Louise Parks met the desert in 1973. She was 12 years old then, and her family had moved from Texas into a camper on the outskirts of Apache Junction, Arizona. They had no running water, so every few days the family would fill up jerry cans from a local well. No electricity, either, so they had to get creative to stay cool. At night, Parks and her seven siblings would cocoon into sheets soaked in water. During the day, as temperatures climbed past 115 degrees Fahrenheit, they’d wrap plastic water bottles in wet burlap sacks and string them up in mesquite trees. When the wind blew, the bottles functioned as DIY swamp coolers, and offered respite from the heat.
“When I was a kid, I hated living in the desert,” Parks said. “But now, I wouldn’t change the way I was raised for anything in the world because it made me who I am today.”
Parks today is the live-in property manager of Parkhaven Estates & RV Resort, a mobile-home park with some 400 homes for retirees in Mesa. Both her current home and the patch of desert where she grew up now sit on the edge of a ballooning Phoenix metropolitan area collectively called the Valley of the Sun. Mobile-home parks like Parkhaven are, for many, the most affordable housing option in a market that’s been growing more expensive over the last decade.
But these structures are often the most dangerous when summer temperatures surge. Their metal frames radiate heat throughout the day and into the night. A lack of greenery and an abundance of dark asphalt bumps temperatures to deadly levels. Extreme heat accounts for more deaths nationwide than any other weather incident, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year, heat played a role in a record 197 deaths in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. It was the fourth record-breaking year in a row.
Just 5 percent of people in Maricopa County live in mobile homes, yet 27.5 percent of heat-associated deaths occur at trailer parks. Parks knows the danger well. A wake-up call came years ago when she watched her 2-year-old daughter crumple onto the lawn under a scorching mid-July sun. That image of her daughter’s heat stroke is still vivid inside her mind. Then, last year, residents died in a mobile-home park adjacent to Parkhaven. Parks said they tried to get through the 120 degree day with just a fan.
“That death happened because the people couldn’t afford to live with constant air conditioning,” she said. “I won’t let that happen here.”
That’s why, as Parkhaven’s manager, she’s declared one vital rule. “I tell all my residents, if it’s the summer, and you don’t hear your neighbor move around in their house or hear their TV or something for 24 hours, you call me,” she said. “I go to the house and knock until they answer the door.”
With about 1.7 million residents, Phoenix is the fifth most populous city in the U.S., and suburbs like Mesa are among the fastest-growing cities in the country. Newcomers are drawn by housing far less expensive than in coastal metros, lower taxes, and massive job growth as the city tries to cement itself as a burgeoning industry hub with year-round sunshine. Areas outside Phoenix that were once a smattering of mining operations and farmland are now suburban epicenters engorging by the year.
Phoenix’s boom has coincided with a warming climate, thus exposing more and more people to exceptional heat and water insecurity. This year, the high temperature has hit 100 degrees on a record 145 days. Phoenix sweltered through its hottest summer ever, with an average high temperature of 107.9 degrees. And it’ll only get hotter. Come 2050, researchers estimate the climate here will feel more like present-day Baghdad, Iraq. Increasing heat here and around the West will jeopardize the metro area’s most important water supply, the Colorado River. All the while, unfettered development is siphoning nearby groundwater reserves.
Officials in the Phoenix area already have big questions to answer about how to manage heat and water. But the region’s incessant growth begs an overarching question — just how big can a desert metropolis get?
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The difference between 100 and 110 degrees, or 110 and 115, might seem minimal. But a strange sensation takes over the body at those temperatures. A deep breath can feel like an assault on the nostrils. Hardcore Phoenicians still hike mountains in this weather, but to the untrained, walking even a few blocks, from one aggressively air-conditioned building to the next, seems insurmountable.
Heat doesn’t have the same immediate shocks people usually associate with disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, but researchers say it’s useful to think of it in similar terms. And in Phoenix, it’s only getting worse.
Businesses and many homes challenge the heat with constant air conditioning. But that’s not an option for all citizens, and places like the mobile home sprawl that Parks manages are suffering the consequences. Shoddy insulation means cooling even a small home in Parkhaven can run as much as $400 a month. “I’m at the point in my life where I can spend $400 a month on electricity, but there are people being priced out,” Parks said. “These are older folks who maybe make $700 a month, and by the time they pay rent and electricity they’re done with that money.”
Parkhaven residents get creative to stave off high electrical bills. There’s the older woman, a painter, who never leaves her house in the summer and survives by rolling a mobile air conditioning unit from room to room. Another resident closes off all but one room, maintaining a cool 80 degrees there while the rest of the house soars to 115. Parks keeps a mental list of people who might need help, and checks on them regularly. In the summer, she’ll hold one or two events in the air-conditioned lobby each week. Before the pandemic, folks would pack into the room.
That financial strain has cost lives. Among indoor heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, those that take place in mobile homes are twice as likely to not have air conditioning present, often because the home has had its electricity shut off. There are some government mechanisms in place to help people cool their homes. Maricopa County, for instance, offers utility payment assistance to low-income households during the summer. Some mobile home residents could qualify for those services, but few are asking for the help.
That gap caught the attention of geographer Patricia Solís, a heat researcher who came to Arizona State University in 2018 to lead an initiative called the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience. The group works with local policymakers and community organizations to prepare Maricopa County for big stressors affecting housing equity, resource management, and health care. Heat was first on the agenda.
Several community groups and aid funds like the utility assistance network already keep track of heat impacts, but they don’t always communicate with each other. Solís said that means years of data on housing, heat deaths, and income levels are siloed. In 2019, her team was compiling work from nearly 100 local groups when they noticed a stretch in Mesa with high instances of heat-related deaths, yet a low number of folks receiving utility assistance from the county.
“There was this obvious spot where something was going on, but none of the organizations we’d been working with could explain it,” Solís said. “I noticed the spot where this was happening looked like this white blotch on the satellite map. I zoomed in and finally realized — these are mobile homes.”
What had looked like a smudge on the map was actually the white metal tops of mobile homes. Spanning nearly three miles, it was one of the largest mobile home stretches in the Phoenix area. And it included Parkhaven, the retirement community managed by Louise Parks. Solís began searching for residents and managers to take part in a heat study, and Parks agreed to cooperate.
Solís said housing is often left out of the discussions about climate vulnerability. Sure, climate change is making Phoenix ever warmer, but our built environments exacerbate the heat. Sprawling flats of black asphalt —which, under direct sunlight, can exceed the ambient temperature by 60 degrees — radiate heat long into the night. As hundreds of thousands of air conditioning systems pump cool air into homes, they also emit hot air into the atmosphere. Those factors cause a heat island effect that makes for nights that are almost 9 degrees warmer than a century ago. And in mobile homes, traditional heat management tools don’t always work. Planting a tree is pretty hard in a parking lot. Solar panels could help cut electricity costs, but many are too heavy to sit on top of the metal homes.
That’s why Solís wanted to understand how heat plays out in metal homes, in real-time. With Parks’s help, Parkhaven residents were outfitted with sensors that measured temperatures in each room of the home for about 85 days during the summer of 2019. Their monthly electricity bills and the type of cooling system they had were also recorded.
Solís and her team found that those living in mobile homes experience temperatures that are not just uncomfortable, but dangerous. The average daily high temperature over the study period was 95 degrees in the participants’ homes; the temperature in one hit 111 degrees. In a survey, more than 60 percent of respondents said indoor heat triggered anxiety, and more than 80 percent had trouble sleeping.
Solís’ team will take this information to a consortium of community groups and university programs to begin crafting solutions. She said work like this is vital in Arizona, where nearly 7 million people statewide reside in mobile homes.
“There’s a lot of knowledge out there and we can’t just know everything by sitting in a lab and looking at imagery,”said Solís. “All the different groups who are part of the utility assistance network provided the data that allowed us to see these issues [in the mobile home parks] — I think it’s a really important part of the story.”
Mobile homes are a go-to option for elderly people on fixed incomes who, according to the Maricopa County Department of Public Health data, are twice as prone to heat-related fatalities. Solís said these are layers upon layers of vulnerabilities, and thanks to the coronavirus, more are piling on.
After re-opening in May, Arizona’s COVID-19 case counts exploded into one of the highest in the country. And just like elsewhere, seniors are most at risk, accounting for over 70 percent of all COVID-19 deaths. The city just experienced its most brutal summer yet, with daily temperatures reaching 100 degrees well into October, and the pandemic eliminated the possibility for people to take refuge in a mall or a movie theatre.
“The mixture of heat, housing and the coronavirus is likely to be particularly challenging for those communities, where multiple risk factors converge,” Solís and other researchers said in an op-ed published in the Arizona Republic in May. “What do you do when it is dangerously hot in your house, even hotter outside, and there is nowhere to go?”
Five months later, there’s still no clear answer.
Nestled between tracts of farmland east of Phoenix, Queen Creek is a town of mostly dirt roads that attracts agrarians and rough-and-tumble recreationists. Families come here looking for space, cheaper housing, and a quieter lifestyle than Phoenix has to offer. That’s what brought Katy Simpson in from central California. Now, she raises goats, chickens and a few dogs there.
What Simpson didn’t know is that every summer, when monsoons lash the parched desert with torrents of rain, her eden would suffer a uniquely unnatural disaster. Last year, sitting in front of her baby-blue mobile home Simpson showed me a video she took in the middle of monsoon season a few years back. In it, her tiny grandson, DJ, is stumbling through almost two feet of water.
“DJ has fallen in the water,” she says in the video, as rippled water rushes past. “It is taking out my goat pen, they are underwater.”
Simpson’s home and others around it sit atop a fissure that opens up when seasonal monsoons flood the desert. The cracks are caused partially by decades of farms and, now, cities pumping groundwater at such a rate that chasms can be filled only by air and sediment. On bad years, a fissure cuts straight through Simpson’s driveway, but she considers herself lucky. A larger crack swallowed one of her neighbor’s horses. They got the horse out, but it had to be euthanized.
“No one told us about the fissures,” Simpson said. “And now no one’s really helping.”
Arizonans have always had to manipulate the water supply to survive. Centuries ago, the Hohokam civilization built a thriving metropolis sustained by the Salt and Gila rivers. They etched out hundreds of miles of irrigation canals through the Salt River Valley where the city sits today. The system sustained tribal communities here continuously for over 1,000 years.
Today, a far more complex — and less sustainable — system has taken its place. More than a third of the state’s water comes from the Colorado River via the Central Arizona Project, a series of canals, basins, and pipelines that deliver water to this city 150 miles away from the river. Arizona divvies up its supply of the river with six other Western states, and all indications are that it will receive less and less water from the Colorado in coming years, thanks to voluntary cutbacks and the river’s dwindling flows.
Shortages along the Colorado River receive a great deal of attention, but Arizona has another looming water crisis. The largest share of the state water supply, 42 percent, comes from underground aquifers that, for decades, were used for farming, industry, and cities with little regulation. Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said lawmakers faced a reckoning by 1980, when over-pumping had depleted the aquifers to dangerously low levels. “We decided in 1980 that any growth should be on renewable supplies, because the last thing you want is for a community to run out of water,” she said.
The 1980 Groundwater Management Act introduced the state’s first pumping regulations. It also required prospective developers to prove their planned communities had enough water to supply residents for 100 years before they could break ground. That requirement hamstrung the real estate industry just as demand in the Sun Belt was booming. Pressed by developers, policymakers introduced groundwater replenishment districts in 1993.
“Replenishment districts were created as an alternative path for developers who wanted to develop in places without access to renewable water supplies,” Porter said. “Basically, they’d enroll their land into the district and go ahead and start using groundwater, then it becomes the job of the Central Arizona Project to replenish the water that they’re using.”
Aquifers are replenished naturally with surface water and rainfall. The groundwater districts seek to mimic that process by releasing Colorado River water from huge CAP storage basins into the soil to feed the aquifer below.
The system allowed subdivisions previously stalled by pumping regulations to drill new wells, so long as they paid into the district. Development exploded. Subdivisions like Queen Creek, where Simpson lives, seeped further into uncut desert, and started growing faster than anywhere in the country. Buckeye, a former cotton farming outpost along the Gila River, was the second-fastest growing city in the country over the last decade. Since the groundwater districts were implemented, metro Phoenix’s population has doubled, and well over a million people are served by the districts.
Competition for water is fierce. Porter said newer developments that rely on groundwater pumping could see their water supply dwindle in the event of cutbacks, as older water rights tied to the Colorado River take precedent.
“To be clear, most, if not all, of the larger, older cities have more than enough water,” she said. “It’s a haves and have-nots situation where people are moving into new developments, typically in the far-flung parts of the Valley or Pinal County — those are the lands enrolled in the districts, and they’re the places without a supply of surface water.”
Pinal County is a huge jurisdiction east and south of Phoenix that includes some of the region’s last large farms and some of its fastest-growing suburbs. Last year, the Arizona Department of Water Resources said the expected demand for groundwater pumping in Pinal County area exceeds the actual supply by more than 8 million acre-feet — nearly four times as much water as the city of Phoenix uses in a year. That deficit has halted new development proposals for now, but expansion plans already in motion are allowed to press on.
“It kind of worries me, seeing all that new building,” Mary Davidson, a retiree who moved to Pinal County from Michigan in 2008, told me. “Because I’m thinking, Wow, is there really going to be enough water for all these people?”
Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, is confident there will be. “The Groundwater Management Act requires us to prove that if we put a pump in the ground, that pump will have water for 100 years,” he said. “Find any other state in the nation who has that test. Who else has that? Nobody.”
Kamps pointed out that the replenishment districts are just one straw drawing from the Colorado River — cities and private utilities do the same, and Arizona’s thirsty farms are the state’s biggest water users. Any notion that developers relying on groundwater districts are egregious, he said, would be a “false criticism.”
But researchers like Porter are still concerned. A native Phoenician, she previously held a career in law, but decided to pursue resource management about a decade ago to solve what she sees as Phoenix’s central conundrum.
“I have a kind of primal attachment to water,” Porter said. “I grew up desperately wanting to jump into a pool in the summertime and putting on my bathing suit to run around during the monsoons; I think I’ve understood how important water is in a very personal and basic way.”
In 2019, Porter co-authored a paper that laid out why replenishment districts — and, thus, the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people — could be in jeopardy. Replenishment districts’ unexpected popularity has overcommitted the supply. Homeowners who buy into the program when they purchase homes could end up paying exorbitant fees for its use. More of the Phoenix metropolis will depend on groundwater as Colorado River supply narrows. They’re also sharing it, as they always have, with farming and industry in the state — all in the midst of a warming, drying world.
If changes aren’t made, Porter said, the groundwater these developments rely on could be put in peril all over again.
Amid dwindling water and worsening heat, one must wonder — can this desiccated city and its suburbs continue on its current trajectory? To Sandy Bahr, director of Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon chapter, the answer is no.
“The Phoenix metro area economy is based not just on growth, but on rapid growth,” she said. “There’s always discussion about diversifying the economy and ending these boom-and-bust real estate cycles, but we keep the same structure, [even though] we know this desert city is getting drier and hotter.”
Years ago, Bahr was at a conference near Buckeye, one of the fastest-growing cities in Arizona. Watching water skiers jet across a manmade lake and members of a local yacht club park their water vehicles along the docks, she wondered how all this could be real in the middle of the Arizona desert.
As heat-related deaths rise and water supply falls, Bahr said that resistance to change, that push to build, grow and expand exponentially — that’s exactly the problem.
“When I moved out to this area 30 years ago, that was all desert, so I never underestimate developers’ ability to find a way,” she said. “But maybe instead of pretending like we’re not a desert, maybe instead of trying to change the desert, we should be learning to live inside of it.”
A few summers ago, a Phoenix teenager made the news when he collapsed from heat stroke after hiking with his dad on a blistering summer day. They ran out of water mid-hike, and the teen made it all the way to the parking lot before blacking out. Paramedics treated him not just for heat stroke, but also for patches of second-degree burns across his arms, hands and legs, simply from hitting the asphalt.
He wasn’t the first person to suffer at the hands of Phoenix’s heat, nor will he be the last. This summer, the Phoenix Police Department came under fire when bodycam footage showed officers holding Ramon Timothy Lopez down on scorching asphalt for several minutes as he was being detained. That morning, Phoenix temperatures were over 100 degrees, shooting the blacktop temperature well past the 131 degree threshold in which second-degree burns can occur. Lopez was unresponsive five minutes after being taken into custody and pronounced dead at a hospital later that day. His death is still under investigation.
It’s hard to imagine the right way to live in a place where everyday heat can be deadly.
Researchers have suggested switching to paler surfaces, planting trees and providing more green spaces for city-dwellers. Coalitions of researchers, conservation nonprofits, and community members are formulating heat action plans that prioritize shade on pedestrian routes, more trees in low-income areas, and strategic water features. And in the face of dwindling water, Phoenix city planners have been innovative, storing Colorado River water in underground water banks and searching for other sources.
Phoenix city planners have had to contemplate these sustainability questions for decades. But the risk of heat and aridity compounds as the population grows, and there’s no indication that this metropolis — or other fast-growing Western desert sprawls, for that matter — will see their population growth slow any time soon. After all, it seems to be in our nature to transform the desert as we see fit. Author Marc Reisner considered this more than three decades ago in his formative book about Western water policy, Cadillac Desert. Gazing down at the vast Western landscape from an airplane in the book’s opening, Reisner wrote that Western cities like Phoenix exist thanks to a “messianic effort” on the part of those who built them.
“Messianic,” Reisner wrote, because, “confronted by the desert, the first thing Americans want to do is change it.”
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