Sun City: Hohokam Fields to Retirement Revolution

Before Sun City existed as a concept, this flat desert ground was layered with centuries of human use. The Hohokam people farmed here from roughly three hundred to fourteen hundred AD, engineering hundreds of miles of irrigation canals to pull water from the Agua Fria River across the desert floor. They disappeared from the archaeological record around fourteen hundred, likely ancestors of the Akimel O'odham and Tohono O'odham nations who still live in the region today.

By the twentieth century the land had become the Marinette Ranch, a cotton farm relying on the same principle the Hohokam understood: groundwater coaxed onto flat land grows crops. Then on January first, nineteen sixty, the Del Webb Corporation opened five model homes here to a stunned public. More than one hundred thousand visitors showed up that first weekend.

Webb had invented the active-adult retirement community, a new land use no one had named yet, built atop ground that had been farmed without interruption for over a thousand years.