Name: Why 5 Million People Live in America’s Hottest City
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T17:05:47.000Z
Duration: 50 min 17 s
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Phoenix is one of America's and the world's most peculiar large cities today.

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If you arrive in the city during the summer when the temperature is routinely higher than 100°F, you'll be simultaneously struck with a sense of wonder and confusion as to how and why so many people have managed to live here in this objectively hostile environment.

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And just like a city you settle in Sid Meier civilization during the late game in an undesirable area that nobody's picked yet, Phoenix is one of the real world's most recently settled major cities.

Only a little more than 80 years ago now, back in 1940, Phoenix was still a fairly small, sleepy town in Arizona with just a tad more than 65,000 residents.

It didn't even rank in the top 100 largest U.S.

it barely even registered as a blip in the general consciousness of most Americans, let alone the rest of the world.

The town had only been initially settled a bit more than 70 years before in 1940, back in 1867, which means that the time between Phoenix being initially settled and growing into this small town of 65,000 is about the same length of time as from 1940 to today.

But over Phoenix's second time period of 80 years from 1940 to today, over the span of just a single lifetime, Phoenix evolved from that small, dusty town in the desert that nobody had ever heard of into a sprawling urban metropolis home to nearly 5 million people that ranks as the fifth largest city in all of America now, having surpassed the city-limits population of Philadelphia in 2020 to clinch its position in the top 5 biggest U.S.

In terms of city-limits population in America, Phoenix is now only overshadowed by the likes of Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and

New York, and it's still growing at a faster pace than any of those other larger cities.

Phoenix has since become one of the most quintessential examples of American suburban sprawl, with seemingly endless rows of single-family homes spilling out beyond the urban core into the surrounding flat desert landscape.

By 2007, roughly one acre of desert land around Phoenix was being developed into residential real estate every single hour, and

Phoenix is still one of the top 10 fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country in the 2020s.

As Americans from all across the rest of the country are being pulled to the region for Arizona's low taxes, relatively low cost of living compared to states like California, Phoenix's booming economy and plentiful jobs, the year-round sunshine, and

But hardly anyone back in the early 20th century, back when Phoenix was still just that small, dusty town, could have ever predicted this meteoric rise over the span of the eight decades that followed after 1940.

Because Phoenix exists within a geographically unlikely place for such a massive urban population to have ever arisen in.

It's in the middle of a valley within the hot and arid Sonoran Desert that lacks major nearby water resources.

The Gila River, a tributary of the much larger Colorado River, passes through the area, but

its flow is very small at only about 7 cubic meters per second on average, which is only about a tenth of the flow of the Rio Grande that runs through New Mexico and forms the border between Texas and Mexico.

The Gila River is more of a stream in comparison, so humanity had to spend decades inefficiently diverting more and more water to the area from elsewhere to continue fueling and sustaining all of the growth.

In Phoenix today, you'll see a landscape that's dotted with lush green golf courses, farms, and

swimming pools cast against a backdrop of dry deserts and rocks that surround them.

It probably won't come as a surprise to you then that despite having less than half of the population of New York City today, the Phoenix metropolitan area consumes more than twice the amount of water as New York does.

And in the age of climate change, Phoenix's future water supply and habitability are each coming increasingly into open question now.

This last summer in 2023 broke the all-time record in Phoenix's history for the highest number of days to reach more than 110°F, or 43°C—54 solid days of them—while one of those days broke the all-time high single-day record in the city of 113°F, or 45°C.

2023 was Phoenix's hottest year ever on record, after breaking the previous record that was only set in 2021, and

the previous record before that that was only set in 2020.

And as the temperatures in Phoenix are increasing, the city's precious water supplies are also beginning to decrease, with cuts already being made to both of Arizona's primary water sources, the Colorado River and the state's own groundwater, while Phoenix announced just last year that for the first time ever, they'll be freezing certain new residential building permits over a concern of the area's diminishing water supply.

There is a real fear emerging that this could be the beginning of the end of Phoenix's past 80 years' worth of explosive and limitless suburban growth across the desert, and

that the chickens are finally coming home to roost in Phoenix.

Peggy Hill herself probably summed up the cultural attitude towards Phoenix best during this episode at King the Hill after stepping outside in the city during a 111°F day.

The wisdom of having established a nearly 5 million-person metropolitan area in the middle of the Sonoran Desert is being criticized louder with every passing year, and

the next 80 years of Phoenix's history are shaping up to look very different than how the past 80 years went.

And in order to understand where the city is going, if this is all really the end of Phoenix as we know it, and

how Phoenix managed to get so huge in spite of its desert environment and became the so-called monument to man's arrogance in the first place, it helps to begin with how Phoenix and Arizona all came to be in the first place.

Modern Arizona and the valley where Phoenix would one day arise in was sparsely inhabited by Indigenous Americans for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans.

The pre-Columbian Hohokam people inhabited the area in the valley for nearly 1,000 years and were the first to recognize the area's potential for agriculture despite its arid environment.

They developed a series of complex canals around the Gila and Salt Rivers in the area that made agriculture possible before mysteriously disappearing sometime around 1450.

It wasn't too long after that that the first Europeans began to arrive in the area in the 16th century, and

then all of modern-day Arizona and the rest of the American Southwest steadily fell under the control of the colonial Spanish Empire and was later inherited by the independent state of Mexico in the 19th century.

But the modern American Southwest was always a sparsely populated fringe territory on the frontiers of their empire.

By the 1840s, only about 80,000 people lived across all of the Mexican territories that would eventually become Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, and

Colorado, and three-fourths of all of them just lived in modern-day New Mexico.

In 1846, the United States declared war on Mexico and conquered all of these lands, and

then purchased a bit more land in southern Arizona, New Mexico, with a Gadsden purchase in 1854, which was the event that brought all of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico both under American control.

Arizona and New Mexico were then each born as effectively twin territories of the United States that have always, ever since, made up the geographic core of the American Southwest region.

Both have very comparable geographic sizes and shapes, and both have very similar climates and topographies, and

both would be jointly admitted into the Union as the final states in the continental U.S.

at about the same time in 1912: New Mexico in January of that year and Arizona the following month in February.

Despite their similarities, however, both states would end up having radically different demographic destinies across the 20th and 21st centuries, with Arizona's current population in 2024 estimated to be at about 7.5 million people, and

New Mexico's lagging far behind it at only a bit more than 2.1 million people.

But interestingly, back at the time in 1912, New Mexico was the one who entered as a state with a larger population.

Remember that three-fourths of the Mexicans who lived across all of this territory that would be conquered by the United States in 1846 all just lived in modern-day New Mexico, which is part of why this territory and state became called New Mexico in the first place.

In 1912, New Mexico entered the United States with a population of 338,000 people, compared to Arizona's meager 217,000 people, and

New Mexico would continue remaining the more populous of the two for decades until after the Second World War, when Arizona and Phoenix would each begin their era of rapid, runaway, explosive growth that would quickly eclipse New Mexico's growth in the process.

But even before Arizona's rapid population boom began in the second half of the 20th century, the seeds were already being sown for the state's current debilitating water crisis.

In 1862, before Phoenix was even settled, the United States federal government passed the first of the Homestead Acts.

Designed to encourage settlers to begin colonizing and inhabiting the newly acquired desolate and empty west of the country, the act promised any settler who moved west 160 acres of free land if they agreed to live on the land for a period of at least five years and improve it through cultivation.

Even more land was offered up to settlers later at a lower price if the settlers agreed to begin farming it.

Ten percent of all the land in the entire United States was given away to Western settlers for free under these acts.

But in the arid southwest of the country in southern California and in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, where water was scarce and where irrigation infrastructure hardly existed, the ability for settlers to actually farm and cultivate the land provided to them proved very difficult.

To try and resolve this issue in 1902, the United States federal government then passed the Reclamation Act, which was designed to fund extensive irrigation projects all across the American West to supposedly "reclaim" the land there for agriculture and civilization.

The plan was for the government to sell land in the west and then use the proceeds from that land to fund the irrigation projects that would better the land and increase the land's value, enabling them to continue selling the land for ever higher prices and enabling them to fund more and more grandiose irrigation projects as time went on.

Virtually every major river in the American West was dammed under this act, and

the largest Western River, the Colorado River, was extensively dammed and irrigated with two of the most notable projects: the Hoover Dam and the Glen Canyon Dam, creating America's first and second largest artificial water reservoirs;

Lake Mead between Arizona and Nevada; and Lake Powell between Arizona and Utah.

Massive reservoirs in the desert like these were created, and

rivers were diverted, artificially bringing abundant water supplies to Western settlers' farms.

And so, with their free or cheap land in a year-round warm climate that enabled a longer growing season than in the rest of the country and backed up with subsidized low federal price guarantees on their water supply, the early farmers in Arizona and the rest of the Southwest did what anyone else in their position would do and simply began growing crops and raising livestock that required warm climates and high amounts of water like citrus, cotton, nuts, and

alfalfa to feed their growing herds of cattle and dairy products, with little care as to where the water was actually coming from.

This is why, still today in the 2020s, agriculture continues to be a booming business across the American Southwest, and

why a whopping 72 percent of Arizona's water consumption in 2024 is still devoted to the state's agricultural sector.

But establishing vast commercial farming enterprises across the Southwest's deserts wasn't the only short-sighted decision that the early planners in the American Southwest made.

In 1922, the seven states that share the Colorado River basin area came together to negotiate what would become known as the Colorado River Compact, regulating all of their access to the river's water.

The Colorado is by far the largest river that can be found in the American Southwest, with a water discharge rate that's comparable to the Hudson running through New York and that has more than nine times the water discharge rate of the Rio Grande that begins in New Mexico and flows along the Mexico-Texas border.

The Colorado River is fed by the huge amounts of snow melt up in the Rocky Mountains that then flow southwest towards the river's delta in the Sea of Cortez, with the watershed extending across Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and

The 1922 compact between these seven states estimated that the average annual flow through the river was approximately 16.4 million acre-feet of water, an acre-foot being a unit of measurement that imagines an acre of land covered by one foot of water, essentially an American football field that's covered with one foot of water.

The compact then allotted 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River to the upper four states, and

an equal 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year allotted to the lower three states, divided 58.7 percent to California, 37.3 percent to Arizona, and

just 4 percent to Nevada, while the remaining 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year was allotted to Mexico furthest downstream.

With New Mexico's annual allotment from the Colorado River in the upper basin states coming out to just 11.25 percent, or 0.84 million acre-feet of water a year, they were entitled to significantly less water from the Colorado River than Arizona was, who got 37.3 percent of the lower basin state's supply, which came out to 2.8 million acre-feet of water a year, more than three times the amount of water as New Mexico got from the river, and

another part of the reason why Arizona's population took off way more than New Mexico's ever did.

But a major problem with this 1922 compact was that it grossly overestimated the actual usual flows of water through the Colorado River.

Their estimate for 16.5 million acre-feet of water a year through the river was based on only limited studies of the river between just 1905 and 1922, a period that many environmental scientists now believe included abnormally high levels of precipitation in the area that abnormally increased the river's flow higher than usual.

Current estimates of the river's true average flow, with more than a century's worth of data, suggest something more like 13.2 million acre-feet of water a year, is the true historical average, which means that for decades now, the seven compact states in Mexico have been pulling more water out from the river and its artificial reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell than can be actually naturally replaced, and

this issue of locked-in overuse on the river has so far never been significantly amended.

Moreover, legal water rights in the Western U.S. were created very differently than in the Eastern U.S.

In the wetter Eastern U.S., legal water rights are based around the reparian doctrine, where anybody who owns land on a body of water like a river enjoys an equal and "reasonable" use of the water.

In the drier Western U.S., where water is much scarcer and more valuable, however, legal water rights are based around the prior appropriation doctrine instead, which established a hierarchy of seniority that granted the rights to use water from rivers from whoever began using the water from them first, and

those senior water rights holders would continue holding their rights until they stopped using the water.

The settlers and farmers who came to the Southwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the ones who acquired most of these senior water rights early on, and

then they were only incentivized by the system to continue guzzling all of their water from the rivers even if they didn't actually need it, because if they stopped using all the water they were allowed to, they'd just lose their rights to it.

And the farmers would continue holding their senior rights even during times of water shortages in favor of anybody who came to the area after them with lower seniority, like the millions upon millions of people that eventually came to settle in southwestern cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and

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Why 5 Million People Live in America’s Hottest City

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