The $80 Million Acre

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News, Business

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Buckeye, Arizona, is a small city with dreams of becoming “the next Phoenix.” It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. In the past few decades, its population has ballooned more than twentyfold, and the city plans to add more than 100,000 new homes in coming years.

The only catch? Growth requires water. And Buckeye doesn’t have enough. So what’s a small city with big dreams to do? Part of the answer lies in one scrubby acre of land way out in the desert that’s owned by a group of investors.

Transcript

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0:00.0	in a quarter mile turn left. Not a person in sight. It's late July and I'm way out in
0:09.5	the Arizona desert. Now there's some more green. About 70 miles west of Phoenix in the
0:16.2	Harqua Hala Valley. Just sort of went through a little speck of town basically and now
0:21.3	back in the middle of the desert. It's 108 degrees. The kind of blazing hot day where
0:27.6	you just pray your car doesn't break down. Your destination is on the right. It's maybe
0:35.4	the weirdest place I've ever Google mapped to. My destination being a field. I drove all
0:44.3	the way out here to look at a one acre plot of land. Well here it is because this dusty
0:54.2	field is about to be sold for a staggering amount of money. This acre of grass and dirt
1:04.5	surrounded by not much is apparently worth 80 million dollars. I've toured some pricey properties
1:15.4	and at $1,800 per square foot. This one costs far more than a plot of land in Miami's
1:22.4	billionaire bunker. If you listen to season two, it's just a bunch of scrub and a couple
1:30.3	weeds. But the water underneath is absolutely precious. Yep, there's a vast aquifer underground,
1:41.2	a possible lifeline for one small city many miles away. The thing with water in Arizona is
1:48.1	it's really not how much water is there going to be? It's it's how much do we want to pay for.
1:53.6	This little acre of land, it kind of encapsulates what's happening in Arizona and a lot of the West
2:00.0	right now where people are adapting to and profiting from the climate crisis. Does it hurt a little bit
2:07.3	to have to pay so much money to investors who basically just made a water play and now are
2:13.5	caching in? No, I mean, that's business. Do you think people should be able to profit from
2:22.4	the crisis, the water crisis in the West? Well, my own personal view has always been no.
2:31.2	Hi, Mamie Scott. Welcome to How We Survive, a podcast for marketplace about people navigating
2:37.6	solutions to a changing climate. This season, the worth of water.
2:47.2	More than 20 years into a mega drought made worse by climate change, a lot of scientists think
	...

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