Green Valley: Desert Designed for Retirement

Green Valley did not grow organically. It was invented. Around nineteen fifty-nine, R.

Keith Walden of the Green Valley Pecan Company and Chicago developers Donald and Norman Maxon looked at this Sonoran scrubland twenty miles south of Tucson and imagined a retirement community. In nineteen sixty-two, the University of Arizona Foundation stepped in to finance the first three hundred eleven acres, securing a twelve-point-four-one-million-dollar federal housing guarantee, the largest the Federal Housing Administration had ever issued for senior housing at the time. Ground broke in nineteen sixty-three, and the first residents arrived in nineteen sixty-four.

By nineteen seventy the population was forty-five hundred; by two thousand ten it had climbed past twenty-one thousand. Green Valley remains unincorporated, with no city government, governed instead by a web of homeowners associations. Its pecan orchards still operate at the edges of the development, a trace of the agricultural past beneath the retirement-community present.