There is water here if you know where to look.
There is actually a river that runs through Phoenix, the Salt River. Though the Salt is dammed up, further upstream, there's still water in it in many places below the dam and lot above it. Go a ways into the mountains, there's enough water in the Salt that people do whitewater kayaking in it certain times of the year. There's also the Verde River not far to the north.
Phoenix was originally a farming community to support the mines up in Wickenburg. Then, after the Mollogon proved too tough to get over with a train track, the Gadsen Purchase was bought along with Tucson to bring the railroads through a southern route, and Phoenix became a major railhead for the mines, farms and ranches. They also moved the State Capitol there from Prescott.
With irrigation, the desert really blooms and you can get in 3 crops per year, depending upon what you are growing (they do a lot of plowing and crop dusting at night here in the summer).
There's small lakes, mostly man made, all over the valley. The valley is also criss-crossed by a vast and large canal network. There's also a zillion swimming pools here.
If you life outside of town the way I do you can just hop on a back road and take off if something happens. It's not that far to the mountains. Phoenix is actually near the edge of the desert, where it begins to get mountainous, which rapidly turns into a forest.
There are vast lakes, mostly man made, several of which are in the desert not for outside of town. These are big enough that they have permanent docks with motorboats and often sailboats on them. Technically, Arizona has more shoreline than California does.
You should see the size and amount of crawfish and fresh water clams you can find in some places, like below a dam.
To think that it's 400 miles to decent terrain shows a complete lack of knowledge of the local terrain. An hour north of Mesa (a Phoenix suburb) is Payson, which is a mile high in terrain that resembles a well treed area of Colorado. It's a thick Ponderosa and Pinon pine forest from there all of the way into New Mexico and up into Colorado.
Arizona's terrain varies so wildly, so fast, that within a 2 hour period I once drove from sunny, springtime weather in the desert, to a Seattle type rainy downpour and drizzle in the forest in Payson, to a blowing blizzard up on the Mollogon Rim.
Actually, if a person had horses or a wood gas burning vehicle, they could make it all of the way up into Montana and Canada, staying pretty much completely in the forest. But, that would require the use of a map, which would be a real pisser for some people. They would also need to bring a sleeping bag.
Some of us are only here for a while for the business opportunities. In the American Southwest, there is a financial triangle of LA-Phoenix-Las Vegas.
Now, some people live in prime survivalist country, like Durango, Colorado, but have probably only about .00000001% of the preparations of those of us living in the 'desert'.
But, all in all, a place like Durango isn't really where you make money, it's one of the places where people go after they make their money. Everyone else that's there relies upon these people in order to live, more often than not at minimum wage or just above.