It can be hard to thrive and survive,” said Rashad Thomas, a South Phoenix resident. “Everything is changing now, with new residents, growing segregation, the heat. Black Americans are moving for a variety of reasons, but rising temperatures, drought, and erratic weather are already making their new homes less livable. And, unlike the previous Great Migration, this trend is rising against an existential threat: climate change. Their experience has been made more difficult by policies that, for more than a century, have encouraged inequities in community investment, favoring predominantly white neighborhoods. But historic numbers are also moving to the West: Las Vegas and Phoenix have the fastest-growing Black populations outside of the Gulf Coast region.īut Black residents in Phoenix face a distinctive set of challenges that impact their ability to build welcoming neighborhoods for their communities. This isn’t the first time that such a significant number have been on the move: Between the early 1900s to the mid-1970s, roughly 6 million Black people left the South and spread across the country in what historians call “The Great Migration.” In recent years, Black America is in the midst of another great migration - one in which many are reversing the previous trend and returning to the South, drawn by the lower cost of living and a larger Black community. Those moving to Phoenix are a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who have left the coasts and the Midwest in search of better jobs and safer communities. Maricopa County’s Black population is growing nearly seven times faster than its white population, making it the fastest-growing region for Black people outside the Dallas and Houston areas, according to U.S. A disproportionate amount of that growth is driven by new Black residents: Between January 2020 and December 2021, the Black population’s increase outpaced every other major racial group. More than 650,000 people have relocated to the Phoenix area during that time, making Maricopa the country’s fastest-growing county. The Watsons are among the at least 70,000 Black folks who moved into Maricopa County between 20. Plus, the neighborhood was diverse, and many residents looked like them. The home is newer and more spacious than places they lived in on the East Coast. After a few years, they bought a home in an affordable, yet rapidly changing neighborhood in South Phoenix. Watson and Blakeney settled in an apartment in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, and married in August 2015. Email Address Submit Credit: Matt Williams Collette and Brian Watson photographed at South Mountain Park in South Phoenix, Arizona in January. Sign up for our newsletter and get more news and analysis from our reporters weekly. “I felt stuck in a place where leaders didn’t prioritize making it livable for people who aren’t rich,” the 38-year-old from South Carolina said. It lacked community spaces and the public transportation she was used to. After living in New York City, she was used to urban bustle, but Phoenix, one of the nation’s five-largest cities, felt different. When Blakeney - “Coco” to her friends and family - first arrived, she felt daunted. “As long as I have her,” he told me, “I’m good.” But his anxiety was tempered by the fact that Collette Blakeney, whom he’d just started dating, would join him and that they’d navigate their new city together. He was apprehensive about the heat - he’d read about the city’s increasingly hot and deadly summers - and about moving to a city where he’d be one of a relatively small number of Black residents.
Watson, 37 at the time, moved to the Phoenix area in January 2014. Executives at the company chose Phoenix, far from the coast - and chose Watson, who led the New Jersey office during the storm, to establish an additional hub in the sunny Arizona city. “The company discovered that they didn’t have an adequate response to the power going out or natural disasters in general,” Watson told me. The disaster caused an estimated $70 billion in damage and prompted Watson’s company to look for a place that was safe from severe coastal weather. Parts of Mercer County lost power for an entire week. And so he worked - even as utility poles buckled under the storm and transformers exploded in its ferocity. Watson’s job as a fraud analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch required him to be on call 24/7 despite the severe weather. In late October 2012, the 80 mph winds of Hurricane Sandy pelted the tiny suburb of Pennington, New Jersey, where Brian Watson worked. This story was produced in partnership with High Country News.
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