Arizona's Water Crisis Halts Phoenix Area Development.

Arizona will not approve new housing construction on the fast-growing edges of metro Phoenix that rely on groundwater due to years of overuse and a multi-decade drought that is sapping its water supply. Developers could still build in the affected areas but would need to find alternative water sources to do so. The move is driven by a projection that showed that over the next 100 years, demand in metro Phoenix for almost 4.9 million acre-feet of groundwater would be unmet without further action.