The town has these jobs. What it does not have is homes those workers can afford, so it fills the jobs by recruiting from outside. Every day 7,378 people commute into Prescott Valley to work here, arriving from Prescott, Chino Valley and Phoenix, then driving back out to sleep somewhere cheaper (Town of PV, 2025). Importing your workforce is expensive, and keeping it is harder. Next door, the City of Prescott, working with the same consultant, found that at the height of recent hiring thirty percent of its job offers were turned down because the person could not find a home they could afford (City of Prescott).

It runs the other way for residents at the same time. Fewer than a quarter of Prescott Valley's working residents, about 23 percent, actually work in Prescott Valley itself; the rest commute out. Most go just next door to Prescott, but 16.3 percent drive all the way to Phoenix, and counting the other Phoenix-area cities, more than a quarter of the local workforce commutes to the Phoenix metro for work (Census OnTheMap, 2023), a pattern the Town's own study echoes in listing Phoenix among the top destinations for workers leaving town. A lot of that is people who could not find the work they wanted here and found it two hours south. It is the same shortage from the opposite side: the town cannot house the workers its employers need, and cannot grow enough of its own good jobs to keep the workers it has. Both trace to the same shortage, and both ease the same way.

Building homes works on both ends at once. House the essential workers the town already depends on, and it can stop importing them and start keeping them. Give an employer a workforce that can afford to live nearby, and the town captures the next round of jobs instead of exporting it. And more homes do not only capture jobs, they make them: every household is a customer, and enough of them within a few miles is what makes a grocery, a dentist or a restaurant worth opening, each of which is jobs. The rooftops come first, and the jobs that serve them follow (NAHB).

Homes also pay their own way. New development funds the roads, water lines and parks that growth requires, through the development impact fees the Town already charges, one-time charges on new construction earmarked for the infrastructure it makes necessary (Town of Prescott Valley). Which is exactly why a moratorium, a freeze on new approvals, gets it backwards. Stopping construction does not stop the growth; the twelve thousand people still arrive, crowd into the homes that already exist and bid the prices up (Town of PV, 2025). It only stops the funding. Block the housing and you keep the traffic, keep the price pressure, and hand the bill for the roads and water to the people already here.

None of this means turning Prescott Valley into Phoenix. That fear sits under a lot of the opposition, and it is a fair one. People are here precisely because they did not want a big city. But more housing does not have to mean high-rises or sprawl. The missing middle, the duplexes and townhouses built to the same scale as the houses already on the street, adds homes without changing what the block looks like. The town does not have to choose between staying as it is and becoming Phoenix. It can add homes at its own scale, or it can watch the workforce keep leaving while prices keep climbing.

We Already Built Them Here

The best evidence that this town can do better is that it already did.

Drive through the older central part of Prescott Valley and you pass duplexes, triplexes and small fourplexes without noticing, because at the scale of a house they look like houses. The Town's own study calls them the standout feature of the local market.

Eight percent of the homes in this town are the kind we no longer build. They went up when Prescott Valley was young and making room for people. They are still standing. Families live in them. Nobody drives past them and thinks the neighborhood was ruined.

We are not asking this town to try an experiment. We are asking it to do again what it already knows how to do.

The Worry Worth Answering

Every time homes get proposed, the same worries surface, and they come from decent people who would never call themselves anything but reasonable.

We are not scared of new neighbors here. Every one of us was a new neighbor. That is the whole history of this town.

We Do Not Have to Guess

The useful thing about being a town of about fifty thousand in 2026 is that everything we are being warned about has already been tried somewhere, and somebody measured it.

How More Homes Bring the Price Down

"Build more" is the right answer, and it works through more than one channel. The plan has three parts that reinforce each other: build more homes, remove the rules that make building hard, and add the missing middle in particular. They run on different clocks, some slow and some fast, but they all move the same direction, and none of them works unless the town is willing to say yes to construction in the first place.

The oldest way is called filtering, and it runs on two speeds. Slowly, as a home ages it tends to lose value in real terms and pass to households earning less than the people who bought it new; a Syracuse University economist found rental housing filters down about two and a half percent a year, enough that over decades a unit built for a six-figure income comes within reach of an ordinary household (Rosenthal, American Economic Review, 2014). Faster, every new home sets off a moving chain: whoever takes it vacates something older, and whoever takes that vacates something cheaper still. Researchers who traced those chains found a hundred new market-rate homes free up housing for forty-five to seventy people in lower-income neighborhoods within about five years (Mast, Journal of Urban Economics), and that new buildings across eleven cities pulled nearby rents down five to seven percent (Asquith, Mast and Reed, Review of Economics and Statistics). Most of the country's unsubsidized affordable housing was made this way. But both speeds carry the same condition: filtering only happens if enough new housing gets built for higher earners to move into. Where building is blocked, those earners bid up the older homes instead, and nothing filters down at all (City Observatory).

It is also the answer to the six. Only six new homes sold under four hundred thousand dollars last year, and that is not the market refusing to build affordable ones. New homes almost always enter at the top of the price range and become the affordable stock later, as they age. The six is a snapshot of the top of that pipeline. The homes an ordinary family can actually buy are the older ones filtering down behind them, which is exactly why the town cannot afford to stop feeding the top: stop building new, and the people who would have bought it turn around and bid up the older homes that were supposed to filter down.

The fastest clock belongs to the missing middle. Missing middle housing, a term coined by the architect Daniel Parolek in 2010, is the range of house-scale buildings with more than one home inside, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses and small courtyard buildings, built to the same scale as the houses around them (Planetizen). They are called missing because zoning quietly stopped allowing them decades ago. Unlike filtering, they do not wait: a townhouse costs less than a detached house the day it is finished, because it sits on less land and that land cost is split more ways. That is what makes it attainable, meaning a home a working or middle-income household can afford without a subsidy, and it is attainable the day it opens rather than in five years or fifty. That speed is why it is worth asking for by name, but it is the near-term piece of the same supply that filtering works on over years, not a substitute for it.

And one piece reaches households the market does not reach on its own. Even a stabilized apartment here needs an income of seventy to a hundred thousand dollars (Town of PV, 2025), so no amount of ordinary supply, by itself, houses a person earning half of that. That is the job of a recorded deed restriction, a condition written into the property's title that stays with the home through every resale, capping its price or reserving it for a local worker. It is why that ask is on the list.

None of these competes with the others; they run on different clocks toward the same place. Filtering works across the whole market, slowly as homes age and faster as each new one clears a chain of moves. The missing middle works fastest and puts attainable homes on the ground now. Below all of it sits the deed restriction, the only one that reaches the aide from earlier, the one earning thirty-six thousand dollars a year, whom no amount of ordinary supply reaches on its own. What they share is a floor: every one of them needs homes to actually get built. Say no to building, and the missing middle is only the first thing you lose; filtering stalls on both its speeds at the same time. All of them stand on the same ground, the town being willing to build, which brings us back to the rules.

Good Start. Not the Whole Job.

Credit where it is owed, because this Council has actually moved.

Prescott Valley cut its minimum lot size from ten thousand square feet to five thousand. It allowed a mix of stick-built and manufactured homes. It convened a work group on attainable housing. In early 2026 it adopted a Local Jurisdiction Affordable Housing Plan built with the Arizona Department of Housing and grounded in the study this article keeps citing. Permits went from seventy-one homes in 2010 to a thousand and twelve in 2022 (Town of PV, 2025).

So the obvious question is why any of this is still a crisis, and it deserves a real answer rather than a demand for more.

Part of the answer is national, and older than any of these reforms. When the housing market crashed in 2008, homebuilding across the country collapsed and stayed collapsed for more than a decade. The framers, roofers, concrete crews and electricians who left the trade in those years mostly did not come back, so the capacity to build shrank and stayed shrunk. Various national studies, summarized by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, put the accumulated shortfall at three to five million homes (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2026). That shortage sets the price of construction, materials and money everywhere, including here. Seventy-one permits in 2010 was what the national collapse looked like from inside Prescott Valley. The town did not cause it.

The rest of the answer is local. Prescott Valley has kept building. By the Town's own count, permits settled back to 481 and 548 in the two years after 2022, still ahead of the roughly 342 a year the study says population growth requires, and its consultant says the town is on pace to meet or exceed that growth (Town of PV, 2025). Keeping pace with the number of new residents is only the floor. Prices fall only when homes go up faster than people arrive to fill them; merely matching the two holds prices right where they are, and where demand runs this hot, even matching supply stays expensive (Tempe YIMBY). The study is blunt about what that leaves out: it names an affordability gap it defines as a shortage of the units needed to house every income level, and projects demand for at least 5,127 more homes by 2040 (Town of PV, 2025). Meeting the headcount does not close that. What it has not built is homes a working household can afford. Under rules that make a large single detached house the simplest thing to permit, that is overwhelmingly what goes up, and it goes up at a price out of reach. Of every home built new in 2024, six sold for under four hundred thousand dollars.

Which is why the reforms so far, right as they were, could not be enough. The answer is to build more, and in particular more of the small, attached and attainable kinds. Quantity by itself does not do it: a thousand more large single detached houses get bought by the same people who could already afford them, and the households priced out stay priced out. Reaching a lower income takes a different kind of home, a duplex, a townhouse, a casita, cheaper because the cost of the land is split more ways. That is the work the missing middle does, and it is why building more has to also mean building differently. The Town's own consultant says exactly that: the affordability problem will not be solved unless, in its words, "higher density housing products are introduced to the community to offset the cost of land and construction."

Building more also does not mean building anything, anywhere. Together Strong weighs every project against the EPA's Smart Growth principles, the standard that asks whether a development uses land efficiently, protects open space, and puts homes within reach of jobs, schools and daily life (EPA). More homes, yes, but the right homes in the right places, an argument big enough for its own article. The narrower point here is that the town cannot build its way to affordability by building only what it builds now.

None of it is abstract. Twenty-nine percent of all households here, and 41.5 percent of renters, already pay more for housing than they can afford, and the 5,127 more homes the study projects by 2040 will go up under the same rules (Town of PV, 2025).

So this is not a case of a Council doing nothing. It is a case of a Council making the right moves, but small ones, while the rules still steer almost every new home toward the expensive end. Cutting the lot size in half was correct, and it can go further. Houston cut theirs to fourteen hundred square feet and got more than twenty-five thousand homes, with an opt-out for any neighborhood that objected (Pew).

The measure of whether the reforms so far were enough is the number this article opened with. Six.

And nobody is coming to help finish it. Arizona's 2024 laws requiring cities to allow casitas and duplexes apply only to municipalities of seventy-five thousand or more, so Prescott Valley is exempt (Arizona House Bill 2720). The Starter Homes Act, which would have limited lot-size mandates statewide, was vetoed in 2024, and a revised version stalled out again in 2025 (KJZZ). In 2026 the Legislature did sign one housing measure into law, HB 2999, but it is a financing tool that lets new developments spread their infrastructure costs over time, not a mandate on what a town must allow, so it changes nothing about what Prescott Valley is required to permit.

This one is entirely ours. Every rule that decides what gets built in Prescott Valley was written here, and can be rewritten here.

Four Things to Ask For

Each of these removes a barrier rather than approving a single project, which is the difference between winning once and winning repeatedly.

Thursday

Here is the part that actually decides it, and it is worth understanding properly rather than being told to care.

Housing rules in Prescott Valley get set at public meetings, in a room with a published agenda, by whoever walks in. Research collecting the records of who speaks at local planning meetings finds that the people who turn out are twenty-five percentage points more likely to be homeowners than the local voting public, and are older, longer settled and more often male. They oppose new housing considerably more strongly than their own neighbors do when surveyed, and even when opposition does not stop a project outright, the project usually comes back smaller than it started (Einstein, Glick and Palmer, Perspectives on Politics).

That is not a conspiracy, and the explanation is almost boring. A retired couple three streets from a proposed subdivision has a free Thursday evening and an immediate reason to spend it at Town Hall. A nursing assistant finishing a shift at seven with two kids at home does not. Neither does the family who would eventually have bought one of those houses, because they do not live here yet and cannot vote here.

Almost nobody has thought through what comes next, and it changes what showing up is actually for.

When a public process stops producing decisions and only produces refusals, the response is not that everyone gives up and goes home. The response is that somebody higher up takes the decision away.

That has already started. In 2025 the Arizona legislature passed HB2447, which now requires cities and towns to hand site plans, plats, land divisions and design review over to administrative staff, judged against fixed objective standards, with no public hearing at all. It does not touch rezonings or annexations, so the biggest fights still get a hearing (HB2447 bill text). The stated goal was removing bottlenecks and making approval timelines predictable (AZBEX). Whatever you think of that, notice what it did: an entire category of local decisions stopped being public.

And Prescott Valley is currently outside Arizona's 2024 laws requiring cities to allow casitas and duplexes, because those apply only to municipalities of seventy-five thousand or more (Arizona House Bill 2720). That exemption is a judgment, made in Phoenix, that a town this size can still be trusted to work this out locally. Judgments like that get revisited when the evidence stops supporting them.

So the two things people treat as opposites turn out to be the same fight.

Cutting the barriers is how a town holds onto its say. A town that argues for eighteen months over four townhouses on a corner lot is a town that will eventually have that argument taken away from it. A town that makes ordinary housing simple to approve keeps its public process for the decisions that genuinely warrant one, and keeps the state out of it.

It is also the only route to ever getting the housing we actually need. Nobody gets to advocate for duplexes and casitas and small-lot homes in a process where every proposal dies of exhaustion before it reaches a vote. Making it possible to build them is what creates the opening to ask for them at all.

Which is why showing up matters, and why what you ask for when you get there matters just as much.

Where the rules get set

Second and fourth Thursday of each month, 5:30 p.m.

Library Auditorium and Council Chambers, 7401 E. Skoog Boulevard (Town of Prescott Valley)

Public comment: 3 minutes Register with the Clerk first Written comment accepted too

Be Part of the Solution

Going is easier with company. We coordinate rides and walk in together, nobody has to do it alone.

Join our meeting chat Volunteer with us

You do not need a study or a script. Say what you do for a living, what you earn, and what you cannot afford to buy here. Nobody in that room can argue with any of it.

If you cannot get there in person, you can submit written comment to the Town Clerk's office ahead of the meeting, and it goes into the record. Check the current agenda for the deadline and how to send it.

Decide right now which Thursday you are going to, and how you will get there. Then bring one person with you.

What This Town Could Be

Prescott Valley does not need to be bigger for its own sake, and nobody is asking for towers on Glassford Hill.

It needs to be a place where the aide who sits with your mother at three in the morning can afford to live in the same town. Where a widow can sell the big house and stay near her grandkids. Where the school district can hire a twenty-six-year-old without apologizing about the rental market. Where a kid who grew up here can afford to raise a kid here.

Six new homes under four hundred thousand dollars in a year is what the current rules produce. Eight percent of the homes in this town already prove we know how to do better. They are standing on ordinary streets, and the only thing keeping us from building more of them is a set of rules that a room full of people could change on a Thursday evening.