yuccabush
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What do you all think of this scare article???
http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktr...ouse-bad19.html
Imagining Phoenix in 2030: Shortages and heat
Dec. 19, 2004 12:00 AM
Liz Garcia's alarm goes off at 5 a.m. She slaps the snooze button, groans and staggers into the bathroom.
In the darkness she leans against the shower door. She lets her pajamas fall to floor, takes a deep breath and turns on the water. Somewhere deep in the plumbing a low gurgling sound grows louder. Liz quickly steps under the city-issue low-flow showerhead and extends her arms.
Liz has rationed two minutes of water for her shower and doesn't want to waste any even if it's freezing at first.
The year is 2030. Garcia lives in Eloy with her family and their dog Wheezer in a monotonous ring of suburbs that surround Phoenix and bump up against Tucson.
In this 34th year of drought, not even the introduction of sand golf nor the huge de-salination plant south of Yuma has helped the water supply. Each of metropolitan Phoenix's 6 million residents is limited to 100 gallons a day, 50 gallons less than their parents were using in 2004. Rationing was the only way to force people to stop their wasteful use of water.
A water shortage is just one of a number of diminished returns the city's reliance on growth and home building as an economic foundation has brought to life in Phoenix in 2030.
Counting, Garcia turns off the water with 20 seconds to spare. Maybe she and the kids can make a pitcher of lemonade later. She tries to be a role model for her young twins, Max and Katy. She cut her long, thick hair last year to save time and water.
Dressing, she checks the phone by the bed for messages. Her husband, David, is out of town. Garcia wakes Max and Katy, hustles their half-asleep bodies into the shower. One-minute showers wake and cool them in the intense morning heat.
On this last Friday in August the radio says the current temperature is 110 and will hit 123. Cooler spots today outside the heat island will include 117 at Gila Bend Estates and 113 in New River Ranch, two gated communities rumored to have undocumented outdoor fountains.
While the children are dressing, Liz straps on Wheezer's respirator and lets him out into the back yard. A golden retriever, Wheezer still loves to romp and bark as best he can in the bulky muzzle. He spots a raven strutting by the pool and charges. The raven drops down into the empty pool and hides among the brush and old patio chairs tossed there years ago by the last monsoon. Wheezer quickly tires. Liz lets him back in and measures out his 4 ounces of morning water.
Outside, she sprays Max and Katy with SPF 100 sunblock and everyone climbs into the family's 15-year-old SUV. Liz notices the gas gauge is barely at a quarter of a tank. Quickly she tries to calculate how much gas she will need to reach school, the Valley Metro lot, her second job that evening, and home. She'll likely have to wait in line at the gas station. At $12 a gallon, she'll have to go to an automatic teller machine for the $300 fill-up. Discount stations are cash only.
Liz pulls out, her yellow smog lights poking weakly through the dense early-morning air and falls in line for the slow crawl to the freeway. "For sale" signs lean at odd angles in many of the bare dirt yards. Every block has a couple of homes wrapped in yellow "no trespassing" tape for foreclosure.
The Garcias moved to Eloy 13 years ago for an affordable home and the last scraps of rural landscape left between Phoenix and Tucson. Light rail was talked about but never happened. Metro buses don't come down this far. The crumbling I-10 is still the only way north for the 25-mile run to Phoenix.
Their plan was to live in this house two or three years and move to a bigger place. David drove a forklift at a Wal-Mart distribution site until the Great Sale of 2018 when Wal-Mart was taken over by the Chinese conglomerate, Mao-mart. The center closed and David found work with Mao-mart's trucking division driving big shipping containers from the Long Beach dockyards to stores around the Southwest. He sleeps at home every eighth night, the other seven in his truck.
Liz reaches the I-10 ramp in half an hour and joins the slow crawl north. Even when traffic is light, between 12:45 and 1:20 p.m. weekdays, the speed limit is just 40 mph, another gas-saving concession. Along the center median in the bike lane, a few brave cyclists sucking on respirators pedal past the lines of cars and trucks.
Liz stays to the right and gets off at the first exit. Heading east against the rush, she is able to make up time and pulls into the school's circular drive - a drive up window of this former McDonald's. She's relieved to see children still walking toward the open front door. With all the Arizona State Land Trust property gone, reductions in state education funding have led to chronic teacher strikes and closed schools. She wishes she could send her kids to a private school but with only a three-income household they can't afford the tuition.
At about 8:30 a.m., Liz finally pulls into the massive asphalt Valley Metro park-and-ride lot at the site of the old Intel plant. She will just make the diesel shuttle. Downtown became a no-car zone after the Great Asphyxiation of 2014 when half the Legislature succumbed to a nasty brown cloud during a debate over renaming Lake Powell the Arizona Salt Flats.
Liz works at the state's only HMO call center taking questions from the 1 million Arizona residents who still have health benefits. She works 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. six days a week, with a 30-minute lunch break. The work is hard and depressing, but the job comes with benefits.
The shuttle drops her in front of the former Translational Genomics Research Institute, now home to Doctors On Call, or DOC. Liz hurries up the escalator and down a dim hallway to the cubicle she shares with four other workers.
DOC workers field all kinds of health questions. Liz's cubicle specializes in upper respiratory illnesses and allergies. Like the old computer company help lines, they have databases of possible questions or scenarios and read canned answers to callers. Liz had quite a scare a couple of years ago when their operation was almost outsourced to Bolivia. But the HMO based in New Delhi decided a local awareness of bad air and allergens would save talk time. Liz tosses her keys on her desk. All her phone lines are blinking.
Normally Liz can lose herself in the onslaught of questions. Delivering canned answers, Liz will concentrate on sounding cheery. But today she is distracted, dreading her lunch appointment with the Realtor.
When her computer screen goes dark at noon, she grabs her purse and runs back down the escalator. Outside it is now 125 degrees. Her shoes stick to the decaying rubberized pavement as she hurries across the street toward a diner. Waiting for her at the metallic stand-up counter is Lacey Dunlap, a real estate agent whose four-story billboard looms over the Garcias' neighborhood. As in her billboard photo, Dunlap is a petite redhead dressed in smart sport clothes and scary smile.
Dunlap took over most of the real estate agencies south of the Loop 505 after the Great Land Deflation of 2011. That was the year growth stalled. Home values dipped and began a 10-year flatline. This wiped out the last wave of speculators, overleveraged homeowners and any real estate agent short on deals. Dunlap thrived by settling for lower margins but doing more deals. Her specialty is helping people get out while they can. Given how much money has drained from the Phoenix economy, Dunlap has plenty of business.
The Garcias are three months behind on their $4,000 monthly mortgage and want to sell before their lender forecloses. David and Liz discussed moving 20 miles farther out and renting a house for only $3,000 a month. It's either that or leave Phoenix for the sprawling prefab condo-plexes in Nogales.
Dunlap waves as Liz enters. In front of her, Dunlap already has the diner's signature Sonoran Sizzler Salad. Liz punches a button on the vending machine and a small Mao-mart quesadilla slides down the chute.
Liz must be quick. She has to be back to work on time so she can leave on time to get to her second job in Apache Junction. There in a warehouse the size of an airport runway is another cubicle where she processes online grocery orders for Bashas' Enormous World Market.
Dunlap senses the rush and shoves her salad aside. Still smiling, punching buttons on her combination cellphone, organizer, calculator, navigation and self-defense device (the wrist model), she tells Liz that at best they should only lose $50,000. Two years ago, the couple borrowed heavily to pay $500,000 for the house. Dunlap holds the calculator too close to Liz's face and says she had an investor willing to buy, but the Garcias better decide pronto.
Those legislators who survived the Great Asphyxiation have long complained to whomever would listen that somebody should have seen the real estate boom coming to an end. First there was the spike in interest rates. Then the water crisis in the 16th year of the drought. Unemployment rose, bankruptcies mounted and people bolted. Investors and homeowners dumped houses as fast as people used to buy them back in 2004. And all the money housing used to pump into the economy dried up, stranding all the businesses and cities that relied on steady growth. Now legislators accuse brokers like Dunlap of selling Phoenix to big money from China and Russia.
Liz tells Lacey Dunlap they will call tonight once her husband gets home. Tonight is a sleep-at-home night and David is supposed to pick up the kids from school. The only catch could be traffic around the mammoth Phoenix-Mexico City-Las Vegas interchange out by Maricopa Mirage Casino.
After work, crawling south on I-10 in her SUV, Liz gauges the size of the backup as she approaches the three-tier South Mountain Tunnel exchange. She considers exiting at the old ASU site but decides to slog on. She arrives at the warehouse with her gas gauge deep into the red. There is a message pinned to her cubicle wall. David has reached the city of Verrado and will be on time.
David pulls up to the kids' school in his 24-wheeler container truck. The kids are outside, sweating in the 128-degree shade. David surprises them with a bottle of spring water given to him by a manager at the huge Bullhead City Mao-mart. Such bottles are $6 each at Bashas', $5.55 at Mao-mart.
David drives back to Eloy, finds an open stretch of street to park his truck and leads Max and Katy home on foot.
As David unlocks the door, Wheezer bounces up and wants to play. Max runs to his room. Katy is the one who stops to bump the air back down to 98 now that they are home.
David switches on the family's plasma screen TV, an old 200-inch model, and rummages through the freezer for four Mao-mart Instant Dinners. He will save one for Liz. The only flavor pills they have are chicken, so Mao's Chicken Delight it will be.
He calls Katy and Max. They sit down to dinner and the TV news.
Later, as David is cleaning up, Liz calls to say she has to stop for gas and will be late.
And then she tells David her surprise: She saved an extra minute and a half of water for him to have a good long shower.
http://www.azcentral.com/php-bin/clicktr...ouse-bad19.html
Imagining Phoenix in 2030: Shortages and heat
Dec. 19, 2004 12:00 AM
Liz Garcia's alarm goes off at 5 a.m. She slaps the snooze button, groans and staggers into the bathroom.
In the darkness she leans against the shower door. She lets her pajamas fall to floor, takes a deep breath and turns on the water. Somewhere deep in the plumbing a low gurgling sound grows louder. Liz quickly steps under the city-issue low-flow showerhead and extends her arms.
Liz has rationed two minutes of water for her shower and doesn't want to waste any even if it's freezing at first.
The year is 2030. Garcia lives in Eloy with her family and their dog Wheezer in a monotonous ring of suburbs that surround Phoenix and bump up against Tucson.
In this 34th year of drought, not even the introduction of sand golf nor the huge de-salination plant south of Yuma has helped the water supply. Each of metropolitan Phoenix's 6 million residents is limited to 100 gallons a day, 50 gallons less than their parents were using in 2004. Rationing was the only way to force people to stop their wasteful use of water.
A water shortage is just one of a number of diminished returns the city's reliance on growth and home building as an economic foundation has brought to life in Phoenix in 2030.
Counting, Garcia turns off the water with 20 seconds to spare. Maybe she and the kids can make a pitcher of lemonade later. She tries to be a role model for her young twins, Max and Katy. She cut her long, thick hair last year to save time and water.
Dressing, she checks the phone by the bed for messages. Her husband, David, is out of town. Garcia wakes Max and Katy, hustles their half-asleep bodies into the shower. One-minute showers wake and cool them in the intense morning heat.
On this last Friday in August the radio says the current temperature is 110 and will hit 123. Cooler spots today outside the heat island will include 117 at Gila Bend Estates and 113 in New River Ranch, two gated communities rumored to have undocumented outdoor fountains.
While the children are dressing, Liz straps on Wheezer's respirator and lets him out into the back yard. A golden retriever, Wheezer still loves to romp and bark as best he can in the bulky muzzle. He spots a raven strutting by the pool and charges. The raven drops down into the empty pool and hides among the brush and old patio chairs tossed there years ago by the last monsoon. Wheezer quickly tires. Liz lets him back in and measures out his 4 ounces of morning water.
Outside, she sprays Max and Katy with SPF 100 sunblock and everyone climbs into the family's 15-year-old SUV. Liz notices the gas gauge is barely at a quarter of a tank. Quickly she tries to calculate how much gas she will need to reach school, the Valley Metro lot, her second job that evening, and home. She'll likely have to wait in line at the gas station. At $12 a gallon, she'll have to go to an automatic teller machine for the $300 fill-up. Discount stations are cash only.
Liz pulls out, her yellow smog lights poking weakly through the dense early-morning air and falls in line for the slow crawl to the freeway. "For sale" signs lean at odd angles in many of the bare dirt yards. Every block has a couple of homes wrapped in yellow "no trespassing" tape for foreclosure.
The Garcias moved to Eloy 13 years ago for an affordable home and the last scraps of rural landscape left between Phoenix and Tucson. Light rail was talked about but never happened. Metro buses don't come down this far. The crumbling I-10 is still the only way north for the 25-mile run to Phoenix.
Their plan was to live in this house two or three years and move to a bigger place. David drove a forklift at a Wal-Mart distribution site until the Great Sale of 2018 when Wal-Mart was taken over by the Chinese conglomerate, Mao-mart. The center closed and David found work with Mao-mart's trucking division driving big shipping containers from the Long Beach dockyards to stores around the Southwest. He sleeps at home every eighth night, the other seven in his truck.
Liz reaches the I-10 ramp in half an hour and joins the slow crawl north. Even when traffic is light, between 12:45 and 1:20 p.m. weekdays, the speed limit is just 40 mph, another gas-saving concession. Along the center median in the bike lane, a few brave cyclists sucking on respirators pedal past the lines of cars and trucks.
Liz stays to the right and gets off at the first exit. Heading east against the rush, she is able to make up time and pulls into the school's circular drive - a drive up window of this former McDonald's. She's relieved to see children still walking toward the open front door. With all the Arizona State Land Trust property gone, reductions in state education funding have led to chronic teacher strikes and closed schools. She wishes she could send her kids to a private school but with only a three-income household they can't afford the tuition.
At about 8:30 a.m., Liz finally pulls into the massive asphalt Valley Metro park-and-ride lot at the site of the old Intel plant. She will just make the diesel shuttle. Downtown became a no-car zone after the Great Asphyxiation of 2014 when half the Legislature succumbed to a nasty brown cloud during a debate over renaming Lake Powell the Arizona Salt Flats.
Liz works at the state's only HMO call center taking questions from the 1 million Arizona residents who still have health benefits. She works 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. six days a week, with a 30-minute lunch break. The work is hard and depressing, but the job comes with benefits.
The shuttle drops her in front of the former Translational Genomics Research Institute, now home to Doctors On Call, or DOC. Liz hurries up the escalator and down a dim hallway to the cubicle she shares with four other workers.
DOC workers field all kinds of health questions. Liz's cubicle specializes in upper respiratory illnesses and allergies. Like the old computer company help lines, they have databases of possible questions or scenarios and read canned answers to callers. Liz had quite a scare a couple of years ago when their operation was almost outsourced to Bolivia. But the HMO based in New Delhi decided a local awareness of bad air and allergens would save talk time. Liz tosses her keys on her desk. All her phone lines are blinking.
Normally Liz can lose herself in the onslaught of questions. Delivering canned answers, Liz will concentrate on sounding cheery. But today she is distracted, dreading her lunch appointment with the Realtor.
When her computer screen goes dark at noon, she grabs her purse and runs back down the escalator. Outside it is now 125 degrees. Her shoes stick to the decaying rubberized pavement as she hurries across the street toward a diner. Waiting for her at the metallic stand-up counter is Lacey Dunlap, a real estate agent whose four-story billboard looms over the Garcias' neighborhood. As in her billboard photo, Dunlap is a petite redhead dressed in smart sport clothes and scary smile.
Dunlap took over most of the real estate agencies south of the Loop 505 after the Great Land Deflation of 2011. That was the year growth stalled. Home values dipped and began a 10-year flatline. This wiped out the last wave of speculators, overleveraged homeowners and any real estate agent short on deals. Dunlap thrived by settling for lower margins but doing more deals. Her specialty is helping people get out while they can. Given how much money has drained from the Phoenix economy, Dunlap has plenty of business.
The Garcias are three months behind on their $4,000 monthly mortgage and want to sell before their lender forecloses. David and Liz discussed moving 20 miles farther out and renting a house for only $3,000 a month. It's either that or leave Phoenix for the sprawling prefab condo-plexes in Nogales.
Dunlap waves as Liz enters. In front of her, Dunlap already has the diner's signature Sonoran Sizzler Salad. Liz punches a button on the vending machine and a small Mao-mart quesadilla slides down the chute.
Liz must be quick. She has to be back to work on time so she can leave on time to get to her second job in Apache Junction. There in a warehouse the size of an airport runway is another cubicle where she processes online grocery orders for Bashas' Enormous World Market.
Dunlap senses the rush and shoves her salad aside. Still smiling, punching buttons on her combination cellphone, organizer, calculator, navigation and self-defense device (the wrist model), she tells Liz that at best they should only lose $50,000. Two years ago, the couple borrowed heavily to pay $500,000 for the house. Dunlap holds the calculator too close to Liz's face and says she had an investor willing to buy, but the Garcias better decide pronto.
Those legislators who survived the Great Asphyxiation have long complained to whomever would listen that somebody should have seen the real estate boom coming to an end. First there was the spike in interest rates. Then the water crisis in the 16th year of the drought. Unemployment rose, bankruptcies mounted and people bolted. Investors and homeowners dumped houses as fast as people used to buy them back in 2004. And all the money housing used to pump into the economy dried up, stranding all the businesses and cities that relied on steady growth. Now legislators accuse brokers like Dunlap of selling Phoenix to big money from China and Russia.
Liz tells Lacey Dunlap they will call tonight once her husband gets home. Tonight is a sleep-at-home night and David is supposed to pick up the kids from school. The only catch could be traffic around the mammoth Phoenix-Mexico City-Las Vegas interchange out by Maricopa Mirage Casino.
After work, crawling south on I-10 in her SUV, Liz gauges the size of the backup as she approaches the three-tier South Mountain Tunnel exchange. She considers exiting at the old ASU site but decides to slog on. She arrives at the warehouse with her gas gauge deep into the red. There is a message pinned to her cubicle wall. David has reached the city of Verrado and will be on time.
David pulls up to the kids' school in his 24-wheeler container truck. The kids are outside, sweating in the 128-degree shade. David surprises them with a bottle of spring water given to him by a manager at the huge Bullhead City Mao-mart. Such bottles are $6 each at Bashas', $5.55 at Mao-mart.
David drives back to Eloy, finds an open stretch of street to park his truck and leads Max and Katy home on foot.
As David unlocks the door, Wheezer bounces up and wants to play. Max runs to his room. Katy is the one who stops to bump the air back down to 98 now that they are home.
David switches on the family's plasma screen TV, an old 200-inch model, and rummages through the freezer for four Mao-mart Instant Dinners. He will save one for Liz. The only flavor pills they have are chicken, so Mao's Chicken Delight it will be.
He calls Katy and Max. They sit down to dinner and the TV news.
Later, as David is cleaning up, Liz calls to say she has to stop for gas and will be late.
And then she tells David her surprise: She saved an extra minute and a half of water for him to have a good long shower.