The city is at the point where it’s dangerous to live there without artificial cooling, placing people one power outage from tragedy, and yet the city keeps sprawling outward.
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People think fans are magic
Air conditioners are magic, they make air colder
Fans just blow hot air around in a circle
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I say something similar, only, “When it’s hot, you can be naked and still be hot.”
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Regularly brought up in threads like this, but still worth pointing out: the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future describes just such a scenario. The result is beyond horrifying.
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your description fits arizona too
cows in a desert halfway around the world are being treated as more important than the current residents of arizona
( and, apparently, pensions in arizona helped to fund to these farms, which is icing on the cake of capitalism )
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It may seem obvious to us, but people with dementia and other cognitive impairments might forget that they have A/C or keep forgetting to to turn it on. A reminder like that might be the prompt someone needs, so it doesn’t hurt.
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Or simply that the cost of moving (financial burden of moving, lost income from potentially spending weeks looking for a new job in a new city; plus social costs of leaving friends and family behind) is greater than the amount they’ll suffer from property values decreasing.
There are real barriers to moving, and then on top of that there’s the sunk cost fallacy. You already have a home, and all the work that that entailed.
Finally there’s crowd psychology. There are millions of other people still living here. Obviously if things were really bad, they’d all be moving. Since they’re not, I’m not about to up-end my life because of a few hot summers.
I don’t think we’ll get mass migration out of these places without some serious government incentives, and that will never happen because can you imagine the outcry if the government started paying people to leave Arizona or Texas?
I think the only thing that will start to move the needle is private insurance companies refusing to cover houses in certain places. This has already started happening in Florida.
I don’t think this will have a big effect, though, because I’d be willing to bet good money that Republican governors will suddenly turn socialist and offer a state-sponsored home insurance policy (which will steadily drain the states’ coffers).
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Actually, if the humidity is fairly low, fans significantly reduce body temperature by evaporating sweat faster. And they’re much more energy efficient too. Most people could raise their thermostats a few degrees if they say under a ceiling fan.
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That’s as crazy as having to convince people facing a potentially lethal virus that they should really get a vaccine.
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I agree with everything you said, with the caveat that things which cannot go on forever don’t go on forever. When the collapse comes it tends to be dramatic as well.
Here in Canada we have tens of thousands of people evacuated from various forest fires, including some fairly large cities. There is a lot of talk about what happens when/if they return. Changes to building codes etc.
The bottom line is that they are climate refugees, though within a relatively wealthy country. That is going to continue and get worse over time.
At some point Phoenix will become unlivable for most of the people there. Heat or water, something is going to give. We already know Republicans will blame ‘woke’ people somehow, but ultimately people will lose their homes - inertia, barriers to moving etc. will become irrelevant.
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water already is for sure
For many years, part of Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated community surrounded by golf courses, had been relying on Scottsdale for their water supply, which was trucked in. But with a parched Lake Mead and overburdened Colorado River going on 20 years of a drought, Scottsdale said they need to conserve water for their own residents and has left these residents in Rio Verde to fend for themselves
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… still doesn’t explain why my housemates leave multiple fans running in the same room when there is nobody there 
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also , perhaps , people with limited means ? with options akin to higher utility bills vs food or medicine next month ?
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And allows the convenience of walking barefoot?! Clearly the designers have never spent time in a cold climate…
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