Michael Jessop checks out the recently poured cement in the swimming pool at his Anthem home. Filling the pool will come at a premium. That's because of the high cost of running a pipeline to ship Central Arizona Project water nine miles uphill to Anthem and building a treatment plant for it.

James s. wood / arizona daily star

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Anthem is symbolic of the kind of development that planners and environmentalists love to hate but that many home buyers simply love.

It is at once self-contained and a bedroom community, about 35 miles north of Phoenix near the rural settlement of New River. Nine years after its development started, traffic is much worse on neighboring Interstate 17 and its water costs a bundle, but the community's atmosphere is low-key and laid-back, and the place is loaded with amenities.

Those are the pros and cons as new Anthems are being built or planned by Pulte Homes in Arizona's "Sun Corridor," the booming stretch in which the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas are expected to merge within the next 30 years.

An Anthem is in the early stages of construction in Florence, about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix along Arizona 79. It has about 650 residents now, and is planned for 9,100 homes, compared with 10,500 at the original Anthem.

Pulte also plans to build a new Anthem in the Buckeye area west of Phoenix.

Last month Pulte decided not to build a 13,000-home Anthem in Benson, just south of Kartchner Caverns State Park, citing a slow national housing market.

But in the long run, Benson officials and landowners expect to get another master-planned community — not unlike Anthem — as part of the 20,000-acre Whetstone Ranch project.

Across the Southwest, such master-planned communities are the rage, allowing developers to piece together in one whack the locations of homes, schools, parks, shopping centers, restaurants and walking paths. Pulte already has Anthems under way near Las Vegas and Denver, for example.

Some planners and many environmentalists criticize them as "leapfrog" development, or sprawl built far from the urban core. They're concerned they can create insular communities, disconnected from the cultural and social lives of the core city; that they're too far from residents' jobs; and that they create a huge demand for new roads that no highway department can build fast enough.

But that doesn't stop these communities from selling — the original Anthem is expected to be "built out" by next year, about 10 to 15 years quicker than its developers originally expected.

"Obviously, Pulte is presenting a housing product that 1,000 home buyers a year are asking for," said R.L. Brown, a Phoenix housing market analyst.

Planners and economists say we can look for new mega-developments coming to the Sun Corridor to have some of the same attractions as the original Anthem — and some of the same problems.

● Anthem has a large regional park and more than 30 small, "pocket parks." The main attraction is a "Big Splash" water park complete with a beach-entry pool and beach volleyball.

● Other amenities include a community center, a community swimming pool, ball fields and soccer fields, a kiddie train, a gymnasium, tennis courts, a rock-climbing wall and golf.

● Prices are generally more affordable than in the urban core, because land is cheaper the farther out one goes.

● Traffic loads on Interstate 17 have more than doubled since the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved Anthem in 1995, due not just to Anthem but to continued growth of suburbs to its south.

● Anthem's monthly water and sewer bills are high — $65 to $70 total for homeowners compared with $38 for the typical Tucson Water residential customer. The water company serving Anthem wants to jack them up to $105.

The high bills are due to the high cost of running a pipeline to ship Central Arizona Project water nine miles uphill to Anthem and building a treatment plant for it.

Benson's Whetstone Ranch won't be needing CAP because it demonstrated to the state that it has a 100-year supply of groundwater. But any other development in Southern Arizona that can't pump from the aquifer and needs its own CAP supply instead of hooking up to a city could face high water bills, says a state water official.

"Are there going to be places with much higher water rates? Absolutely. The infrastructure for moving water uphill and far away is very expensive," said Kenneth Seasholes, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources' Tucson office.

In the Anthem north of Phoenix, resident Kevin Hartigan lives with his wife and three kids in a two-story, half-million-dollar house — their second in Anthem — in a neighborhood called Legacy. The earth-tone home has a pitched roof covered with gray tiles that looks much the same as most other homes on his block.

He said Anthem's small-town atmosphere is "really good for the kids." He likes the water park, the community center, the plethora of walking and bicycling paths, the wide streets and the wide sidewalks — "user-friendly," he said.

The Hartigans like it that Anthem has more than a million square feet of retail space, including three grocery stores and an outlet mall, and that it's planned to ultimately have 2.2 million square feet of stores, offices and industries. There are no movie theaters and the restaurant selection is limited. Hartigan's fine with that.

"If they were right next door, we would go more and eat more. Now we save money and it's healthier," he said.

But when the family moved to Anthem in 2002, Interstate 17 was a lot less congested, he said. Today, "it's absolutely gotten choked up almost all the time."

The freeway traffic starts backing up at 5:30 in the mornings, and is particularly bad on Friday and Sunday afternoons because of drivers heading to and from Flagstaff.

His main beef: "If you are going to put in a community of 30,000 to 50,000 people, you should fix up the road first to allow for that volume of traffic."

The Arizona Department of Transportation recently agreed to speed up widening of Interstate 17 to Anthem from four to six lanes by 2010, instead of well after 2020 as originally planned. That required the Legislature to transfer $307 million to this and other projects from the state's general fund — the first time that's happened in Arizona.

But as Sun Corridor growth continues, local communities will have to make zoning decisions that require developers to address future road needs, says Victor Mendez, chief of the state transportation department.

"The expectation that state government will come in and fix all of these issues resulting from land-use decisions isn't going to work in the future," he said.