Buckeye, Arizona, has plans to become one of the Southwest’s largest cities in the next decades. Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

At Phoenix’s Far Edge, a Housing Boom Grasps for Water

Beneath the exhausting Sonoran sun, an hour’s drive west of Phoenix, heavy machines are methodically scraping the desert bare.

Where mesquite and saguaro once stood, the former Douglas Ranch is being graded and platted in the first phase of a national real estate developer’s gargantuan plan that foresees, in the next few decades, as many as 100,000 new homes to shelter 300,000 people. In late October 2024, dozens of trees, salvaged from the land and potted as if they had just arrived from the nursery, watched over the quiet construction zone.

This remote site in western Maricopa County, between the stark White Tank Mountains and frequently dry Hassayampa River, is the location of Teravalis, the largest master planned community in Arizona and one of the largest in the country. It is part of a constellation of roughly two dozen master planned communities in the area – with names like Tartesso, Festival Ranch, Sun City Festival, and Sun Valley – that could propel upstart Buckeye in the coming decades to one of the largest cities in the Southwest. Buckeye planning documents anticipate a city population later this century between 1 million to 1.5 million if all the master planned communities are fully built out.

Opinion: Trump’s “Thrilling New Era” Is a Gas

President Trump blew a lot of smoke at his inauguration. He promised more oil production, less regulation, fewer clean cars, less clean energy. He withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, and opened Alaska to more development. 

Like dry branches dropped in a dark forest, Trump’s inaugural pledges and the executive orders that came shortly thereafter were kindling stoking the bonfire of fossil fuels. 

The president’s allegiance to producing more carbon pollution set off a global chorus of condemnation because it could reverse the downward slope of U.S. climate emissions of the last decade. If emissions head up again, the effect from the world’s second largest producer of climate change gases – behind only China – will be even hotter temperatures and more of Mother Earth’s wrath on every living thing. 

The Rundown

• President Trump issues executive orders on energy production, water supplies, and climate change.
• Other executive orders target foreign aid, FEMA, and the Paris agreement.
• In settlement with EPA, California mobile home park operator agrees to fix failing water system.
• Reclamation publishes a report detailing five options it will analyze for post-2026 Colorado River management.
• President Trump visits recent disaster zones in California and North Carolina.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.