Weiss and Parks-Fox returned, and it was Fox’s turn to go out for a cigarette. A long time passed, but he never returned. Then Parks-Fox’s phone beeped. It was a text message from her husband, who was sitting in his car outside, typing on his phone. She read it out loud. “Tell her I’m sorry,” it said. “I got too depressed talking about the loss of my house.”

IN THE EARLY 1990S, Maricopa was a small farming community with a population of about 600, mostly longtime farmers and Hispanic laborers, along with a few American Indians. Local businesses included a low-profile Nissan testing site and the state’s largest beef-cattle feed lots  industries that chose Maricopa because it was out of the way. But as Phoenix grew, far-thinking developers began buying up tracts of land in and around Maricopa. By 1996, one developer, Mike Ingram, had amassed with his business partners 18,000 acres  an area larger than the island of Manhattan  most of it purchased for $500 an acre or less. He had a vision of Maricopa’s future, and he helped persuade the state to widen the two-lane road to Phoenix, turning it into a four-lane divided highway. That year, Ingram and his partners announced plans to build a 6,000-acre community in Maricopa. They cleared farmland, brought in utilities and designed a maze of cul-de-sacs, drives, circles and courts oriented around a golf course. They sold building rights to a variety of “superbuilders” like KB Homes, Hacienda Builders and Continental Homes, and in the fall of 2001, the first houses went on sale, while they were still being built.

The first subdivision was completed in 2003 and quickly sold out. The median price for a new home in the city was $147,000, about $80,000 less than a new home in Chandler. Other builders rushed to get in on Maricopa. Within a matter of months, a grove of pecan trees would transform into a few thousand new housing units. The Maricopa post office requested a new ZIP code. Builders literally couldn’t put up houses fast enough, which drove up demand, which drove up prices and buzz. The median house price rose to $160,290 in 2004, then to $212,051 in 2005 and $281,798 in 2006. Subprime financing supercharged the town’s growth; according to First American CoreLogic, a housing-analysis firm based in Santa Ana, Calif., more than a third of buyers in Maricopa in 2004 and 2005 were subprime, a higher rate than in the rest of Arizona and the United States. Investors and speculators bought houses in Maricopa before they were built  often having put little or no money down  and resold them for a profit without ever moving in, sometimes on the day construction was completed. Maricopa’s mayor calculated that at one point in 2005, three new people moved to Maricopa each hour.

Image Boxed In Many homeowners in Maricopa can no longer pay their mortgages or find buyers for their homes. Banks pursued foreclosures on 647 houses in 2007. Credit... Paul Graham for The New York Times

There were plenty of other cities in Arizona that were experiencing a housing-market boom at the same time. But most of those cities already had an infrastructure in place to deal with the influx of people. Nearby Casa Grande had, for instance, a courthouse, a police station, zoning laws, a fire department, a city hall, a local government and a sewer system. Maricopa had none of the above. There was one school in town, built in the 1950s, a four-building campus where Maricopa’s children were educated from kindergarten to 12th grade. Before the boom, Maricopans had found ways to cope with the occasional weather problems that you find in the desert: when it rained and Honeycutt Road flooded, Maricopans just took another route until it dried out. This kind of ad hoc strategy worked fine when fewer than 1,000 people lived there. But the subdivisions brought thousands of commuters, people who worked in Phoenix and Chandler, and they all had to get on the same road to Phoenix every morning and return on it every evening. There is no overpass where Highway 347 crosses the train tracks, so when a train comes along  and about 60 freight trains pass through town every day  the highway just stops dead. At rush hour, the roads become a parking lot.

Ideally, a growing city will negotiate with developers to reduce the impact that new residents will have on the area; it might offer the builder smaller setbacks from the road in exchange for providing space for a school or widening roads. But at the beginning of Maricopa’s growth, the city was unincorporated, and all these negotiations were made by a three-person county board of supervisors that was working from rural zoning codes dating back to 1962. As a result, in those early years, decisions about Maricopa were driven by the concerns of developers, who left little space in their plans for business or commerce  just lots and lots of houses. They created blocks of identical homes, because it was more efficient to build with as little variation as possible. They built sidewalks on only one side of the street to save money. They happily left space in subdivisions for playgrounds and five new elementary schools, which they thought would help bring in the young families they were targeting, but they did not leave space for parks for older kids or for a high school. Each builder worked independently, so there were no paths connecting any of the subdivisions.

As Maricopa grew, a coalition of farmers and newcomers decided that they wanted to try to exert some control over the town’s expansion. In 2002, they applied to the state to incorporate Maricopa as a city, and the county appointed an interim city council and a mayor. Eventually, the city purchased trailers from the highway department and set them down across from the railroad tracks near the old downtown under a sign that said “Interim City Hall.” By the time Maricopa became a city, though, almost half of its land was owned by developers. In 2005, the local school district appointed a superintendent, John Flores, who began pleading with the developers for space for a high school (for a while, Maricopa schools were admitting 300 new students every month). But it was to no avail. Amy Haberbosch, Maricopa’s former director of planning, told me that developers believed high schools lowered property values; she said one developer told her he’d rather build a jail on his property than a high school.