Sustainability

How Six Illegal Curb Cuts Became Tucson Policy

A Tucson neighbor cut his own curb with a saw in 1998, and Philadelphia already owns the tools to ask the same question on our blocks.

By Harry Hayman 7 min read
How Six Illegal Curb Cuts Became Tucson Policy

I keep coming back to a story out of Tucson that almost nobody in Philadelphia has heard, and it starts with a man named Brad Lancaster standing on his own street in the Dunbar/Spring neighborhood in 1998 with a saw in his hand. He was not waiting on a permit or a public meeting. He cut six openings straight into the curb in front of his house so that rain running off the street would turn and spill into planted basins between the sidewalk and the road instead of rushing on toward a storm drain and out of the neighborhood for good. Cutting a public curb without permission is illegal, plainly, and everyone involved knew it. City officials did not notice for three years, and the only reason they ever found out is that Lancaster eventually told them himself. Years later he told a tour group, as the University of Arizona’s alumni magazine reported, that the early work was “pre-legal”: “We started on Sunday mornings, when no one from the city was watching.” What I cannot stop thinking about is what happened after he told them, because that is the part of this story that actually applies to us.

The Three Years After He Told Them

What followed is the piece I want every reader in Philadelphia city government to sit with for a second. Lancaster did not stop at confession. According to reporting from This Is Tucson, he spent roughly three more years working through the city’s own process, meeting with Tucson’s Transportation Department and arguing that a curb cut built to move water onto a residential block was a different animal than the curb cuts the code had been written to prevent. He won. Today a curb cut in Tucson is not an act of civil disobedience. It is a licensed contractor and a permit that runs about fifty dollars, according to the same reporting and to Lancaster’s own site, Harvesting Rainwater, where he has published the technical detail on curb cores and costs for anyone who wants to copy the work. One stubborn neighbor with a saw turned into an ordinary line on a homeowner’s spring project list. That is what I mean when I say policy sometimes follows the person who breaks the rule for a reason, instead of the other way around.

The story itself is documented well by Upworthy, and by Lancaster’s own biography, and I want to be careful with it, because a story this good gets rounded up as it travels. Rainwater harvesting is not mandatory for every homeowner in Tucson today; the requirement applies to new commercial development. And the tree count depends on who is counting: Lancaster’s biography puts it at more than seventeen hundred, and the University of Arizona’s alumni magazine put it at nearly two thousand in early 2025. Either figure holds up fine on its own.

The Money Tucson Put Behind the Basins

Once the city stopped treating curb cuts as a problem, it started treating them as infrastructure, and the money followed. Tucson Water now offers residents a rebate of up to two thousand dollars for rainwater harvesting, covering both the passive systems like Lancaster’s basins and the active systems built around gutters and cisterns, provided the homeowner takes a class and files a plan, according to Tucson Water’s own program page. In 2008 the city went further and passed what the Resilient West case study describes as the first ordinance of its kind in the country: new commercial development in Tucson has to show a plan that supplies half of the water its outdoor plantings need from harvested rain.

Then came Storm to Shade, approved by Tucson’s Mayor and Council in 2019 and launched in 2021, funded through a dedicated fee on the water bills of Tucson Water customers inside city limits rather than a onetime grant, per the city’s own climate action office. The program builds basins across the city that catch runoff from streets, parking lots, and roofs and route it into planted ground instead of a pipe. I find that funding mechanism almost as interesting as the basins themselves. Tucson did not ask its residents to write a check once. It built the cost of shade into the water bill everyone was already paying, which means the program does not have to win a budget fight every single year to keep going.

A Neighborhood That Grows Food on Rain It Used to Waste

Here is the number that actually stopped me. The Dunbar/Spring Neighborhood Foresters, a volunteer group that has been at this since 1996, have planted and kept alive more than seventeen hundred native food bearing trees along that neighborhood’s streets, according to Lancaster’s biography page: velvet mesquite, whose pods get ground into flour, palo verde, and desert ironwood, all of them desert natives. Together with the basins that feed them, the neighborhood now harvests more than a million gallons of stormwater a year, in a city that gets less than twelve inches of rain annually. Tucson turned a shortage into a forest by redirecting water it was already getting and would otherwise have lost to a storm drain.

I want to sit with that for a second before I turn to Philadelphia, because the instinct in a lot of cities facing scarcity is to import something, a new water source, a new supply contract, a new pipeline. Tucson mostly rerouted what fell from the sky onto its own streets. The tool was a saw, a shovel, and a resident willing to ask forgiveness rather than permission.

Philadelphia’s Opposite Problem

Philadelphia is not short on water. We have the opposite problem, and I think that is exactly why this story is useful to us instead of merely charming. About sixty percent of our city runs on combined sewers, meaning stormwater and sewage share the same pipe, and in a hard rain those pipes overflow, sending billions of gallons of stormwater mixed with diluted sewage into our rivers and creeks every year, according to the Philadelphia Water Department. Where Tucson has too little water reaching the ground, we have too much water reaching the wrong pipe. Same basin, opposite emergency.

We are also not starting from zero on the policy side, and I think this matters more than most Philadelphians realize. Green City, Clean Waters is the Water Department’s twenty five year plan, running from 2011 through 2036, built specifically to keep stormwater out of that combined sewer system using basins, planted swales, and permeable surfaces instead of only concrete and pipe, per the department’s own page. Underneath that citywide plan sits a smaller, more personal program called Rain Check, which gives Philadelphia homeowners a free rain barrel, a hundred dollar downspout planter, or a discounted rain garden built right on their property, according to PWD Rain Check. The tools Tucson had to invent from scratch in 1998, we already have on the books in 2026.

What If Our Basins Grew Food Too

So here is the question I cannot let go of. Tucson’s basins exist because one resident proved the idea worked on his own block before the city ever wrote a rule for it, and the Neighborhood Foresters turned those basins into food, not just decoration. Philadelphia already funds the basin. Rain Check will help a homeowner in South Philly or Kensington put a rain garden or a downspout planter on their own property right now, this year, at a steep discount, and a rain barrel for free. What we have not asked, at least not out loud, is whether that rain garden has to be ornamental. What would it take for a Rain Check basin on a Philadelphia block to hold a paw paw tree, or a serviceberry, or a persimmon, instead of only decorative grasses? I do not know whether anything in the program or the plumbing code stands in the way of that, and I am not going to pretend I have checked every regulation between here and an answer. What I do know is that the financing already exists, the installers already exist, and this city is full of block captains and community gardeners who would plant those trees tomorrow if someone told them it was allowed.

This is the same question I keep circling back to across every part of my work, whether it is a restaurant, a food rescue program, or a stormwater basin: we spend so much energy solving problems in isolation that we miss the moments where one fix pays for two things at once. Tucson’s basins manage water and feed people. There is no reason ours could not do both either, and there is a whole neighborhood forestry group in Arizona that would probably tell us exactly how they did it if we asked.

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