Arizona restricts Phoenix home construction amid water shortage
reuters.comSomething like 70% of water usage in AZ is agricultural [1] Somehow this never gets talked about. Somehow it's always "dumb to live in the desert" but growing water-intense crop... no problemo.
Home builders can buy water rights from farmers. Regulators are requiring water market participants allocate a fixed amount amongst themselves, but as the quote I copied mentions, there isn’t enough water to go around. Hence the need to inhibit unmet water demand new development would incur.
> The Department of Water Resources said developers would need to find other sources to build.
> Those sources could include officially designated entities that have excess water to sell, or farmers or Native American tribes with water rights, but all are facing short supplies given overuse and a historic drought this century.
As they should - whoever thought it was a great idea to put a massive sprawling city in the middle of the fucking desert (with a single small river with which to draw any sort of water) was out of their mind.
Don't get me wrong - I lived in Southern AZ during my undergrad years (Go Cats!) and loved it. It's a nice place....in the winter. But the summers there are BRUTAL beyond belief, and in times of climate change and things getting hotter, there's no reason to continue to build and bring in new residents - it's just not a good idea.
Where is the right place to build? Drought seems no more problematic than the wildfires, flooding, etc other areas have to deal with. In fact it's something we can probably engineer our way out of (by conserving more and building dams and so forth) whereas hurricanes are totally unavoidable if you build in Florida or Houston.
Also it obviously wasn't one person who decided to build a massive city. Lots of people are moving there because they like whatever trade offs the area offers.
The water issue can be permanently solved with a desalination plant and a canal to the Sea of Cortez, similar projects have been done all over the Middle East. I think AZ actually has really bright prospects both figuratively and literally.
The right place to build is where there's plenty of resources one needs to sustain life at any scale. Water being one of those resources.
So, in the US, most places east of the Mississippi and north of the hurricane alley. Funny how that is the most densely populated corridor.
So, nowhere. There are no longer plentiful resources anywhere. We have entered an age of scarcity. Increasing constrictions seem to be inevitable, which people cannot grasp having seen unmitigated expansion for countless decades.
Some of that scarcity is artificially induced, but that does not change the fact that land, water, and other resources are becoming exponentially more expensive to obtain.
Dubai is one of the most successful cities in the world. Money and technology can solve a lot of problems.
Being on the water can help too. Dubai might be in a desert, but a desert with direct sea (and ocean) access. Arizona, PHX in particular, has no such resource.
Arizona resident here...
We have a canal that goes to the Colorado river, and Phoenix is in an active management area (AMA) water district. The state is actively working to be at a point where the canal isn't necessary to supply our water needs, and any excess capacity gets "banked" into aquifers or water reservoirs. People love to shit all over Phoenix for being in the middle of a desert with no rivers, but there are some extremely well managed and healthy aquifers out here (and ones where it's the Wild West, which is what you hear about on the news, like in Rio Verde).
In fact, the water management here is probably one of the most forward thinking and strategic in the entire country.
Our aquifers in Phoenix have been RISING since we enacted more stringent measures in the 1980s. Read that again, because it surprises people, but we have more water in most of the Phoenix metro water wells than we did 40 years ago.
Last I heard, we were planning on being entirely water neutral for our water aquifers in Phoenix, Prescott and Tucson by 2025. That means like 80-90% of the states population will be located near water sources that are sustainable and well managed.
My hometown (Paarl - Western Cape) is in the middle of the valley surrounded by granite mountains which seems like heat radiators at night - great for growing tobacco, fruit and grapes for wine but unbearable during summers (45C).
Why? How is this such a Tragedy of the Commons situation warranting risking others experiencing homelessness? Climate change will still happen, except now housing prices will soar through the roof just like in San Francisco.