Phoenix, Arizona is familiar to extremes. As the eleventh largest metro in the USA, Phoenix is a sprawling, fast-growing metropolis in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. In 2024, residents endured unprecedented levels of extreme heat, breaking records with 113 consecutive days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).

If extreme heat is the ‘normal’ for cities under climate change, then secure, affordable water access is a lifeline for low-income households who rely on simple, low-cost cooling techniques (aka, a cold shower). And yet, from 2000 to 2022 the number of households without running water in the Valley of the Sun has remained steady—at roughly 5,800 households or nearly 18,000 people. We ask: why?

Our research in Phoenix aims to understand local conditions in housing and water governance that produce little to no improvement in plumbing poverty; how households experience and cope with access problems and shut-offs under climatic extremes; and what might be done to improve water justice in an overheating city.