Apartment Market and Sales Insights
With our unique down-stream location, 100+ years of proactive conservation, 45 years of aggressive water laws and on-going water sensitive measures, Metro Phoenix has plenty of water to sustain our projected development and population growth. Here’s some of the details. The drainage basin that feeds the Salt River, that flows into metro Phoenix, is huge and a good portion of this basin is at a much higher elevation and receives 15 to 20+ inches of rain per year. This water has been filling the aquifers below Phoenix for eons and more recently, been the source of water for many of the upstream lakes, created in-part by SRP. A prime example is the Roosevelt Dam/Lake completed in 1911.
In 1980, Arizona created the Dept. of Water Resources and adopted the 1980 Ground Water Management Act. Even with a population increase from 240,000 in 1950 to 4.7 million in 2024, our water consumption has decreased every year since 1980. This is due to implementing conservation measures and that housing takes about 25% of the water typically used for agriculture. Especially to the west, we have a huge amount of agricultural land for development
The 1980 Groundwater Mgmt. Act also required developers working in populated areas (designated as Active Management Areas or AMA’s) to have an “assured water supply” – in many cases this is a 100-year assured water supply. The Act also banned new irrigated agricultural land. As a potential reserve, Phoenix has at least three times their annual water consumption stored in underground aquifers. Metro Phoenix also only uses about 15% of the CAP water for domestic use.
Details of the Metro Phoenix water history plus a list of water resources is found here on our website.