The title should have been American Oases, as Paoletta is telling the stories of the great cities of what is called “arid America” or the American desert southwest. He begins with his home town of Albuquerque, moves on to Phoenix, then Tucson, El Paso and finally Las Vegas.
The five communities have much in common: they’re mostly flat (which makes thirty thousand-home developments easier), they are (or were) mostly empty, the sun almost always shines (which makes people from places like Buffalo and Chicago want to move into those homes), and three of them are reliant on the Colorado River for water. Unless of course it rains. Which it doesn’t often.
Albuquerque and El Paso are on rivers and Tucson began as a Spanish military fort but Phoenix and Las Vegas were the results, respectively, of boosters catering to wealthy seekers of sun and gangsters wanting to cash in on Nevada’s legalization of gambling. And let the suburban sprawl begin.
There are significant differences, though. Las Vegas is home to a culinary workers union that has guaranteed maids and servers a living wage, including owning your own home. That union, the Culinary Workers 226, has influenced union organizing, Paoletta writes, “in every industry—from the arts to agriculture to college athletics…”
Phoenix, on the other hand, has made an excellent living from rolling out the red carpet for business and manufacturers.
When, in 1955, Sperry Rand was scouting locations for a new aviation electronics plant, local businesspeople raised $650,000 to buy a factory site for the company ahead of a planned visit from its executives, which the Thunderbirds [the local booster club] offered free of charge over cocktails at the Phoenix Country Club.
Meanwhile, Albuquerque boosted itself on the strength of the railroads and I-40, and wondered a little resentfully why Phoenix got all the attention. El Paso’s working population was nearly erased by NAFTA when businesses located in El Paso decamped en masse across the river for Ciudad Juarez and lower taxes and cheaper labor.
Paoletta does a good job of curating the histories of these communities, including the redlining of their Mexican, Indian, and Chicano neighborhoods. He argues that for sustainability alone, never mind growth, they’re going to have to get a handle on their water usage.
As the climate crisis has drained away the southwest’s stockpile of Colorado River water, the so-called bathtub ring around Lake Mead has become a Paleozoic metaphor for scarcity…what remains to be seen is what we do now that recycling and conservation technologies are making it possible to return to a system of living that respects the limitations of the landscape…
Las Vegas is already there.
Las Vegas is among the most efficient municipal water users in the world…The region’s remarkable efficiency means that, even after Nevada’s allocation of water from the Colorado River was cut by 8 percent in 2023, it still used tens of thousands of acre-feet less that it was entitled to.
Between recycling, paying residents to remove their lawns, and spending $1.5B on a third “straw” to suck water from Lake Mead if the reservoir fell below a certain level (it did), Las Vegas is living within its water means. None of the other communities are, and Phoenix continues to gobble up farmland for housing developments on a direct heading for Tucson. Population: five million and counting. Stay tuned.
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Wow
I must disagree with the author. All of those cities are surrounded by mountains. There are indeed flat areas, but I would never describe them as flat land. I grew up in Sacramento, CA. That was flat land.