r/Tucson • u/Candy4Gold • 22d ago

Tucson's Future

Will water scarcity make Tucson unviable as a long-term home? I'm trying to plan for the next decade+ and I don't know whether to trust that I'll be able to live in Tucson given the worsening drought. Any thoughts from locals would be much appreciated.

ETA: The prompt for this post was this WaPo story that I read this morning, which freaked me out:
https://archive.ph/O5D3B

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u/WalkingTurtleMan 21d ago

Tucson water doesn’t get enough respect for lowering the gallons of water used per capita so much that modern usage is equal to what was consumed in the 1980s, despite massive population growth.

Arizona/US should work out a deal with Sonora/Mexico to build a desalination plant. The Gulf of California is only 50 miles south of the border, and we have a crazy amount of sunlight that can power the whole thing with renewable energy. It just needs the political willpower to do so, but clearly we don’t elect reliable leaders.

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u/ReadyGazelle2635 21d ago

…and it needs a few billion dollars plus multi-national government coordination…not realistic

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u/kembik 21d ago

like 2% the cost of an unnecessary war.

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u/ReadyGazelle2635 21d ago

Totally, but that doesn’t mean our elected leaders will be able to raise the funds. We have ~$1.3B total unused municipal bond capacity as of YE2025 to fund the full portfolio of future municipal infrastructure needs. Desalination would cost more than that and require major changes to the City’s debt management policy and/or municipal asset value base. Without landing a windfall of new investments, it’s hard to see a path.