Phoenix’s Agricultural Past Shapes Its Present Neighborhoods 

A friend and I were driving shelter dogs to Starbucks for pup cups the other week, and somewhere in Arcadia I noticed lawns that made no sense. We passed rows of suburban homes fronted by yards so lush they looked out of place in this parched metro. Each lawn sat under a few inches of standing water, held in by a low dirt berm. My knee-jerk reaction was, “What the–?” My friend, who's a native Phoenician, gave me that patient look they save for transplants tripping over what's supposed to be obvious. “It's flood irrigation, left over from when this was all citrus groves.”