Prior to developing and approving new ordinances that would further regulate sex- offender distance restrictions and clustering, the Phoenix City Council approved a study to examine the nature and impact of sex-offender clustering. Their overall goal was to use the study to fill in some important knowledge gaps about the issue of sex-offender residential clustering in order to inform the development of effective policy. To examine this issue on behalf of the city council, we relied on a multi-methodological research design. We wanted to incorporate information from several different points of view, giving policy makers a more comprehensive perspective from which to inform their decision making. For this study, we relied on four resources: official police data, offender interview data, citizen survey data, and key stakeholder interview data.

This contains two reports. The first is by authors from Statistical Research, Inc. that provides background information on the definition and application of the traditional cultural places designation under the National Historic Preservation Act. The second report is from the National Forest Service and expands on the first with examples of how traditional cultural places can be considered as part of land management planning.

A number of significant positive and negative economic impacts could result from Pima County's SDCP and related programs, according to an analysis of existing research on large-scale conservation planning undertaken to provide a framework for community decision-making. This report offers no final verdict on the net economic impact of Pima County's current, ambitious initiatives in habitat conservation and growth management. However, it does provide a framework for future assessment and decision-making.

The age of housing in the Phoenix metropolitan area reflects the mostly steady outward spread of development. Large differences exist across the area in other housing measures. Many of these differences are closely related to geographic variations in household income and in the type of housing. As in the rest of the country, housing affordability in the Phoenix metropolitan area fell substantially in the 1970s. During the 1980s, the change in affordability varied by situation. Affordability rose for the median-income household, especially for homeownership. For those at the low end of the income spectrum, affordability of rental units improved slightly, but affordability of owned units worsened. Data for the 1990s are limited; the affordability of owned units rose for the median-income household, which could afford the median-priced home in 1998. An inadequate supply of very low-cost housing existed in the Phoenix metropolitan area in 1990. Even if low-income households were perfectly matched to low-income housing that they could afford, a little less than 3 percent of all households (about 23,000) could not have found affordable housing. The inadequacy expanded in the 1980s. The percentage of households reporting an unaffordable housing payment was much greater. Considering only low-income households who spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing, about 21 percent of all households had a housing problem related to affordability.

As a major component of the Climate Assessment Project for the Southwest, this study is part of a larger effort to assess the vulnerability of natural and human systems to climate variability and change in the southwestern U.S. As importantly, this assessment seeks to fulfill the project’s larger mission of working directly with communities to improve their ability to respond adequately and appropriately to climatic events and climate change. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the utility of a rapid ethnographic approach for (1) conducting a community-level assessment of climate related vulnerability and (2) extending the findings to other assessments.

Conventional wisdom often views the urban water sector as being among the more sensitive sectors in the arid U.S. Southwest. To test this assumption, the Climate Assessment Project for the Southwest analyzed the water budgets of five Arizona cities to determine how severe the impacts would be from the deepest one-, five-, and ten-year droughts on record. Case study sites for the analysis included the Phoenix Active Management Area, Tucson Active Management Area, Santa Cruz Active Management Area, and the Benson and Sierra Vista subwatersheds of the San Pedro River.

Most of the state's cattle ranches rely solely on rain-fed range to support their herds. Drought conditions can result in significant declines in forage production and nutritional quality. Failure to respond to these changes with appropriate management can compound the effects of drought on already stressed vegetation resulting in poor range condition and animal performance. The project discussed in this paper has three broad purposes: first, to compile a profile of Arizona's ranchers, with an emphasis on socioeconomic characteristics of ranchers in the southeastern portion of the state; second, to identify and understand the physical, social, and political-economic factors that make the livelihoods of ranchers vulnerable to climatic variability; and third, to determine whether or not ranchers can mitigate their vulnerability with improved access to information on climate. The project is in its initial stages and thus no conclusive data are available at this time. In this paper we will outline our assumptions in entering the project, our methodology, and some preliminary assessments from our work to date.