The Price of Paradise

Amy Scott: The first sign that something is amiss at Leigh Harris’s house is the plastic bottles.  Some bottles of water outside, lots of them.  Dozens of clear one gallon bottles lined up outside the front door.  Nice shirt. I love Arcade Fire. A fit blonde woman wearing an Arcade Fire t-shirt and a wide scarf holding her hair back comes out to greet me and my producer Caitlin.

Leigh Harris: Caitlin, nice to meet you. Welcome to our house. Out in real paradise. You can see that we have the most beautiful views of the mountains we’re surrounded by trails it’s really a hikers horseback riders, mountain bikers paradise. But the problem is, as you can see, we have a price to pay.

Amy Scott: Inside more bottles on the kitchen counter and all over the tile floor, which Leigh admits hasn’t been cleaned in a while.

Leigh Harris: You have to promise me to not think untoward of us because we’ve been literally camping in this house for six months now, with no real running water. We do our best we can’t wash the floors or do things that normal water you don’t really think about how you use water on an everyday basis when it’s just flowing from taps.

Amy Scott: She could turn on the taps and clean water would come out. But at a price Leigh can no longer afford. Because here in Rio Verde foothills in the scrub outside Scottsdale Arizona. Leigh and her husband frog are among hundreds of people scrambling for water after the city cut them off. It’s mid-Junefor more than six months at this point, Leigh and Franck have been doing everything they can to avoid turning on their taps.

Leigh Harris: I kept reaching for that faucet handle. And I kept going, Oh darn, I did it again. I can’t keep doing this. And I literally took a pack of rubber bands, I mean really strong ones. And I banded all of the handles. And when that didn’t work, I stuck post it notes with please do not use this. And it was pretty much for me. You just need to break yourself of that muscle memory of turning on and off a faucet.

Amy Scott: Leigh and Franck are both semi-retired, she works at an assisted living facility Franck at a grocery store. To get by they’ve been living on water borrowed from work or friends’ houses and collecting rainwater to flush their toilets and water their plants. But out here during one of the hottest and driest summers on record, there hasn’t been much rain, nearly none at all. And they’re doing whatever they can to save every last drop that they have.

Leigh Harris: I’m standing in my master bathroom shower. I’ve got several buckets of rainwater, it takes about two grounds to flush the toilet, and we go ahead and put it into the tank behind the toilet. So here you go. Anything to stay in our house, right? You got to do what you got to do.

INTRO

Amy Scott: I’m Amy Scott. Welcome to How We Survive a podcast for Marketplace about people navigating solutions to a changing climate. This season, we’re focusing on water scarcity in the American West, and taking a close look at some of the people adapting to and cashing in on that scarcity. This episode we’re following the story of one woman, Leigh Harris and her husband Franck Avril, and how they got to this point of camping in their own home. It’s a story about what happens when you think you’ve bought into the American dream. But then you find out that dream doesn’t include water. This is episode four: The Price of Paradise.  Leigh Harris is the resilient type. For years she worked as a news producer for local radio in Arizona, taking helicopter lessons to do weather and traffic reports. She grew up the youngest of six kids in upstate New York and spent a lot of time on Lake George where her family would camp out for weeks at a time in the summer.

Leigh Harris: I never ever had to worry about there not being water.

Amy Scott: Fast forward a few decades and a few 1000 miles and Leigh nearing her 60s found herself living in a condo in Scottsdale, Arizona. Looking for a new house with her partner Franck.

Leigh Harris: Franck and I are big outdoors people, we love hiking, and we’d be looking down over this very large expanse of desert we’d see houses kind of placed in and around this gorgeous Sonoran Desert type of landscape and we go, oh, that’s that’s a really pretty area.

Amy Scott: Rocky hills with tall Sawara cacti and mesquite trees, but they were looking at was Rio Verde foothills, an unincorporated community in Maricopa County, they found a place that seemed perfect. Right next to the hiking trails. They loved a stucco house with high ceilings and a fireplace and 35 windows to take in the mountain views. There was just one catch.

Leigh Harris: Yeah, it’s a beautiful home, but it is completely, you know, dependent on hauled water.

Amy Scott: Like many houses in rural communities. This one didn’t come with a built in supply of water, no pipes connected to a city water utility, but also no well to draw from. Instead, it had a 5000 gallon underground water tank, which they’d have to pay someone in a huge truck to come and fill. Before they made an offer on the house. Leigh called up her brother’s friend who lived in the area.

Leigh Harris: And I said you know what’s, what’s the deal? I mean, hauled water. I’m having a truck deliver the water, how many gallons 5000 6000 gallons. I mean, isn’t that a little strange? And he said no, actually, there’s a lot of homes that do it. But the hauled water that you’ll get is the city of Scottsdale so it is clean and safe and potable.

Amy Scott: Scottsdale is the nearest city guys and big trucks would buy water from the city and bring it out to Leigh. It made her pause.

Leigh Harris: It brought to mind the fact that we are on our own little island in this house and it is a beautiful little you know island of paradise. But we have finite resources. And that tank was our finite resource.

Amy Scott: Still for its size and beauty. The house was affordable by Scottsdale standards. About a half a million dollars. It would be a stretch Franck’s mom has Alzheimer’s disease and he pays for her expensive care.

Leigh Harris: You know he blew most of his retirement just being able to get her into a care that would allow her to be you know clean and happy and and taken care of by nurses.

Amy Scott: But between the sale of the condo and their income from Social Security and their hourly jobs, they thought they could make it work. The house was too beautiful to pass up. Plus there was this other thing.

Franck Avril: It’s acoustics are superb.

Amy Scott: Franck and accomplished classical oboist fell in love. And I’m not kidding here…with the walls.

Franck Avril: Because the walls are circular. It’s resonant but without being bouncy. anytime day or night, I can practice the oboe.

Amy Scott: You had a very specific wish-list for a house.

Franck Avril: Absolutely.

Amy Scott: So with her brother’s friends reassurances, Leigh and Franck went for it. The day they moved in, in 2019. Leigh could hardly believe it was hers.

Leigh Harris: I’d look out the window and I’d see four peaks in the sunset. And I thought to myself, you know, I’m the luckiest person.

Amy Scott: It all felt so perfect. Just every now and then that water situation nagged at the back of Leigh’s mind. She made a vow.

Leigh Harris: We’ll do the best we can on making sure that the water situation doesn’t chase us from our dream home as we get into our older years.

Amy Scott: Six months after moving in, Leigh was out driving when she noticed something.

Leigh Harris: I started seeing signs on the Rural Metro Fire Department property that said “Got Water?”.

Amy Scott: She was intrigued. What could that be about?

Leigh Harris: I immediately thought this is not a good sign. I mean, the banner was a good banner. But this is not a good sign for us as a community if there is a question about water supply.

Amy Scott: At the time, Leigh and Franck we’re paying about 130 bucks per water delivery. They could stretch that water five to six weeks before needing a refill. When she got home. Leigh pulled up the website she’d seen on the banner.

Leigh Harris: And it said If you want to secure your property, then you can sign the petition and say that you’re going to, you know, put a certain amount of money towards buying property in the Harquahala Valley west of Phoenix. And I said, Well, that’s an interesting development.

Amy Scott: The website said a group of residents would be holding meetings about forming something very jargony, an organization called a Domestic Water Improvement District.

Leigh Harris: And so I called my brother’s friend and I said, So what’s the deal with this domestic water improvement district thing? And he said, Oh, well, it’s probably just people wanting to make extra money. I wouldn’t pay any attention to it. The city of Scottsdale is never gonna cut you off, though young to worry about it. And I went, Oh, okay. Click.

Amy Scott: But the more she thought about it, the more she thought maybe she and Franck should at least check out one of those meetings.

Leigh Harris: And I put it off and I put it off until like the very last meeting. And then we went and we listened.

Amy Scott: It was December of 2020, in the midst of the COVID crisis, and it was at that meeting in the driveway outside someone’s home that Leigh and Franck heard about a scary situation for the first time. They learned that years earlier, the city of Scottsdale had warned the two main water hauling companies in the community that it might have to cut off water to Rio Verde Foothills part of a plan to address the ongoing drought.

Leigh Harris: They tried to let us know that there was an oncoming train way in the distance, but that it would arrive if that drought continued.

Amy Scott: So that’s what the meeting was about finding another source of water in case that train arrived in Scottsdale, cut them off. Remember the Harquahala Valley from episode one. The people at the meeting wanted to buy their own farmlands there for its water rights, so they’d have a backup supply. To do that they need to form a quasi government entity, that Domestic Water Improvement District AKA a DWID. When news about the potential DWID spread in the area, the backlash was swift. To many people. This was setting up a new layer of government and a lot of people had moved far out into the Foothills to be left alone. About a 20-minute drive from Leigh and Franck’s house, Caitlin and I went to see Christy Jackman. Wow, look at this view.

Christy Jackman: It’s getting a little warm. It’s chore time. This is my morning tasks I come out and look the stalls and feed the horses.

Amy Scott: Christy owns Donkey Holler Ranch, an equine boarding business in Rio Verde.

Christy Jackman: In here there’s five that are boarded one donkey one mini and one horse that’s mine.

Amy Scott: She’s dressed in jean shorts and cowboy boots and a tank top that says, “Never underestimate a woman who loves donkeys”. I love that.

Christy Jackman: Yeah. That’s the truth. It is the truth. That’s Cheeks he’s my donkey. Most of mine are rescues and he came to me so incredibly obese. And I’d never seen a butt so big on a donkey. So I named him cheats.

Amy Scott: Christy has lived here for 14 years and has a well on her property and access to another shared well down the road.

Christy Jackman: I have one for the ranch and one for the home and this could have handled the ranch one could have handled mine but I didn’t want to tax it too much. And there are three other homes on it.

Amy Scott: Watching her fill up a red bucket with water from a hose and the horses splashing around in it. I can’t help but think of Leigh Harris and all her water bottles. Christy says she’s not worried about her own supply.

Christy Jackman: We’re in really good well area. What we have our fingers here. So the fingers if you get lucky and you tap into one, there you go. You’ve got water.

Amy Scott: Like a lot of people up here who have wells Christy oppose the DWID that would have helped her neighbors buy water from the Harquahala Valley. She was worried about the powers this new quasi government entity would have.

Christy Jackman: They have the power to tax they have the power to annex and those of us who have been here a long, long time on wells. We were concerned that you know a group of ambitious neighbors who don’t have any skills in building this kind of a system was going to try to do so and be given all the powers of the state government entity.

Amy Scott: Christy does feel for her neighbors. She’s even shared her well water with some of them.

Christy Jackman: A lot of us have pitched in to help have to. These are neighbors. They didn’t do this on purpose.

Amy Scott: She says the bigger picture here is that home builders have taken advantage of a loophole in the law. If you’ve been listening to this season, you know that Arizona law requires builders of new subdivisions here to prove they have a 100-year supply of water. But a subdivision is defined as six or more lots. A lot of the land out here is divided into guess what, five, lots or fewer. So, builders don’t have to prove they can provide that water. They’re known as Wildcat developments.

Christy Jackman: The problem is you don’t put houses for sale. When there’s no water underneath it in a place like this. You don’t pop up five in a row to make a quick profit. And then say, well, you’re hauled water. Because look what happens. We don’t have hauled water.

Amy Scott: Do you blame the builders or the home-buyers who didn’t maybe read the fine print?

Christy Jackman: I don’t blame the whole home buyers in this case, because all they did was buy a home. But when it says hold water on the disclosure sheet, even if they say what does that mean? They’ve been told, Well, essentially it’s Scottsdale water you’re moving into Scottsdale, Scottsdale, just let’s trucks bring it to you. It’s a different method of delivery. They were fooled. They were tricked. The old timers that are on hold water knew what they were doing. And at that point, we didn’t have any fears of Scottsdale shutting us off. Because you know, there might have been 50 homes at the most that needed some help.

Amy Scott: Today, there are around 500 homes that rely entirely on hauled water and they keep getting built. Caitlin and I saw several under construction as we drove through the area. Some of these houses are just like they’ve totally, as she said, scraped the desert, put in gravel, there’s nothing growing a bill to close the so called Wildcat loophole didn’t go anywhere this year.

Christy Jackman: It needs to be fixed. It really does. This is a fragile environment. And they just come in and they’ll take 20 acres and they’ll just take all the plants off. What they’re doing is is a domino effect of disaster. So I would like to see the legislature buckled down and fix this.

Amy Scott: In the end the DWID opponents one out, but the drought dragged on. In the winter of 2021. Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam that supplies water to states across the West had dropped to an all time low. And Scottsdale did what it had threatened to do years before the city made an announcement

Leigh Harris: January 1 of 2023, we will no longer allow anyone who is not a Scottsdale resident or business to buy any more water from our standpipe and they were definitive about it. And I can tell you I lost a lot of sleep on those nights because I was very, I was scared. I was angry. I was disappointed. And here we had put all of our nest egg money into this house because we loved it so and that was what was required for us to actually get the house. We have our beautiful home. But how are we going to live with it without any water?

Amy Scott: We find out after the break. After Scottsdale announced it would stop selling water to Rio Verde Foothills. Leigh and Franck had one year to prepare. They looked into drilling their own well, but it was expensive 10s of 1000s of dollars and there was no guarantee they’d hit water. A neighbor’s well had totally dried up. They started tracking every drop up in a spreadsheet, how much water a load of laundry used how much water it took to shower or wash their hands.

Franck Avril: I’m pretty good at Excel.

Leigh Harris: Yeah, he’s really good at that.

Amy Scott: They invested in a rainwater harvesting system installing a 2500 gallon tank to collect rainwater as it poured from scuppers on the roof, along with other smaller tanks and containers, and stored up as much as they could. After every storm, they transfer water from their rainwater tanks into smaller one gallon think milk jugs sized containers, so their tank would be ready to capture more water during the next storm. That’s what Caitlin and I saw lined up outside the house.

Leigh Harris: So I’m filling up one gallon here from skill and doing the other one and so once we’re finished with this, this will be at least one toilet flush between these two.

Amy Scott: As the clock ran out, Leigh and Franck scrambled to secure one final drinking water delivery before the price rocketed up a backup supply for guests and emergencies. And on January 1 2023, Scottsdale officially turned off the water to Rio Verde Foothills.

NBC News (2023): The city of Scottsdale stopped the transportation of water, making good on a year’s worth of warnings that the municipal water supply was running dry.

ABC15 (2023): The community desperately searching for a source of water.

FOX 10 Phoenix (2023): Water tanks and reservoirs here at homes in the Rio Verde Foothills community are running low with no guarantee that they’re going to be refilled.

Amy Scott: People living on hauled water would have to buy it somewhere else. Instead of driving the 15 minutes or so to Scottsdale and back. The water haulers now had to drive hours away to fill up. And for Li and frog the price jumped from about $130 for a full tank to more than $500.

Leigh Harris: Because of not the water but the diesel the cost of diesel to truck in that water from more distant points.

Amy Scott: At that rate, their monthly costs would work out to about $380. For context, the average water bill for a single family house in Scottsdale is $84. When we visited in June, Leigh and Franck had shelled out for just two partial deliveries since Christmas. To conserve that water, they ate a lot of packaged soups and rice, things that don’t use water.

Franck Avril: We use whatever you can stick in a microwave and not add anything to.

Amy Scott: Leigh started showering at a gym near her work.

Leigh Harris: That’s a friend’s membership. And they made allowance for me to shower after work at this fitness club.

Amy Scott: And when they do need to shower at home.

Leigh Harris: We really just take military showers. And because Franck has got the small container that catches all of your run off of your body while you’re showering the military showers yield enough for him to be able to flush his toilet maybe twice.

Amy Scott: Not a drop wasted. The average American household uses around 82 gallons per person per day at home according to the EPA, for things like taking showers, brushing, teeth, drinking making coffee. So for a household of two, that’d be about 160 gallons.

Leigh Harris: We haven’t used our dishwasher maybe twice since Christmas. And we do do laundry here and there.

Amy Scott: Leigh figures they’ve cut their water used down to about 16 gallons a day. I probably used more than that when I showered this morning.  I mean, some people might hear this and say well, why don’t they leave? I mean, if you were to try to sell this house, would you be able to?

Leigh Harris: No, I mean, we could probably sell it for maybe a quarter of what what it’s worth, but for my husband and I this is our nest egg. This is everything we have. And if we had to sell it at a rock bottom price, we’d lose everything that we had worked for for most of our lives as professionals.

Amy Scott: After our visit to Leigh and Franck’s house in June, they were hit with a summer heatwave that just wouldn’t let up. Phoenix reported record heat and record drought. The summer monsoons didn’t come making it the driest summer on record since 1895. People were getting burns just by touching the pavement. Things started looking pretty dire.

Leigh Harris: It is July 2, and it’s 108 degrees outside and the sun just went down so Franck and I are going ahead and filling up the buckets. Now that it’s getting cooler.

Amy Scott: These are Voice Memos they sent me to let me know how they were doing each week Franck who’s 70 transports 12, 13, 14 buckets full of water from the dwindling rainwater tank to the house. Leigh brings plastic bottles to and from her job to get water she can drink and cook with.

Leigh Harris: With these we’re able to wash her hands and kind of rinse our dishes. It’s not heated or anything, so it’s not necessarily the most hygienic stuff.

Amy Scott: Sometimes she fills them up at the drinking fountain. Other times from a friend’s house.

Leigh Harris: I’m going to fill up some empty 28 ounce bottles of Gatorade that we already consumed. But now we can use to fill with just tap water so that we can wash our faces and hands and brush our teeth at home.

Amy Scott: It’s like their whole life revolves around finding and transporting water from outside of their home.

Leigh Harris: It’s been a bummer to try to figure out, okay, how long can I stay human. In living in this type of situation where I can’t, I can’t wash myself in my own home. I’m just getting tired of trying to figure out ways in order to save a couple of ounces of hot water here or, you know the potable water from the city there.

Amy Scott: Phoenix would end up going a month without temperatures dropping below 110 degrees. The summer was so dry in the Phoenix area that the Saguaro the iconic cacti of the Southwest, were unable to take it and began collapsing.

Leigh Harris: Hello! Come on in and get out of the heat.

Amy Scott: In early August, I went back to see Leigh and Franck. By this point, they gone eight months living on borrowed tap water and rainwater. And that was running out.

Leigh Harris: We were we were getting pretty worried. Because one by one we were emptying our tanks just to be able to flush our toilets.

Amy Scott: Five tanks turned into four tanks than three than two than one.

Leigh Harris: We were able to actually quantify that we probably could survive another six weeks to two months if we really got down on it of not flushing our toilets every week that went by with no rain got us further and further into that hole and we were starting to get really worried.

Amy Scott: But finally, there was a solution in sight. The Arizona legislature had approved a bill allowing Rio Verde Foothills to create what’s called a standpipe district, not one of those DWIDs but a different water buying entity that would buy water from a private company and use Scottsdale infrastructure to deliver it to Rio Verde Foothills.

Leigh Harris: Now the state legislature has created a water district a brand new animal never been seen before. But it might very well-set legal precedent for the rest of the West.

Amy Scott: Leigh says what happened in her community could be a cautionary tale for other rural places.  So when I tell people, I’m going to Rio Verde Foothills, people in Arizona Water Policy, they say oh, but that’s just such an outlier. That’s just a few 100 homes. What’s your response to that?

Leigh Harris: What happened to us. Being the one community that was left without the chair in the game of musical chairs can happen to just about any rural community if they don’t have that water source secured? And I mean, not just water credits, or this that looks like water is guaranteed. I’m talking about wet water.

Amy Scott: Knowing what you know. Now looking back. You’re really honest with yourselves. Was it a mistake?

Franck Avril: No. I mean, that’s my answer to it.

Leigh Harris: No. I look outside and I see the beauty of this place. We love Rio Verde Foothills.

Amy Scott: I find this kind of hard to believe it would be months before the new standpipe district would start delivering water. Why not cut their losses and start over somewhere a little easier. Like one woman I heard from who after 18 years on hauled water in Rio Verde Foothills sold her house and moved. Believe it or not, there’s still demand. A new family just bought the house on a dry lot next door to Leigh and Franck. But as I’m wrapping up to leave as the sun is about to set, they take me up onto their balcony to look out at the door darkening McDowell mountains.  Oh, look at that color.

Franck Avril: You can see the colors changing.

Amy Scott: Wow, it’s so beautiful.

Franck Avril: Exactly.

Amy Scott: I can see why it’s hard to leave. And in a way, Leigh and Franck’s experience is an extreme version of the kind of trade offs we all may have to consider in the future. Under the growing threats from drought, extreme heat, wildfire floods, what are we willing to endure to keep living in the places we love, and who will have a choice.

Leigh Harris: My gosh, here it comes. Here comes the water.

Amy Scott: A few months later, on October 21 2023, Leigh and Franck sent me another dispatch.

Leigh Harris: And the truck is just about to turn onto our property coming down the driveway. This is massively exciting. Honey! Water delivery truck’s here!

Amy Scott: The truck backs down their long driveway.

Leigh Harris: So now he’s going back to the water truck to go ahead and turn on the spigot.

Amy Scott: The driver hums a happy tune as he connects the hose to their underground tank for the first time in months.

Leigh Harris: Oh here it comes.

Amy Scott: About nine months after Scottsdale shut them off. When Lee and Frank’s tank was 44% full. The residents of Rio Verde Foothills were finally able to access their new supply of water. So now they can clean their house mop the floors run the dishwasher.

Leigh Harris: That’s the sound of that glorious water going into our underground tank that will allow our house to become functional again.

Amy Scott: This doesn’t mean a complete return to normal, they will still be paying high prices for water about $340 for a full delivery. So that’s more than double the amount before the water was cut off. The deal expires in two years long term the private company will build its own infrastructure to deliver the water and Scottsdale will be off the hook. Leigh says she still plans to gather rainwater, she hates the idea of flushing the toilet with potable water. And she and Franck are installing a filtration system so they can drink rainwater if they have to.

Leigh Harris: We’re just about done with our rain water filtration system. So that we can be reading in case we get cut off again by the city of Scottsdale in two years and two months from now.

Amy Scott: All this has meant that Leigh and Franck have ended up retrofitting their house and are more prepared physically and emotionally for the reality of our climate challenged future.

Leigh Harris: These days lesson has been learned. You don’t waste a drop of water. And he’s unhooking the hoses now from the water truck. Because we empty the water truck out. We got water!

Amy Scott: That’s it for this episode. Next week, we’ll visit a place that’s trying to keep the water and the fun flowing.  So we’re standing in front of the Bellagio Hotel. There is a giant lagoon and showgirls and people walking around with giant daiquiris.

Patt Mulroy: The economic value of that fountain is unbelievable. It’s become the symbol for the city.

OUTRO

Amy Scott: How Las Vegas became the poster child for conservation. Thanks for listening and as always, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review and share with a friend. We appreciate it. How We Survive is hosted by me, Amy Scott. Peter Balonon-Rosen and Sophia Paliza-Carre wrote this episode with me. Our producers include: Hayley Hershman, Lina Fansa and Courtney Bergsieker. Help this season from Marketplace reporter Savannah Maher. Caitlin Esch is our senior producer. Our editor is Jasmine Romero. Sound design and original music by Chris Julin and audio engineering by Brian Allison. Special thanks to Jon Gordon and Stephanie Siek. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is Executive Director. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President & General Manager of Marketplace.