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October 6, 2025

On the far edge of suburban Phoenix, a giant concrete arch spans the Central Arizona Project, dubbed a “Bridge to Nowhere” by developers and neighborhood activists alike. Nobody can use it; even pedestrians are barred by a chain-link fence sporting a huge “Road Closed” sign. To the bridge’s north, the desert sits as raw as ever.

The bridge was built in recent years to connect an existing subdivision to the planned North Star Ranch and its proposed 9,600 homes. North Star was to be the latest of many new master-planned communities in Buckeye, one of the fastest-growing cities in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metro areas.

But now, this development is on hold over concerns that there’s not enough groundwater to supply the community. And it’s not the only project: *High Country News *found that almost half a million homes, including thousands in North Star, are currently on pause, far more than developers or local elected officials have acknowledged publicly.

Developments like North Star have long represented the future of housing for local developers and prospective homebuyers. Phoenix has sprawled endlessly in every direction since World War II, a beacon of the Sun Belt. The city’s rampant growth has transformed former agricultural fields and open desert into homes and tested the bounds of the water supply in Maricopa County, which usually ranks as one of the nation’s fastest-growing counties. The proposed new developments would stretch past the White Tank Mountains, a low-slung collection of peaks that has long served as Phoenix’s unofficial western boundary, making them the most remote developments yet.

But then, in June 2023, state modeling studies concluded that Phoenix and the surrounding areas had “reached the anticipated limits of growth on groundwater supplies,” and the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) made the stunning decision to stop issuing new water supply certificates to developments served by groundwater in the city’s outer ring of suburbs. Nowhere on Phoenix’s edges did this moratorium hit harder than in Buckeye, where many of the halted projects were slated to be built.

The decision stemmed from a provision in the state’s pioneering 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Act that required metro areas and developers to prove that new subdivisions have enough water to last 100 years.

A slew of sensational headlines followed.* The New York Times* said it likely signaled the “beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix area the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country,” a prediction echoed by other outlets. The number of homes halted due to unsustainable reliance on groundwater is a striking indication of how widespread the practice has become — and of the state’s determination to rein it in.

The moratorium’s impacts heightened a political crisis that had been building in Phoenix for years as the demand for cheap housing and the limits on its water supply collided. Not only did the moratorium come during the worst drought to hit the Southwest in at least 1,200 years, it also hit in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis that has impacted even the Phoenix area, once a bastion of affordability. Developers and their supporters argue that it has caused real economic harm to homebuyers, because they say growth has stopped where the housing is most affordable. But the moratorium could also encourage denser growth in the city — something urban planners say would be healthy for Phoenix and also preserve desert habitat, conserve water and bolster the sense of community.

In the two years since the moratorium began, the housing and water pressures on the area have only increased. Phoenix has become trapped between a demand for affordable homes that meet people’s expectations for a good middle-class life and what government officials say is the dwindling amount of water available to supply those homes. And decision-makers have splintered along partisan lines, seemingly intractably, divided over the best way forward. Republican legislators have pushed hard for bills that would ease or lift the moratorium, while Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, whose administration introduced it, and most Democratic legislators have continued to stand by it.

Phoenix is at an inflection point, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s water chief, said at a June 2023 press briefing announcing the new restrictions. The question remains: In which direction will Phoenix tip?

Locals call this bridge over the Central Arizona Project canal in Buckeye, Arizona, the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

ONCE A QUIET FARMING COMMUNITY, Buckeye has rapidly mushroomed; town officials say about 125,000 people live here today, making it about 19 times larger than it was in 2000. That’s nothing, though, compared to the future growth already approved by the Buckeye City Council — enough new development to push the city’s population to more than 1 million.

State officials and local governments like Buckeye’s have routinely enabled this kind of growth through zoning and planning policies that treat sprawl as a way of life. Homes built within the urban core typically use less land, consume less water and require less infrastructure. Although they’re more expensive to build due to land costs, their urban location preserves desert habitat. But development on the edges has long been seen as the quickest, simplest way to meet people’s housing needs.

“In Phoenix, land development has always been as natural as breathing,” Andrew Ross observed in his 2011 book Bird on Fire, one of the few works that has ever taken a critical look at the region’s growth practices. “Any corner of the landscape is a parcel, begging for a contract; each building is a renovation opportunity, every open space a ‘vacant lot,’ awaiting its approver, and, with a little backing, it could be you.”

Efforts to rein in sprawl have run into economic — and political — walls. Growth-related industries such as construction and real estate account for a substantially larger share of the area’s economic base than they do in the U.S. as a whole — nearly 19% compared with 14.3% nationally. In 2000, the Sierra Club led a high-profile ballot initiative to compel Arizona cities to form growth management plans and impose urban growth boundaries on all cities with more than 2,500 people. A sizable majority of voters favored it initially, but the effort ultimately crashed at the polls, crushed by the real estate industry’s over $4 million opposition campaign.

Kathleen Ferris, a former state water director who is now a senior researcher studying water supply issues at Arizona State University, takes a particularly cynical view of the local attitude toward development — the “god of growth,” as she calls it.

An architect of the 1980 law that, years later, would halt North Star Ranch and the hundreds of thousands of other new suburban homes, she sees the restrictions as a protection against the worst of Arizona’s past excesses. “We are not going to have growth without water,” she said. “We will have water in hand before growth is allowed.”

Today, Ferris, at 76, is a key player in the ongoing struggle over the city’s water issues — one part water lawyer, one part researcher and one part crusader. She regularly talks with legislators and gives ADWR a piece of her mind about pending bills and regulations. As a water expert and a prominent voice speaking against groundwater-based development, her presence has become almost obligatory in discussions of Arizona’s water troubles.

Kathleen Ferris has spent her career working toward water security in Arizona as the state’s population doubled. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

In 1980, her presence loomed even larger: She was at the center of Arizona’s seemingly intractable groundwater wars. Back then, when lawmakers were drafting the bill that would ultimately spawn the current moratorium, the state’s groundwater levels were already nearing a crisis point: There were essentially no limits on groundwater pumping in any sector of the state’s economy, which was booming with the same intensity as it is today. Cities, farms and mines were at one point pulling at least 1.9 million more acre-feet a year out of the state’s aquifers than rainfall and snowmelt could replenish. In some areas, the aquifers were so depleted that they were collapsing, causing the land to sink and subside.

Around 200 miles of earth fissures caused by this subsidence have been mapped across Arizona. In both rural and suburban areas, earth fissures have undermined and closed roads, power lines, irrigation canals and sewer systems. In 2007, a horse fell into a 10-foot-deep, 15-foot-wide fissure in suburban Phoenix and died before it could be rescued.

Arizona already had a well-earned national reputation as a haven for land fraud. Legendary swindlers like Nathan Waxman, the self-proclaimed godfather of land fraud, were behind the sale of lots without any water supplies, roads or a clear understanding of who even owned the land. In the 1960s and 1970s, Waxman, working secretly with some of Arizona’s most prominent businessmen, “had scammed millions of dollars from Easterners who thought they were buying a retirement home rather than a chunk of barren desert,” reporters for the Arizona Project wrote.

“It just seemed horrible to me,” Ferris recently recalled. “Growth was really starting to happen big-time in Arizona. We were using way too much groundwater.”

In late 1979 and into 1980, then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt and more than a dozen lobbyists and legislators gathered in a downtown Phoenix law office for a closed-door meeting to hammer out details of what would become the state’s Groundwater Management Act. Ferris, one of the state’s preeminent groundwater authorities, and one of her staff members were the only women in the room.

Ferris was a few months shy of 31, but she was already regarded as an authority on groundwater. She had been intimately involved in day-to-day negotiations and politicking over the groundwater law. She spent countless mornings and evenings with Babbitt, the law’s prime architect, sifting through the bill’s fine points and hashing out the details.

As director of the Arizona Groundwater Management Study Commission, she spent nearly two years during the late 1970s traversing the state, seeking public comments on how to cobble together a new law regulating groundwater pumping. The committee’s recommendations would form the basis of the negotiations over the 1980 law.

Congress authorized construction of the $4 billion Central Arizona Project (CAP) in 1968, hoping to ease the groundwater deficit and deliver Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. It was still under construction in the late 1970s, but a report commissioned by then-State Water Engineer Wes Steiner predicted that CAP would only bring in enough river water to fill two-thirds of central Arizona’s total overdraft — even if substantial farmland was retired.

Ferris agreed. She worked with Babbitt to orchestrate a quiet, successful effort to induce then-Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus to threaten to cut off federal funding for finishing CAP’s construction unless Arizona enacted a groundwater law.

But at one spring 1980 meeting, Bill Stephens, an attorney for the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, made it clear that his group had strong objections to the assured water supply rule. And his association, which represented water utilities in Phoenix and its largest suburbs, had plenty of influence. Many of its members were already formalizing contracts to buy very expensive CAP water, and Stephens felt the rule was unfair.

“We were late in the negotiations, and I just remember Babbitt saying something like ‘I guess we’re going to have to put the issue aside. We’re not going to resolve this one,’” Ferris said.

“I just lost it,” Ferris recalled. “Tears were starting to flow down my face. I gathered up my books and my papers, and I walked out of the room. I was demoralized; I was so sad. I just had to get out of the room. I left while all those men were sitting around the table watching me.”

Within days, though, cooler heads prevailed. Ferris’ supporters among the negotiators convinced her to stay. If she walked out, it would permanently sink the bill. Some crafty negotiating got the cities back on board with the assured supply provision.

The law’s “over-arching objective” — explicitly spelled out — was to reduce and manage groundwater use in key areas of the state, including the Phoenix and Tucson metros. But only in recent years has that law actually stopped any development on a large scale — first in 2019 in Pinal County, a much smaller but also fast-growing slice of suburbia to Phoenix’s southeast — and now the city’s desert suburbs.

After the law was passed, Ferris became the first chief counsel of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, which the law created, then the director. These days, she sits on a water policy council that Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed shortly after taking office.

Kathleen Ferris holds a copy of the 1980 Arizona Groundwater Management Act at her office in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

**WHEN NEWS BROKE OF THE STATE’S 2023 BAN **on new groundwater-based subdivisions, sparking apocalyptic national coverage, local and state officials switched into defense mode.

“It seems in some ways like there’s criticism for us for doing planning and smart development,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego told the Arizona Republic after the ADWR moratorium was announced. “It is a strength, not a weakness. We are planning ahead. We have a very simple principle: Water first, then development.”

While the moratorium is unlikely to stop the area’s runaway growth — 80,000 lots had already been approved — the initial response far downplayed the number of homes on hold, according to a High Country News review of state records.

Developers had filed for confirmation that they had enough water to move ahead on roughly 300,000 home lots when the state decision came down. Another 162,000 home lots on state-owned land from Phoenix west to Buckeye also remain undeveloped due to water shortfalls, ADWR records show. Arizona’s Constitution mandates that such lands be sold or leased to help fund public schools, meaning it’s usually developed with housing. But the application process for the assured water supply certificates started in the 2000s and never came through. The development plans were halted.

Among the biggest developments currently on hold are Teravalis and Belmont. Both have been in the works more than two decades. The aftereffects of the 2008 real estate crash delayed them, but they had recently been revived.

Teravalis, at 100,000 homes on nearly 37,000 acres, heralds itself as “the community of your future” and “the nation’s next premier master planned community.” Its website is packed with photos of sunset-drenched saguaros and chollas, and it promises to reduce water use by promoting native landscaping and to set aside 7,000 acres as natural open space, parks and trails. To its west runs Sun Valley Parkway, a seldom-traveled, 30-mile-long four-lane road, itself long known as the Road to Nowhere. Belmont would be only a little less grandiose, building 80,000 homes on 24,000 acres in unincorporated Maricopa County, along with data centers and autonomous vehicles, according to a 2017 press release.

In 2022, developers began construction on 8,000 homes in Teravalis that already had a guaranteed water source. Some are now listed for sale; model homes are already up and the first homes could be occupied by early 2026. But since none of the other planned homes were certified prior to the ruling, the rest of the project is on hold.

THE MORATORIUM CAME AS A COLLECTIVE SHOCK to the Phoenix-area homebuilding industry. But it shouldn’t have: For more than two decades, Arizona water officials had been sending out warnings, echoed by Ferris’ high-profile criticism. Time after time, they concluded that far less groundwater was available for proposed subdivisions than the developers claimed.

Belmont’s original developers, for example, wanted permission to use 39,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year. But back in 2003, ADWR determined that barely half that amount was physically available. Around the same time, Tartesso’s developer asserted that 26,000 acre-feet was available, while ADWR said it was actually only about 19,000 acre-feet. Similar discrepancies arose around proposed developments across the West Valley.

Then, in 2021 and 2022, ADWR told the developers of several subdivisions, including Festival Ranch and North Star Ranch, that it was finalizing a computer model for the West Valley area that showed the subdivisions’ groundwater demands likely exceeded known supplies.

But then-Gov. Doug Ducey’s Republican administration was said to have prevented the model’s public release. The day after Gov. Hobbs took office in January 2023, Ferris urged the new governor to release the study in an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic. Hobbs did so six days later. Alarm bells began to go off for developers and builders.

The moratorium that ADWR declared five months later “had pretty devastating impacts to housing,” homebuilder lobbyist Spencer Kamps told an ADWR advisory committee meeting a few weeks after its release. “We are the only land use that does meet the 100-year requirements,” since apartment, commercial and industrial development were not covered by the 1980 law.

Emilie Myth and her dog, Piper, at home in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

He estimated that developers and homebuilders were sitting on at least $2 billion worth of investments in infrastructure in the Buckeye area, including roads and sewer and water lines, along with the Bridge to Nowhere. His estimate rose to $4 billion as the moratorium continued. Kamps also said it contributed to rising housing costs as well, adding to the existing 45,000-unit housing shortage in the metro area.

The moratorium has also intensified the isolation of suburban areas where new development had been planned. Emilie Myth moved to Tartesso, a subdivision of Buckeye, well over three years ago. She had been living in Torrance, south of Los Angeles, but found herself stressed by the cost and concerned about the safety of her neighborhood. Late one night, for example, she found a woman sleeping in her garage and was barely able to wake her and get her to leave.

So she moved to Tartesso, where the mortgage for a four-bedroom house costs the same as the rent for her one-bedroom apartment back in California: about $1,600 a month.

The downside is being marooned on a service-less island. Tartesso, with its 3,400 homes housing 10,000 residents, is about 10 miles east of the nearest gas station and 20 miles west of the nearest place to buy groceries. A convenience store is expected to open a few miles away at the end of this year. The only food service available comes from the handful of food trucks that spend evenings in one of Tartesso’s many parks. Similarly, North Star Ranch would lie an hour’s drive north of downtown Buckeye. Just south at one of Festival Ranch’s subdivisions, there’s a lone restaurant attached to a golf course, and a single Subway outlet and convenience market at the development’s entrance. The nearest grocery store is a Safeway 20 miles east.

The Festival Ranch housing development in Buckeye, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

Yet, in some ways, Myth enjoys the isolation. “I like the quiet,” she said. “The only things you hear are cars going by, people talking and dogs barking, whereas in cities it was traffic, 24-7.

“I never felt at peace.”

But it’s been an adjustment, too. She grew up in South Sacramento, where she could take the bus to the movies or walk to the convenience store to get a candy bar. “What do kids do around here? What do teenagers do around here?” she wondered. “I just feel like as a kid I could be more independent than a child is here.”

The very thing she struggles with now contributes to her new neighborhood’s low cost: Since World War II, homebuilders have hopped over the urban fringe and alfalfa and cotton fields to develop the vast swaths of cheap desert land beyond them. This made the housing more affordable; denser construction would have cost more per unit, as would including commercial services.

Buckeye, for example, is among the handful of areas in the Phoenix area where homeowners can find a new home for under $400,000, a study by longtime Phoenix economic consulting firm Elliott D. Pollack and Co. found. Between June 2019 and June 2025, the median home price in Maricopa County jumped 65% to nearly $474,000, according to one real estate company, putting home ownership out of reach for much of the working class. In a 12-month stretch, though, more than a quarter of the 2,700 homes that sold for less than $400,000 were in Buckeye. According to Pollack, “There are few suitable alternatives for affordable homes in the region if Buckeye cannot continue to develop homes.” Pollack’s study was commissioned by the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

Other reports, though, suggest that the moratorium may have had less of an impact than developers claim. There are dozens of homes listed in Tartesso, Festival Ranch and Buckeye in general for under $400,000. And a variety of other factors affect housing prices, according to a recent study from ASU’s Kyl Center for Water Policy: federal interest rates, inflation, supply chain interruptions, migration patterns, remote work, labor markets, inventory and local, state and federal government policies and regulations.

For example, the single-family, low-density zoning that covers most of the metro area can discourage lower-cost housing development and increases the cost of infrastructure such as roads and utilities. Macroeconomic influences account for much of the housing costs and availability, the study found. “In the absence of economic studies, it is difficult to say whether or how the (ADWR) moratorium might impact housing affordability.”

But it does mean that residents like Myth will likely continue to live in suburban isolation. “In a lot of ways, it sucks,” said Myth. “I understand why the governor wants to do that. We don’t want to turn off water for some people and have other people have it. But at the same time, when I moved here, I was told there is going to be more housing soon and eventually there will be a grocery store. That looks like it’s not going to happen for decades now.”

Some Tartesso homeowners told HCN they were leaving, or at least considering it, due to the long bus rides for schoolchildren and the onerous drives to get basic groceries. Not Myth, though. “I’ll probably stay here,” she said, since anywhere else, her mortgage bill could easily double.

Clouds catch the last light of the day behind a sign for the Tartesso development in Buckeye, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

**WITH TIME, THE FIGHT OVER THE MORATORIUM **has hardened along familiar lines. Republican legislators have essentially accused ADWR of waging war against affordable housing, while ADWR and its backers say they’re standing firm on behalf of the state’s 45-year-old tradition of responsible groundwater management. A complicated history and a challenging present, distilled into a simple fight: affordability versus environment.

Duane Schooley Jr. bought two houses in Tartesso to rent out at first back in 2018 and 2019 because “we figured that Arizona was going to be a hot spot.” But Schooley, a local Republican party activist, is now openly disdainful of the state’s decision to stop allowing new homes to be built on groundwater supplies. He even doubts the state’s talk of a water shortage.

“When I moved here, it was all farmland, all of it,” Schooley recalled “Now, you have the Walmarts, the Boeings, the distribution centers. You displaced 1.3 million square feet of farmland for a concrete warehouse. Where did the water rights go? How much water were they using?” ADWR’s model found, however, that even those kinds of reductions in water use — moving away from farming, cutting back water use — hadn’t been enough.

Arizona officials are “playing with fire” and are “kind of short-sighted” by stopping so much development simply because of water, he added. “It seems kind of heavy-handed.”

Homebuilders began looking for a way around the moratorium just weeks after it was implemented. Industry representatives argued that developments that had been in process should be allowed to move forward, but state legislation on that got nowhere. After that and other efforts to overturn the moratorium failed, they pushed for a bill to allow new subdivisions to be built on retired farmland, since homes generally guzzle less water than cotton fields. The Legislature passed it in 2024, but Hobbs vetoed it after ADWR officials claimed it could actually lead to more water use in those areas. Developers have also challenged the accuracy of the forecasts made by ADWR’s groundwater model, saying its forecasts make faulty assumptions about where wells would be placed, overestimate future demands and underestimate supplies. Their consultant prepared an alternative model that projected groundwater supplies would more than suffice for 100 years. ADWR, however, pushed back on its findings.

For now, the department has focused instead on extending the responsibility to restrict groundwater use to some cities as well, by requiring them to cut groundwater use once renewable supplies arrive. While the rule’s backers say this provision is essential for reducing dependence on native groundwater, homebuilders and Republican legislative leaders have claimed it is an illegal “tax.” (ADWR has denied this, saying that it isn’t a tax.)

In early 2025, the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona joined two lawsuits against ADWR. One was filed on their behalf by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. This complaint challenged ADWR’s decision to stop issuing certificates for development, while the other, which was filed along with the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives, went after the requirement that cities importing renewable water cut groundwater use by 25%.

The Goldwater Institute lawsuit alleges that ADWR lacked the authority under state law to impose its moratorium in the first place, arguing that ADWR’s rules have become “insurmountable obstacles” to obtaining state certification of a 100-year supply.

In response, ADWR filed to have that lawsuit dismissed. “What is at stake in this lawsuit is the ability of the state to protect the Arizonans that are here today, by ensuring that their water supplies don’t run out or water levels fall to alarming depths of 1,000 feet due to new groundwater pumping,” Buschatzke, a defendant in the Goldwater lawsuit, wrote in an op-ed. “The Goldwater lawsuit would create a policy directive to rubber-stamp new developments if water was available beneath them, while forcing ADWR to ignore any potential impacts to neighboring homeowners or communities.”

The various factions have found one area of compromise, however: Legislation was passed this summer that could allow several hundred thousand new homes to be built on farmland. New subdivisions can only be built if they use as much as 1.5 acre-feet of groundwater per acre of developed land — enough water to serve three Phoenix-area homes for a year but far less than the farms themselves would have used.

But the new law won’t help the hundreds of thousands of planned homes in Buckeye and other suburbs in the desert. Instead, it focuses on developments that are less likely to move quickly.

Developers of master-planned communities want to build in lush desert mountain landscapes because they are selling atmosphere, said Sarah Porter, director of ASU’s Kyl Center. “They are designed from top to bottom, and everything is beautifully designed for a look, to work well together. It’s very hard to do that in an old farming town.”

A roofer works on a home in a housing development in Buckeye, Arizona, in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

WHATEVER THE OUTCOME of the various debates and lawsuits, Phoenix’s future growth ultimately depends on the public’s willingness to pay. “For enough money, people can dig a trench between Phoenix and the ocean to bring water. It might cost a trillion dollars, but it can be done,” said Brett Fleck, a water resources manager for the city of Peoria, northwest of Phoenix. “It’s not about running out. It’s about: Are you willing to pay for what it costs?”

Even relatively straightforward solutions are expensive and quickly run into problems. The city of Buckeye, for instance, agreed in early 2023 to pay $80 million to buy rights to 5,926 acre-feet of groundwater a year — enough to serve more than 17,000 homes annually — from a company that represents farms west of Phoenix. The town of Queen Creek spent $30 million for about 5,000 acre-feet from farms in the same area a year earlier.

In July, ADWR allowed the cities to take the water. But they still need the Central Arizona Project’s permission to put the water into the canal to bring it about 60 miles to the Phoenix area. That won’t be easy, since the water will require costly treatment: Much of it is contaminated with unsafe levels of naturally occurring arsenic and nitrates from crop fertilizers. If it’s put in the canal untreated, it would make water flowing to other houses and farms unusable.

And the CAP canal itself may very well be carrying less water soon. It has delivered renewable Colorado River water supplies to the state’s hot, dry interior since 1985, but with officials of the seven river basin states locked in tense negotiations over how to apportion the water supply from the oversubscribed river, the prospect of cuts looms large. Water officials of five Phoenix-area suburbs that get Colorado River water told *HCN *that they may have to scale back their future growth plans if the region sustains a significant cut to CAP deliveries.

Another proposal is to raise the Bartlett Dam on the Lower Verde River northeast of Phoenix so it can store an additional 323,000 acre-feet of water for metro-area cities in central Arizona. But one projection estimated it will cost about $1 billion, needs congressional authorization and wouldn’t go online until the late 2030s. The city of Phoenix is considering a facility that would treat upward of 80 million gallons of wastewater per day to make it drinkable — projected to cost $4 billion to build, and that’s a decade away.

Former Gov. Ducey proposed spending more than $1 billion for seawater desalinization plants on the Gulf of California and a pipeline to ship the treated seawater 200 miles north to the CAP canal. Ducey proposed this billion-dollar allocation toward the cost of such a project to the Arizona Legislature in 2022, but major state revenue shortfalls in 2024 led to a more than $400 million cut to the funding, leaving the prospect for water imports uncertain at best.

Myth would like to see some of these options considered more seriously. Why not, she asks, if the question is having enough water for people to drink and to bathe and to live?

“I would say that we are not being as imaginative about water as we could be,” she said. “If we could pipe oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, why can’t we pipe water from the Great Lakes here, or bring water up from the Sea of Cortez and treat it up here?”

Tom Berry at home in the Festival Ranch housing development in Buckeye, Arizona in September. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

But for some residents the moratorium has offered unexpected benefits. They have come to love their subdivisions marooned in the desert and dread the revival of the growth machine. Tom Berry began thinking of moving to Arizona more than a decade ago but dismissed Phoenix’s rural suburbs as an option. “I thought, ‘Who in their right mind would ever live out there?’ It was so remote.” But after years living in a booming neighborhood of northern Peoria west of Phoenix, he grew concerned about all the development he could see coming. “It was really going to impact our lifestyle.” So he drove to Festival Ranch “on a whim,” and bought a new home there in September 2021. Like many Festival Ranch residents, he was delighted that the state had blocked North Star Ranch.

“(The city is) enamored with the high growth rate of Buckeye,” he said. “It is growth at any cost, and too bad if you already live here.”

Just across the Sun Valley Parkway from his neighborhood lies the huge White Tank Mountains Regional Park, he noted. The parkway drive passes through open desert where cattle that graze on neighboring state land occasionally break through fences and stroll onto the road. Authorities have posted signs between Festival Ranch and Surprise warning drivers to “Watch for cattle.”

“So one of my friends said, ‘How about we put signs on the fenceline facing the desert that says ‘Watch for cars?’” Berry said.

A few streets over, Billy Ryan, a 39-year-old paramedic and Phoenix-area native whose four-bedroom house lies a block away from the bridge, was also cautiously celebrating the halt on new homes.

“I don’t want any development up there. It’s more traffic, more people, more everything,” said Ryan. “The whole reason I moved out here was to get away from that.

“You go five miles down the road and you’re in open desert. You see snakes and bugs. There’s nothing to the north of us, to the east or to the west. We’re kind of like an island,” he added. “If you like being outside, in nature, it’s ideal.”

Still, he tempers his relief at the indefinite delay imposed on the North Star Ranch project with the intuitive awareness of someone born in the state that “you can’t stop progress.

“It will happen,” he said. “The developers always get their way. At the same time … if people want to develop here, they need to find a better way to get the water.

“I don’t know where they are going to get the water, it is a finite resource, to be sure. But at the end of the day, developers are the ones with cash. If not this election cycle, not now, four years later, five years later, 15 years later, it will get done.”

Development meets the desert in suburban Phoenix, Arizona. Caitlin O’Hara/High Country News

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This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Dried out in Phoenix.”