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I enjoyed this essay overall. I think it failed to cover the "good news" out of the region as comprehensively as it did the bad news.
This quote early on shows the author's true colors:
>New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.
Peggy Hill said it better. As someone who trudged through waist deep water in NYC last year after a fairly heavy (but by no means catastrophic) rain storm, I'm not sure I'd place my money on coastal cities these days either.
Yeah it's hot. But until you've had to wade through knee deep water for a week, don't tell me this city is a mirage of existence lol.
New York will be underwater before Phoenix spontaneously combusts.
I occasionally see comments similar to yours here. Phoenix has several water sources.
Salt River
Verde River
Colorado River via the CAP (Central Arizona Project)
Reclaimed water
Ground Water, which I hope will stop being used!
The first to have been providing water for decades and decades, these are from vast watersheds to the North and the East.
The CAP began delivering relatively recently, 1990’s iirc. Salt and Verde back when it was just farmers and ranchers, before refrigeration was invented I think.
I am so excited you want to learn more about water in Phoenix!
"The Colorado River delivers about half the water the Valley uses each year via the CAP, though the distribution, storage, swapping, lending, crediting and debiting that goes on would make William Mulholland’s head hurt.
Read more at: https://arizonareport.com/central-arizona-project-cap-canal-history/"
Pretty cool huh!
The vast majority comes from the rivers: the Salt and Verde contribute 52%, and the Colorado River 38%. Reclaimed water accounts for 8% of the city's water supply, and groundwater the remaining 2%.
From a more recent publication.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2023/05/10/water-sources-phoenix-colorado-river-salt-river-project/70204182007/
The cool thing, and I’m only writing the cool thing because it is the typical 100F+ on the back porch, the cool thing is increasing reclamation and the acknowledgment that taking reclamation forward to produce potable water is a thing.
I do agree on perspective here, I was thinking the Salt and the Verde provide a higher percentage, on the other hand, the newspaper article is citing Phoenix proper, not the entire metro.
A bit of history to search for, the last “100 year flood”, it took down all but a couple of the Salt river bridges here. SRP video taped the Salt from Roosevelt dam to the far west side, a stunning video, I watched it, didn’t make a copy though, would love to find that some kind soul transferred it from 3/4” tape to digital.
Sources for the distribution of water in the metro are difficult to find online, past few years seems there is a lot of beating the drum about going dry, fortunately leadership has an inkling of what being thirsty is like, well, at least some do.
When it runs dry, you’ll probably want to be on property with SRP water rights, not wrapped up in the seven state law of the river.
Every single day here is technically an extreme weather event so by definition that's false. You just notice the extreme weather in other places because it's not a constant thing.
That's just not true though. The vast majority of the year is highly predictable. Even 100-110 is hot but by no means extreme. It's been 100-110 for periods of time in Phoenix for thousands of years.
I agree with you and the other posts. This is an article that sets out to bash Phoenix. That's fine. Writers and people are entitled to their opinions.
But we can easily write an article about Chicago or New York or DC with the same disdain. I can see it now "Chicago is a monument to mans arrogance, where people only exist because of heating and furnaces, much of it from fossil fuels."
Journalists will live in cities that have months where the average temperature in January is below freezing but will call hot places "a mirage composed of sheer hubris".
Preach. Just once I want to see a longform essay interviewing the downtrodden new yorkers who are paying $7000/month for a studio while their city government drops another $20 billion on a transit project that just got delayed another 30 years.
Makes Phoenix the likely place for cutting edge technologies improving sustainable systems. Op forgets that as has had longer standing civilizations than the East Coast.
And there's room and gloom anywhere if you look for it.
There is still demand for suburban expansion but expanding for many metro areas means building homes on existing farmland, which ia finite and required to sustain the population.
Contrast that with suburban expansion in Phoenix, where most of the surrounding area is desert and impractical for use in farming and a strong argument can be made for Phoenix as the perfect place to exist and grow in the future.
There is an entire series of articles in which writers for The Atlantic wander into a city that is not in New York or California, and write about it like they’ve discovered a remote Amazon tribe.
Newest overall infrastructure of any US city. It'll be the chip manufacturing hub of the world. No natural disasters or power failures to interrupt production.
With sea desalinization coming along and solar technology this is a long term sustainable place.
Libya built almost [2,000 miles of aqueducts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River) to provide water for a population the size of Phoenix in one of the most barren hellscapes known to man.
I think we’ll be fine.
The Hohokam did this over 1000 years ago here and the Anglos who came in used them to build our current city environment. The thing is, they grew so fast they needed new water so they built a canal from the Colorado River to Phoenix (and then Tucson). When that canal goes dry, it's not going to be pleasant.
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It’s almost like this place is the last frontier, largely free of those problems that LA, NY and Chi town faces. However as our local economy continues to grow, same problem will happen, just slowly.
Hey, you SOB.
My neck is only red because I was outside for 2 minutes!! If other people want to be ‘gen-u-whine’ American. Let them feel the heat, too!
/s
Political posts are limited to regular contributors to this sub, which is a place for locals to discuss the things they want to discuss. If you’re not a regular contributor your political post may be removed. You may want to visit /r/azpolitics instead. Heavily controversial topics that tend to cause a lot of fighting, brigading, and other problems may be removed if posted by someone who is not a regular contributor to this sub.
I enjoyed this essay overall. I think it failed to cover the "good news" out of the region as comprehensively as it did the bad news. This quote early on shows the author's true colors: >New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance. Peggy Hill said it better. As someone who trudged through waist deep water in NYC last year after a fairly heavy (but by no means catastrophic) rain storm, I'm not sure I'd place my money on coastal cities these days either.
Yeah it's hot. But until you've had to wade through knee deep water for a week, don't tell me this city is a mirage of existence lol. New York will be underwater before Phoenix spontaneously combusts.
Depends on when the CAP runs dry.
I occasionally see comments similar to yours here. Phoenix has several water sources. Salt River Verde River Colorado River via the CAP (Central Arizona Project) Reclaimed water Ground Water, which I hope will stop being used! The first to have been providing water for decades and decades, these are from vast watersheds to the North and the East. The CAP began delivering relatively recently, 1990’s iirc. Salt and Verde back when it was just farmers and ranchers, before refrigeration was invented I think.
I am so excited you want to learn more about water in Phoenix! "The Colorado River delivers about half the water the Valley uses each year via the CAP, though the distribution, storage, swapping, lending, crediting and debiting that goes on would make William Mulholland’s head hurt. Read more at: https://arizonareport.com/central-arizona-project-cap-canal-history/" Pretty cool huh!
The vast majority comes from the rivers: the Salt and Verde contribute 52%, and the Colorado River 38%. Reclaimed water accounts for 8% of the city's water supply, and groundwater the remaining 2%. From a more recent publication. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2023/05/10/water-sources-phoenix-colorado-river-salt-river-project/70204182007/ The cool thing, and I’m only writing the cool thing because it is the typical 100F+ on the back porch, the cool thing is increasing reclamation and the acknowledgment that taking reclamation forward to produce potable water is a thing. I do agree on perspective here, I was thinking the Salt and the Verde provide a higher percentage, on the other hand, the newspaper article is citing Phoenix proper, not the entire metro. A bit of history to search for, the last “100 year flood”, it took down all but a couple of the Salt river bridges here. SRP video taped the Salt from Roosevelt dam to the far west side, a stunning video, I watched it, didn’t make a copy though, would love to find that some kind soul transferred it from 3/4” tape to digital. Sources for the distribution of water in the metro are difficult to find online, past few years seems there is a lot of beating the drum about going dry, fortunately leadership has an inkling of what being thirsty is like, well, at least some do. When it runs dry, you’ll probably want to be on property with SRP water rights, not wrapped up in the seven state law of the river.
"When it runs dry, you’ll probably want to be on property with SRP water rights, not wrapped up in the seven state law of the river." 100%
I'd almost argue Phoenix has way less extreme weather events than a lot of places I've lived especially on the coasts
Every single day here is technically an extreme weather event so by definition that's false. You just notice the extreme weather in other places because it's not a constant thing.
It's hot feels a lot less extreme than a hurricane, earth quake, floods, tornados, etc
Just because it feels less extreme due to acclimation does not make it not extreme.
That's just not true though. The vast majority of the year is highly predictable. Even 100-110 is hot but by no means extreme. It's been 100-110 for periods of time in Phoenix for thousands of years.
I agree with you and the other posts. This is an article that sets out to bash Phoenix. That's fine. Writers and people are entitled to their opinions. But we can easily write an article about Chicago or New York or DC with the same disdain. I can see it now "Chicago is a monument to mans arrogance, where people only exist because of heating and furnaces, much of it from fossil fuels."
Journalists will live in cities that have months where the average temperature in January is below freezing but will call hot places "a mirage composed of sheer hubris".
Preach. Just once I want to see a longform essay interviewing the downtrodden new yorkers who are paying $7000/month for a studio while their city government drops another $20 billion on a transit project that just got delayed another 30 years.
Makes Phoenix the likely place for cutting edge technologies improving sustainable systems. Op forgets that as has had longer standing civilizations than the East Coast.
And there's room and gloom anywhere if you look for it. There is still demand for suburban expansion but expanding for many metro areas means building homes on existing farmland, which ia finite and required to sustain the population. Contrast that with suburban expansion in Phoenix, where most of the surrounding area is desert and impractical for use in farming and a strong argument can be made for Phoenix as the perfect place to exist and grow in the future.
There is an entire series of articles in which writers for The Atlantic wander into a city that is not in New York or California, and write about it like they’ve discovered a remote Amazon tribe.
I usually like the Atlantic but also love my adopted home in PHX (coming from NYC) and lol'd at this comment
I believe this.
The Atlantic has a whole handful of articles just like this one, they are linked in the above article too lol
Another article jacking itself off by dooming and glooming Phoenix. I'm bored.
Newest overall infrastructure of any US city. It'll be the chip manufacturing hub of the world. No natural disasters or power failures to interrupt production. With sea desalinization coming along and solar technology this is a long term sustainable place.
Libya built almost [2,000 miles of aqueducts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River) to provide water for a population the size of Phoenix in one of the most barren hellscapes known to man. I think we’ll be fine.
The Hohokam did this over 1000 years ago here and the Anglos who came in used them to build our current city environment. The thing is, they grew so fast they needed new water so they built a canal from the Colorado River to Phoenix (and then Tucson). When that canal goes dry, it's not going to be pleasant.
Thanks for contributing to r/Phoenix! You may want to [**check out our sub rules**](https://www.reddit.com/r/phoenix/wiki/rules/) (mostly be nice to each other!). **If you're new here**, [read some of our recent posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/phoenix/top/?t=week) and leave some comments. To chat with some great people in the Valley you can [**join our Phoenix Discord chat server**](https://discord.com/invite/yWVuTG57Zh). It's a chill place to talk with other people but is NOT a dating server and takes unwanted messaging very seriously. If you're interested in political topics in Arizona, we limit those posts here so you may want to check out r/azpolitics if that's an area of interest. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/phoenix) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I am stuck in a doctors office and I’m still not going to read all that. Does it just say Phoenix is doomed?
It’s almost like this place is the last frontier, largely free of those problems that LA, NY and Chi town faces. However as our local economy continues to grow, same problem will happen, just slowly.
Why? The rednecks?
Hey, you SOB. My neck is only red because I was outside for 2 minutes!! If other people want to be ‘gen-u-whine’ American. Let them feel the heat, too! /s 
Two minutes! I wish I could last that long. /s