In their imagined vision of the future, a Phoenician named Sylvia returns to her home-megalopolis in 2035 and reminisces about the state’s changes over the previous three decades. But the authors distill many of their predictions down into a five-page speculative fiction scenario intended to “point out lessons, concepts and innovations that should be considered now so that good public policy will be made for the future of the Sun Corridor.” The report is daunting to read, clocking in at 50-pages of demographics, economics, governance and land-use issues. It’s especially interesting, given that the report was published just after the housing bubble burst spectacularly, hitting Southwestern cities especially hard. It’s fascinating to read the report 15 years after it was written, not only to see what the policy nerds of 2008 got right and wrong about their future (and our present), but also because it provides a window into what was happening at that moment in time - and how much the region has and hasn’t changed in the last decade and a half.
The urban-planning policy report looked ahead 30 years to imagine the challenges and opportunities facing the 8 million-person megalopolis that authors expected to see there by now. Its authors take on the sprawling urban beast that stretches from Prescott to the Mexico border, with Phoenix and Tucson at its heart. Given the recent news, the report, called Megapolitan: Arizona’s Sun Corridor, is prescient. Recently, however, while I was digging through my digital archives - files I’ve saved from past reporting projects - I ran into an old report from 2008 put out by Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy. That may not slow growth, but it does provide a bit of a wakeup call in a state that is notoriously sleepy when it comes to dealing with water. That means that new housing developments that rely solely on wells will no longer be allowed developers will have to get their water from somewhere else, which will be not only more costly, but could be difficult, since other water supplies are also shrinking. As a result, the state will stop issuing assured water-supply determinations in the Phoenix Active Management Area based solely on groundwater supplies.
This month, we got some bombshell news: The Arizona Department of Water Resources has recently concluded that, by 2121, water demand in the greater Phoenix metro area will exceed groundwater supplies by nearly 5 million acre-feet, or about 1.6 trillion gallons. This is an installment of the Landline, a fortnightly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.
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