The future of desert (sub)urbanism is barren. Water dwindles yet the party continues as developers build and new homebuyers try to import Midwestern and coastal lifestyles to the desert. I foresee...
The future of desert (sub)urbanism is barren. Water dwindles yet the party continues as developers build and new homebuyers try to import Midwestern and coastal lifestyles to the desert.
I foresee that in the immediate future, governments will intervene to prop things up as they were by importing water and so on. But eventually things will collapse when the lakes dry.
It seems some people will eventually lose their life savings as their homes become worthless. Though cruel, it may be long overdue for humans to touch nature's hot stovetop and learn to live sustainably.
I think this is reading too much into one local community's inability to secure its water supply due to bad politics? It's still the case the agricultural water use is much higher than...
I think this is reading too much into one local community's inability to secure its water supply due to bad politics? It's still the case the agricultural water use is much higher than residential. Reducing agricultural use by 20% in the US West would probably fix things. And residential can pay more.
It's going to be messy, but I expect cities and suburbs will win, and import more of their food from places that are further way but have more water.
Part of the question of sustainability is: How do we reconcile economic justice for people whom choose to stay an areas that cost exponentially more resources than others? In the 'most fair'...
Part of the question of sustainability is:
How do we reconcile economic justice for people whom choose to stay an areas that cost exponentially more resources than others?
In the 'most fair' system, these people would be perpetually poor due to the increased energy demands from others.
Home insurance for multi-million dollar beach rental properties need to reflect the more frequent rebuilds, but even then, that neglects the material costs of rebuilding large quantities of structures every few years.
In an increasingly destabilized climate, seasonal migration might become a neccesity again.
That's a bit vague. Are we still talking about water? I think water infrastructure is best funded by a progressive system where larger or richer water users get charged more. Too often, expensive...
That's a bit vague. Are we still talking about water? I think water infrastructure is best funded by a progressive system where larger or richer water users get charged more.
Too often, expensive water infrastructure improvements are opposed with an economic justice excuse, and the way to fix that is it make it so the poor aren't funding it.
The whole point is to broaden the discussion. Water is a factor, but so is electicity, maintainence, and raw materials usage. If the water-rich areas need to supply the desert with water, you're...
The whole point is to broaden the discussion. Water is a factor, but so is electicity, maintainence, and raw materials usage.
If the water-rich areas need to supply the desert with water, you're burdening that area with the demand anyway, and having to build a load of infrastructure to move it further away.
Large systems require more power to run, people to maintain. How much effort should we, as a society, spend on trying to keep communities alive in increasingly hostile terrain? Would those resources better be spent aiding in relocation?
America has a severe infrastructure problem in part because long term maintainence of sprawling roads and bridges was perpetually ignored.
At a certain threshold, the answer becomes: Yes, relocate the desert dwellers to more habitable zones. To make it somewhat hyperbolic with a historical example..If a group of 1,000 stubborn people demand to live on top of a coal fire....do we spend every resource available to let them continue living there in comfort, or do we offer to pay to relocate them, and abandon the people who refuse?
This analysis is suffering from too much abstraction. What are "water-rich areas?" Since we're talking about Arizona, we should look at where Arizona water comes from. Essentially all water that...
This analysis is suffering from too much abstraction. What are "water-rich areas?" Since we're talking about Arizona, we should look at where Arizona water comes from. Essentially all water that comes from out of state (36% of the total) is from the Colorado river.
Colorado river water comes from rainfall over a large watershed, much of it snowmelt in mountains. Mountainous areas are actually more expensive to live in, because they're not flat and have worse weather - large amounts of snow in the winter.
Moving a lot of people from the desert to the mountains (in western Colorado, for example) isn't likely to help. It's more efficient to use gravity to move the water, and much of that movement happens naturally. (But there are enormous pumps for the uphill parts.)
As far as water goes, there isn't any connection to other water-rich areas. They aren't going to supply Arizona with water. They can supply food, though.
It's true that when there's not enough water to go around, something has to give. But it should be easier to pay off some farmers. A lot fewer people are affected that way.
Reducing ag use creates other problems, both environmentally and economically. Increasing shipping distance increases the logistical burden and also pushes on food quality, as produce is optimized...
Reducing ag use creates other problems, both environmentally and economically. Increasing shipping distance increases the logistical burden and also pushes on food quality, as produce is optimized for transport over nutrition. It also raises prices.
Better production practices will go some way. But houses have to learn to be much less wasteful as well. Cities “wins” will be short lived without region wide, comprehensive strategies.
Side note, i heard along the way that ‘Memphis(?) cut off some suburbs because(?) it cost a lot more to supply the suburbs but they weren’t allowed to charge differential prices.
Not an expert, but I think agricultural water use could be cut back significantly without affecting anything essential, if there were a way to make US water prices more sane. There is very...
Not an expert, but I think agricultural water use could be cut back significantly without affecting anything essential, if there were a way to make US water prices more sane. There is very inefficient agricultural use of water that happens because water is too cheap for some large-scale water users. Almonds don't need to be grown in the desert.
Food gets shipped all over the world anyway. Rail and ship transport are pretty cheap relative to food prices. Food grown in the desert often isn't getting consumed nearby.
Agreed that western water rights regimes are in dire need of rational reform. Fair point about food shipping, although i disagree about the price proportion of shipping v production, especially as...
Agreed that western water rights regimes are in dire need of rational reform.
Fair point about food shipping, although i disagree about the price proportion of shipping v production, especially as it changes moving forward.
My unexpressed assumption is that any comprehensive reforms will have to include a reduction in the shipping distance from farm to table for many products, especially fresh produce. This will likely require a demand side shift away from a desire for uniform products across all regions and seasons.
Possibly true, but centralization has its advantages too and the distance tradeoff needs to be made by representing costs as numbers. With carbon pricing, transport costs would be more realistic....
Possibly true, but centralization has its advantages too and the distance tradeoff needs to be made by representing costs as numbers. With carbon pricing, transport costs would be more realistic. My guess is that in dry regions, it's still going to be cheaper to ship food in than the water needed to grow it.
A bit off-topic: Almonds are a bit of a paradox, because they require both ample water and a dry climate. California’s Central Valley nominally provides both. In any case, almonds are a high value...
A bit off-topic: Almonds are a bit of a paradox, because they require both ample water and a dry climate. California’s Central Valley nominally provides both. In any case, almonds are a high value crop, and it is better to grow them versus other water intensive crops like alfalfa, which is only used for cattle feed.
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of having a predictable increase in future water prices so that some large water users decide the economics don’t work for them anymore and go into some other business....
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of having a predictable increase in future water prices so that some large water users decide the economics don’t work for them anymore and go into some other business. (Or alternatively figure out how to get by with less.) Maybe it’s not the examples that come to mind?
Not from USA but aren't there borewells in those areas? Borewell water is almost a new found water source these days, especially in places like Bangalore and Mumbai here in India where water is a...
Not from USA but aren't there borewells in those areas? Borewell water is almost a new found water source these days, especially in places like Bangalore and Mumbai here in India where water is a scarce resource. Considering the population size, we should have come up with many more smart cities by now instead of depending on these old metros. But people somehow don't seem to care about sustainability at all.
Many do have wells, which are common in rural areas in the US. (The house I grew up in gets water from a well.) I don't know if "borewell" means something different in India? According to the...
Many do have wells, which are common in rural areas in the US. (The house I grew up in gets water from a well.) I don't know if "borewell" means something different in India? According to the article:
About a quarter of the homes in Rio Verde Foothills, a checkerboard of one-acre lots linked by dirt roads in an unincorporated part of Maricopa County, rely on water from a municipal pipe hauled by trucks. Since the cutoff, their water prices have nearly tripled. The others have wells, though many of these have gone dry as the water table has fallen by hundreds of feet in some places after years of drought.
Relying on trucked-in water seems unusual to me, due to the expense. I wouldn't expect this to happen as much as it does in that neighborhood. But drilling a well can be expensive too.
A dropping water table is a big problem for people with wells in California too. Especially if it drops below sea level near the coast, so salt water comes in.
It's the same thing, ground water essentially. Just terminology differs from urban to rural! Even in some parts of rural India, we still have those old school "wells" where they insert a rope tied...
It's the same thing, ground water essentially. Just terminology differs from urban to rural!
Even in some parts of rural India, we still have those old school "wells" where they insert a rope tied to bucket and try to pull water from that. In urban areas like Bangalore, big apartment complexes also dig the wells and plumb it to a centralized tank, these are called "bore wells".
The water is mostly salty but in rare cases, there are sweet water wells too. It depends on what kinds of minerals are deposited there. I'm not a geology expert but I've heard that "law of inversion" applies here so that wells which are in close vicinity to seas and oceans are sweet whereas the ones closer to rivers are salty. Though it makes rational sense that opposite be the case, this is apparently some weird geological phenomenon!
Yep, there has been a super proliferation of "RO Water Filters" in last few years across India as the salty waters from bore wells started becoming a concern. But now, the trend seems to be...
Yep, there has been a super proliferation of "RO Water Filters" in last few years across India as the salty waters from bore wells started becoming a concern. But now, the trend seems to be reversing and people have started worrying about "low TDS water" as these RO filters are making the water so pure that they're worried even essential minerals and nutrients may be ruined out of them (facepalm!)
Interesting. Does all water from the well go through one reverse osmosis filter, or is it just used for drinking water? How salty is this water, typically?
Interesting. Does all water from the well go through one reverse osmosis filter, or is it just used for drinking water? How salty is this water, typically?
Not the original user but usually we just run drinking water through RO filters / "aquaguards". It's common to find something like what's sold here on many Indian kitchen walls. When I go home, I...
Not the original user but usually we just run drinking water through RO filters / "aquaguards". It's common to find something like what's sold here on many Indian kitchen walls. When I go home, I need to remember not to drink straight from the tap. I should also note that we didn't use borewells, our city supplied water which also went through some processing on their end. So we didn't use a full blown RO filter. That said, others in the city did have borewells if it was a neighbourhood the city didn't support and so on.
From the article: [...] [...] [...] Seems like a lot but 300 gallons per day is apparently typical in the US? In California the average is apparently around 80 gallons per day, and it varies...
From the article:
On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades.
[...]
About a quarter of the homes in Rio Verde Foothills, a checkerboard of one-acre lots linked by dirt roads in an unincorporated part of Maricopa County, rely on water from a municipal pipe hauled by trucks. Since the cutoff, their water prices have nearly tripled. The others have wells, though many of these have gone dry as the water table has fallen by hundreds of feet in some places after years of drought.
[...]
With growing urgency, Rio Verde Foothills residents have pursued two main alternatives to find a new source of water, although bitter disagreements over the best solution have divided the community and pitted neighbors against each other.
For the past several years, some residents have sought to form their own water district that would allow the community to buy water from elsewhere in the state and import what they need, more than 100 acre-feet of water per year. Another group prefers enlisting a Canadian private utility company, Epcor, to supply the community, as it does with neighboring areas. But political disputes have so far foiled both approaches.
The water district plan — which supporters say would give them long-term access to a reliable source of water — was rejected in August by the Maricopa County supervisors. The supervisor for the area, Thomas Galvin, said he opposed adding a new layer of government to a community that prizes its freedom, particularly one run by neighbors with the authority to condemn property to build infrastructure.
[...]
Cody Reim, who works for a company that installs metal roofing, normally pays $380 a month for the roughly 10,000 gallons per month he consumes along with his wife and four young children. If his family continues to use water at the same pace, the new prices will put his next bill at $1,340 per month, he said, almost as much as his mortgage payment.
Seems like a lot but 300 gallons per day is apparently typical in the US? In California the average is apparently around 80 gallons per day, and it varies widely by region. Counties in the SF bay area are lower than that.
A ten min shower at 3 gpm x family of six is 180 gallons. Assuming you don’t let the yellow mellow, that’s another 1.6x6x3 (flushes per person) is about 30, so that’s over 200 gallons per day. Add...
A ten min shower at 3 gpm x family of six is 180 gallons. Assuming you don’t let the yellow mellow, that’s another 1.6x6x3 (flushes per person) is about 30, so that’s over 200 gallons per day. Add in cooking, cleaning, drinking, you’re pushing 300 easy I reckon.
Yeah, that reads about right. Looked at the past year of water bills for us and we are averaging 3400 gallons per month for two people and some pets. 57 gallons per person per day multiplied by 6...
Yeah, that reads about right. Looked at the past year of water bills for us and we are averaging 3400 gallons per month for two people and some pets. 57 gallons per person per day multiplied by 6 is 342 gallons.
That said, searching around for the 80 gallon number in California says that number is a per person amount, not per household.
I moved from AZ to MI a decade ago. No regrets. People trying to live in a desert using the same lifestyle expectations as they had in other states is a testament to the hubris of man.
I moved from AZ to MI a decade ago. No regrets. People trying to live in a desert using the same lifestyle expectations as they had in other states is a testament to the hubris of man.
An interesting bit about how they got into this situation: Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off (The New York Times) (archive)
An interesting bit about how they got into this situation:
To prevent unsustainable development in a desert state, Arizona passed a law in 1980 requiring subdivisions with six or more lots to show proof that they have a 100-year water supply.
But developers in Rio Verde Foothills have been sidestepping the rule by carving larger parcels into sections with four or five houses each, creating the impression of a miniature suburbia, but one that did not need to legally prove it had water.
The future of desert (sub)urbanism is barren. Water dwindles yet the party continues as developers build and new homebuyers try to import Midwestern and coastal lifestyles to the desert.
I foresee that in the immediate future, governments will intervene to prop things up as they were by importing water and so on. But eventually things will collapse when the lakes dry.
It seems some people will eventually lose their life savings as their homes become worthless. Though cruel, it may be long overdue for humans to touch nature's hot stovetop and learn to live sustainably.
I think this is reading too much into one local community's inability to secure its water supply due to bad politics? It's still the case the agricultural water use is much higher than residential. Reducing agricultural use by 20% in the US West would probably fix things. And residential can pay more.
It's going to be messy, but I expect cities and suburbs will win, and import more of their food from places that are further way but have more water.
Part of the question of sustainability is:
How do we reconcile economic justice for people whom choose to stay an areas that cost exponentially more resources than others?
In the 'most fair' system, these people would be perpetually poor due to the increased energy demands from others.
Home insurance for multi-million dollar beach rental properties need to reflect the more frequent rebuilds, but even then, that neglects the material costs of rebuilding large quantities of structures every few years.
In an increasingly destabilized climate, seasonal migration might become a neccesity again.
That's a bit vague. Are we still talking about water? I think water infrastructure is best funded by a progressive system where larger or richer water users get charged more.
Too often, expensive water infrastructure improvements are opposed with an economic justice excuse, and the way to fix that is it make it so the poor aren't funding it.
The whole point is to broaden the discussion. Water is a factor, but so is electicity, maintainence, and raw materials usage.
If the water-rich areas need to supply the desert with water, you're burdening that area with the demand anyway, and having to build a load of infrastructure to move it further away.
Large systems require more power to run, people to maintain. How much effort should we, as a society, spend on trying to keep communities alive in increasingly hostile terrain? Would those resources better be spent aiding in relocation?
America has a severe infrastructure problem in part because long term maintainence of sprawling roads and bridges was perpetually ignored.
At a certain threshold, the answer becomes: Yes, relocate the desert dwellers to more habitable zones. To make it somewhat hyperbolic with a historical example..If a group of 1,000 stubborn people demand to live on top of a coal fire....do we spend every resource available to let them continue living there in comfort, or do we offer to pay to relocate them, and abandon the people who refuse?
This analysis is suffering from too much abstraction. What are "water-rich areas?" Since we're talking about Arizona, we should look at where Arizona water comes from. Essentially all water that comes from out of state (36% of the total) is from the Colorado river.
Colorado river water comes from rainfall over a large watershed, much of it snowmelt in mountains. Mountainous areas are actually more expensive to live in, because they're not flat and have worse weather - large amounts of snow in the winter.
Moving a lot of people from the desert to the mountains (in western Colorado, for example) isn't likely to help. It's more efficient to use gravity to move the water, and much of that movement happens naturally. (But there are enormous pumps for the uphill parts.)
As far as water goes, there isn't any connection to other water-rich areas. They aren't going to supply Arizona with water. They can supply food, though.
It's true that when there's not enough water to go around, something has to give. But it should be easier to pay off some farmers. A lot fewer people are affected that way.
Reducing ag use creates other problems, both environmentally and economically. Increasing shipping distance increases the logistical burden and also pushes on food quality, as produce is optimized for transport over nutrition. It also raises prices.
Better production practices will go some way. But houses have to learn to be much less wasteful as well. Cities “wins” will be short lived without region wide, comprehensive strategies.
Side note, i heard along the way that ‘Memphis(?) cut off some suburbs because(?) it cost a lot more to supply the suburbs but they weren’t allowed to charge differential prices.
Not an expert, but I think agricultural water use could be cut back significantly without affecting anything essential, if there were a way to make US water prices more sane. There is very inefficient agricultural use of water that happens because water is too cheap for some large-scale water users. Almonds don't need to be grown in the desert.
Food gets shipped all over the world anyway. Rail and ship transport are pretty cheap relative to food prices. Food grown in the desert often isn't getting consumed nearby.
Agreed that western water rights regimes are in dire need of rational reform.
Fair point about food shipping, although i disagree about the price proportion of shipping v production, especially as it changes moving forward.
My unexpressed assumption is that any comprehensive reforms will have to include a reduction in the shipping distance from farm to table for many products, especially fresh produce. This will likely require a demand side shift away from a desire for uniform products across all regions and seasons.
Possibly true, but centralization has its advantages too and the distance tradeoff needs to be made by representing costs as numbers. With carbon pricing, transport costs would be more realistic. My guess is that in dry regions, it's still going to be cheaper to ship food in than the water needed to grow it.
A bit off-topic: Almonds are a bit of a paradox, because they require both ample water and a dry climate. California’s Central Valley nominally provides both. In any case, almonds are a high value crop, and it is better to grow them versus other water intensive crops like alfalfa, which is only used for cattle feed.
Yeah, I think it’s a matter of having a predictable increase in future water prices so that some large water users decide the economics don’t work for them anymore and go into some other business. (Or alternatively figure out how to get by with less.) Maybe it’s not the examples that come to mind?
Not from USA but aren't there borewells in those areas? Borewell water is almost a new found water source these days, especially in places like Bangalore and Mumbai here in India where water is a scarce resource. Considering the population size, we should have come up with many more smart cities by now instead of depending on these old metros. But people somehow don't seem to care about sustainability at all.
Many do have wells, which are common in rural areas in the US. (The house I grew up in gets water from a well.) I don't know if "borewell" means something different in India? According to the article:
Relying on trucked-in water seems unusual to me, due to the expense. I wouldn't expect this to happen as much as it does in that neighborhood. But drilling a well can be expensive too.
A dropping water table is a big problem for people with wells in California too. Especially if it drops below sea level near the coast, so salt water comes in.
It's the same thing, ground water essentially. Just terminology differs from urban to rural!
Even in some parts of rural India, we still have those old school "wells" where they insert a rope tied to bucket and try to pull water from that. In urban areas like Bangalore, big apartment complexes also dig the wells and plumb it to a centralized tank, these are called "bore wells".
The water is mostly salty but in rare cases, there are sweet water wells too. It depends on what kinds of minerals are deposited there. I'm not a geology expert but I've heard that "law of inversion" applies here so that wells which are in close vicinity to seas and oceans are sweet whereas the ones closer to rivers are salty. Though it makes rational sense that opposite be the case, this is apparently some weird geological phenomenon!
That does sound weird. What do they do about salt water? Some kind of desalination?
Yep, there has been a super proliferation of "RO Water Filters" in last few years across India as the salty waters from bore wells started becoming a concern. But now, the trend seems to be reversing and people have started worrying about "low TDS water" as these RO filters are making the water so pure that they're worried even essential minerals and nutrients may be ruined out of them (facepalm!)
Interesting. Does all water from the well go through one reverse osmosis filter, or is it just used for drinking water? How salty is this water, typically?
Not the original user but usually we just run drinking water through RO filters / "aquaguards". It's common to find something like what's sold here on many Indian kitchen walls. When I go home, I need to remember not to drink straight from the tap. I should also note that we didn't use borewells, our city supplied water which also went through some processing on their end. So we didn't use a full blown RO filter. That said, others in the city did have borewells if it was a neighbourhood the city didn't support and so on.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
Seems like a lot but 300 gallons per day is apparently typical in the US? In California the average is apparently around 80 gallons per day, and it varies widely by region. Counties in the SF bay area are lower than that.
A ten min shower at 3 gpm x family of six is 180 gallons. Assuming you don’t let the yellow mellow, that’s another 1.6x6x3 (flushes per person) is about 30, so that’s over 200 gallons per day. Add in cooking, cleaning, drinking, you’re pushing 300 easy I reckon.
Yeah, that reads about right. Looked at the past year of water bills for us and we are averaging 3400 gallons per month for two people and some pets. 57 gallons per person per day multiplied by 6 is 342 gallons.
That said, searching around for the 80 gallon number in California says that number is a per person amount, not per household.
Good catch! Yeah, per person makes more sense.
Looks like San Francisco is about half the state average at 42 gallons per person.
I moved from AZ to MI a decade ago. No regrets. People trying to live in a desert using the same lifestyle expectations as they had in other states is a testament to the hubris of man.
Currently seeing about getting the hell out of here. Congrats to you
An interesting bit about how they got into this situation:
Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off (The New York Times) (archive)