A Puzzle in Arizona’s Boom Towns: How to Keep Growing With Less Water
“It’s a little gold mine,” he said.
He trusts the city will have enough water to brew his coffee and fill his faucets.
Buckeye’s affordability has attracted growing numbers of Black and Latino families from California, the Midwest and other corners of Arizona over the past 20 years. Today, the city has a higher percentage of Latino residents than Arizona as a whole.
On the far western reaches of the city, the realities of limited groundwater will soon start coming into focus. There, just west of the jagged White Tank Mountains, earth movers had cleared away creosote bushes to make way for the first homes of a new development called Teravalis, which aspires to build 100,000 homes and 55 million square feet of commercial space.
The development, which is owned by the Howard Hughes Corporation, has gotten approval from state water authorities to build 7,000 homes. But now, the developers of Teravalis and several other projects in the deserts of western Buckeye will have to find other sources of water to get permits to build the rest of the project.
The limits mean that cities on the outer edges of Maricopa County, home to 4.5 million people, must redouble their hunt for new sources of water. They are seeking it through conservation, recycling wastewater, expanding reservoirs or even pumping in treated seawater from Mexico.
Source: The New York Times
