Phoenix as a city doesn't make sense. It's entire existence is due to Arizona getting wayyyy too much in the way of water rights for the amount of economic activity that should be happening in it.
The Pima and Maricopa tribes were able to create massive agricultural surpluses from pre-Columbian times to the early 19th century thanks to the Salt River. Phoenix is not a rainforest, but it's also not a bone-dry location.
Phoenix today has plenty of water for residential and light industrial use, the problem is the persistence of agriculture. A farm in Phoenix uses something like 100x the amount of water compared to an equal amount of residential use. It was fine when there wasn't a global supply chain that could provide oranges or cotton at acceptable prices, but today the land and water have uses with much higher economic value.
How many millions of people lived in the area in the early 19th century? What did their golf courses look like? Did they also ship those agricultural surpluses the Bani Khalid? Is the climate still the same?
What we're doing to the land and the realities of how much water the area receives today is vastly different from what was done in the early 19th century. It seems meaningless to me to point out that the area managed to easily sustain some population of people in the early 1800s when so many other fundamental things are different.
Many cities or towns don’t make sense, top of mountains, isolated islands, extreme weather. Yet they exist and people live there. They also need services.
