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This is what worries me the most about my home region. The surface water is turning to be unreliable, the groundwater is being siphoned out at an alarming rate

This is what worries me the most about my home region. The surface water is turning to be unreliable, the groundwater is being siphoned out at an alarming rate, yet we still continue to add more and more pressure to the system. Not just farming and agriculture, either. People are moving to Phoenix and Santa Fe and Dallas and Houston at amazing rates, but the water systems can't keep up. In the Dallas suburbs, one public water system owns exactly one lake and has partial rights to three others but all of those lakes drop to alarming levels almost every summer. Yet, the cities inside that water district keep adding more and more houses and commercial buildings and water connections because nobody wants to say "we might not have enough water for those who are already here." I don't even know if a city government could say that. But here we are. More people moving into dry areas expecting to be able to drink, wash, and clean, but with less water every day with which to do it.

gascan 8y ago
Cheap water seems to give the idea it will always be cheap & plentiful. And rules preventing market pricing will perpetuate that notion right up until the day your faucet dries up. Increasing tap fees are the closest thing to a market driver- although they have not stopped development, they have been rising. I think they are around $30k in my area.
- niftich 8y ago
  Factors like water supply make me think that the Sunbelt migration, whose targets, especially the southwest, were are among the most water-poor areas, is a trend that won't last beyond another 40 years. As these areas become built out, they will begin to experience factors that make them less appealing: rising property values, rising utility prices, and demographic pressures from natural deaths among the elderly and low incomes among new arrivals. Areas that are unremarkable now because they've gone through a deindustrialization transition (upstate NY, northeast Ohio) will cycle back as sites of opportunity, and non-southern metros that have heretofore been able to maintain a liveable compromise between affordability and demand (represented by Chicago, but also Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) will face an influx of out-migrants from the declining fortunes of the southwest. Southeast metros that are targets of opportunity now (Atlanta, Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando) will have cycled further along the affordability transition, so they won't draw nearly as much residents during the southwest's decline as they do now.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > rising property values If property values are rising, then manifestly it is becoming more appealing to live there, not less.
    - niftich 8y ago
      If property values are rising, it becomes more difficult to move there. People who do move are either wealthier (because they are increasingly the only ones who can afford it), or poorer (because a higher amount of their income is going towards rent). This is how the middle hollows out.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      It depends on why they are rising. If it’s just speculation, maybe not. If property values are rising because of inequalities in the tech industry, appealing depends on if you are in or out of that.
  - gascan 8y ago
    Yeah, the Sunbelt migration could be sustainable if people were moving there to live in the heat and xeriscape their yards, but apparently people want to move to Phoenix and live at 72 degrees with lush green everywhere. Aside from the limited water, there's the total dependence on air conditioning running headlong into the urban heat island and a warming climate.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      I get that air conditioning is expensive in a place like Phoenix, but isn't heating similarly expensive in the Great Lakes and northeast?
      - eropple 8y ago
        The answer, as with many things, is "it depends." All other things being equal, air conditioning is a little cooler on a degree-by-degree basis than some forms of heating...but it never is that simple. Heat pumps have a higher cost to entry but lower operating costs, air conditioners have a lower cost of entry but nontrivially higher operating costs. A common pattern is to use heat pumps, ducted or no, for high-efficiency cooling and heating, with a backup solution like a gas furnace for heating below the point where a heat pump can function.
cozzyd 8y ago
Houston and Dallas are not really in arid regions, so water problems there are probably more political than anything else. Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do.
- chomp 8y ago
  Yes, we're technically subtropical in Houston and get a decent amount of rain, but that hasn't stopped subsidence: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-years-the-Houston-area-has-been-losing-ground-7951625.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/... Here's an interactive site from Texas' state water plan that has a really really great breakdown: https://2017.texasstatewaterplan.org/statewide https://2017.texasstatewaterplan.org/statewide Texas has virtually no natural lakes, we have to construct anything we want to drink from (or pump it from the ground). Actual billions of dollars are being poured into these drinking supplies, and I can't even count how many times election season includes a "water projects" ballot measure. We're very fortunate to live on the coast of a very warm body of water. I foresee more water projects to capture the moisture from the gulf here, but yeah I have no clue what the dry states are going to do.
- batbomb 8y ago
  Phoenix (+ Scottsdale) and Las Vegas are in a league of their own even compared to Santa Fe + Albuquerque/Northern New Mexico, water use, and water availability.
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do. Just price water like any other market good. It will wipe out farming in deserts (this happens a lot in California as well) and there will be plenty of water for residents. The increased revenue per cu/acre will allow more reservoir projects, water canals, and even desalination. I'm always shocked at arm-chair commentary on these threads that assumes people in the Southwest don't have the forethought to consider their water sources. The Central AZ Project hasn't even been built out fully partially because of lack of water demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project
ethagknight 8y ago
For those who are truly concerned about water rights and extended droughts, I think the simple solution to that person is simply "dont live in an area with very limited water resources." In the next decade, there will probably be a multi-year regional drought that hits a US city (not a countdown to running out drought, but an actual "no water in the domestic pipes" drought), and it will properly force states and the fed to come to grips with reality. Lenders and fire insurance will be the first to obligate some level of water supply chain assurance. But not until they get burned badly first.
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  I have a strong feeling that new pipelines aren't going to be caring oil, they will be caring water. We should be building as many desalination plants along the coast as we can right now. When we need them it will already be too late.
  - wahern 8y ago
    People don't need much water to drink or bathe. Agriculture and industry are the largest consumers of water by a large margin. Shipping water is very inefficient and uneconomical as compared to shipping the products of water--food, industrial products, etc.
- sehugg 8y ago
  This is close to happening in Cape Town: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-drought/cape-town-day-zero-pushed-back-to-2019-as-dams-fill-up-in-south-africa-idUSKCN1HA1LN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-drought/cape-town...
  - anothergoogler 8y ago
    Thankfully, Cape Town's had a very rainy May.
- sbov 8y ago
  I'm curious, how do you define "area"? How long does water have to travel before its no longer in the "area"? How do you classify rivers? Water falls one place, and rivers direct it elsewhere, sometimes hundreds of miles away from where it first fell. Presumably these nearby rivers are still in area, even though the water flowing in them did not originate in area. For example, SF gets its water from a reservoir in the Sierras, 150 miles away. Much of California gets its water from just a couple places: the Colorado river (which runs along the border) and Northern California (and much of "Northern California" gets its water from More-Northern California). Some people who live in the southwestern deserts live closer to their water source than people in SF.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Understand that agriculture water use and people water use are not comparable. There is typically 10x to 20x water use per acre of farm as there is for one person, Penn state ran some numbers for their region [1], it is even worse in California where people are literally farming in land that is essentially desert. The bottom line is that if people and communities are replacing farmland then there is a net increase in the availability of water by a large margin. Something to keep in mind when looking at water availability. [1] https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-water-needs https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-w...
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  That's not the only competition for water. In Texas somewhere between 10-50% (depends upon location) of fresh water is used for fracking, not to be used again for human consumption for generations, if ever. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-as-fracking-expands/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-a... IIRC it's even encroaching upon Dallas' suburbs.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    10-50% is nuts, especially for technology we ideally should want to get rid of and replace with cleaner energy.
    - ianai 8y ago
      To say nothing of all of the other negative external costs of fracking. I wish one of the carbon cost agreements had gone through.
      - zubiaur 8y ago
        The fracking I’m familiar with tries to reuse the fracking fluids as much as possible. Still some oil and gas activities do consume large quantities of water: pressure maintenance injection and Steam assisted gravity drain, the last one is used a lot in the Canadian tar sands.
justherefortart 8y ago
Instead of oil pipelines just build more water pipelines. That's what we do here in Oklahoma. SE part of the state is wet, we run water back to the west side.
empath75 8y ago
The Great Thirst, Wired (2002) https://www.wired.com/2002/09/thirst/ https://www.wired.com/2002/09/thirst/
fusiongyro 8y ago
Albuquerque has been very worried about this for many years, check out their Water 2120 plan for more information: https://www.abcwua.org/uploads/files/Water%202120%20Approved%20Policy%20Document.pdf https://www.abcwua.org/uploads/files/Water%202120%20Approved... Is it enough? Probably not, but Albuquerque hosts more than half the population of the state, so if only they get their act together it'll still cover most of us. I think it's likely that well water will be mostly sufficient for most of the rural communities for a long time. I would hope that Las Cruces develops a similar plan, but Santa Fe's population is not that high and the cost of living there helps keep it down.

gascan 8y ago

Cheap water seems to give the idea it will always be cheap & plentiful. And rules preventing market pricing will perpetuate that notion right up until the day your faucet dries up. Increasing tap fees are the closest thing to a market driver- although they have not stopped development, they have been rising. I think they are around $30k in my area.

niftich 8y ago
Factors like water supply make me think that the Sunbelt migration, whose targets, especially the southwest, were are among the most water-poor areas, is a trend that won't last beyond another 40 years. As these areas become built out, they will begin to experience factors that make them less appealing: rising property values, rising utility prices, and demographic pressures from natural deaths among the elderly and low incomes among new arrivals. Areas that are unremarkable now because they've gone through a deindustrialization transition (upstate NY, northeast Ohio) will cycle back as sites of opportunity, and non-southern metros that have heretofore been able to maintain a liveable compromise between affordability and demand (represented by Chicago, but also Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis) will face an influx of out-migrants from the declining fortunes of the southwest. Southeast metros that are targets of opportunity now (Atlanta, Dallas, Raleigh, Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando) will have cycled further along the affordability transition, so they won't draw nearly as much residents during the southwest's decline as they do now.
- lisper 8y ago
  > rising property values If property values are rising, then manifestly it is becoming more appealing to live there, not less.
  - niftich 8y ago
    If property values are rising, it becomes more difficult to move there. People who do move are either wealthier (because they are increasingly the only ones who can afford it), or poorer (because a higher amount of their income is going towards rent). This is how the middle hollows out.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    It depends on why they are rising. If it’s just speculation, maybe not. If property values are rising because of inequalities in the tech industry, appealing depends on if you are in or out of that.
- gascan 8y ago
  Yeah, the Sunbelt migration could be sustainable if people were moving there to live in the heat and xeriscape their yards, but apparently people want to move to Phoenix and live at 72 degrees with lush green everywhere. Aside from the limited water, there's the total dependence on air conditioning running headlong into the urban heat island and a warming climate.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    I get that air conditioning is expensive in a place like Phoenix, but isn't heating similarly expensive in the Great Lakes and northeast?
    - eropple 8y ago
      The answer, as with many things, is "it depends." All other things being equal, air conditioning is a little cooler on a degree-by-degree basis than some forms of heating...but it never is that simple. Heat pumps have a higher cost to entry but lower operating costs, air conditioners have a lower cost of entry but nontrivially higher operating costs. A common pattern is to use heat pumps, ducted or no, for high-efficiency cooling and heating, with a backup solution like a gas furnace for heating below the point where a heat pump can function.

cozzyd 8y ago

Houston and Dallas are not really in arid regions, so water problems there are probably more political than anything else. Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do.

chomp 8y ago
Yes, we're technically subtropical in Houston and get a decent amount of rain, but that hasn't stopped subsidence: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/For-years-the-Houston-area-has-been-losing-ground-7951625.php https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/... Here's an interactive site from Texas' state water plan that has a really really great breakdown: https://2017.texasstatewaterplan.org/statewide https://2017.texasstatewaterplan.org/statewide Texas has virtually no natural lakes, we have to construct anything we want to drink from (or pump it from the ground). Actual billions of dollars are being poured into these drinking supplies, and I can't even count how many times election season includes a "water projects" ballot measure. We're very fortunate to live on the coast of a very warm body of water. I foresee more water projects to capture the moisture from the gulf here, but yeah I have no clue what the dry states are going to do.
batbomb 8y ago
Phoenix (+ Scottsdale) and Las Vegas are in a league of their own even compared to Santa Fe + Albuquerque/Northern New Mexico, water use, and water availability.
pathseeker 8y ago
>Sante Fe and Phoenix on the other hand.... I don't know what they'll do. Just price water like any other market good. It will wipe out farming in deserts (this happens a lot in California as well) and there will be plenty of water for residents. The increased revenue per cu/acre will allow more reservoir projects, water canals, and even desalination. I'm always shocked at arm-chair commentary on these threads that assumes people in the Southwest don't have the forethought to consider their water sources. The Central AZ Project hasn't even been built out fully partially because of lack of water demand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Arizona_Project

ethagknight 8y ago

For those who are truly concerned about water rights and extended droughts, I think the simple solution to that person is simply "dont live in an area with very limited water resources." In the next decade, there will probably be a multi-year regional drought that hits a US city (not a countdown to running out drought, but an actual "no water in the domestic pipes" drought), and it will properly force states and the fed to come to grips with reality. Lenders and fire insurance will be the first to obligate some level of water supply chain assurance. But not until they get burned badly first.

bhhaskin 8y ago
I have a strong feeling that new pipelines aren't going to be caring oil, they will be caring water. We should be building as many desalination plants along the coast as we can right now. When we need them it will already be too late.
- wahern 8y ago
  People don't need much water to drink or bathe. Agriculture and industry are the largest consumers of water by a large margin. Shipping water is very inefficient and uneconomical as compared to shipping the products of water--food, industrial products, etc.
sehugg 8y ago
This is close to happening in Cape Town: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-drought/cape-town-day-zero-pushed-back-to-2019-as-dams-fill-up-in-south-africa-idUSKCN1HA1LN https://www.reuters.com/article/us-safrica-drought/cape-town...
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  Thankfully, Cape Town's had a very rainy May.
sbov 8y ago
I'm curious, how do you define "area"? How long does water have to travel before its no longer in the "area"? How do you classify rivers? Water falls one place, and rivers direct it elsewhere, sometimes hundreds of miles away from where it first fell. Presumably these nearby rivers are still in area, even though the water flowing in them did not originate in area. For example, SF gets its water from a reservoir in the Sierras, 150 miles away. Much of California gets its water from just a couple places: the Colorado river (which runs along the border) and Northern California (and much of "Northern California" gets its water from More-Northern California). Some people who live in the southwestern deserts live closer to their water source than people in SF.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Understand that agriculture water use and people water use are not comparable. There is typically 10x to 20x water use per acre of farm as there is for one person, Penn state ran some numbers for their region [1], it is even worse in California where people are literally farming in land that is essentially desert. The bottom line is that if people and communities are replacing farmland then there is a net increase in the availability of water by a large margin. Something to keep in mind when looking at water availability. [1] https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-water-needs https://extension.psu.edu/water-system-planning-estimating-w...

stevenwoo 8y ago
That's not the only competition for water. In Texas somewhere between 10-50% (depends upon location) of fresh water is used for fracking, not to be used again for human consumption for generations, if ever. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-as-fracking-expands/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-use-rises-a... IIRC it's even encroaching upon Dallas' suburbs.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  10-50% is nuts, especially for technology we ideally should want to get rid of and replace with cleaner energy.
  - ianai 8y ago
    To say nothing of all of the other negative external costs of fracking. I wish one of the carbon cost agreements had gone through.
    - zubiaur 8y ago
      The fracking I’m familiar with tries to reuse the fracking fluids as much as possible. Still some oil and gas activities do consume large quantities of water: pressure maintenance injection and Steam assisted gravity drain, the last one is used a lot in the Canadian tar sands.

justherefortart 8y ago

Instead of oil pipelines just build more water pipelines. That's what we do here in Oklahoma. SE part of the state is wet, we run water back to the west side.

empath75 8y ago

The Great Thirst, Wired (2002) https://www.wired.com/2002/09/thirst/ https://www.wired.com/2002/09/thirst/

fusiongyro 8y ago

Albuquerque has been very worried about this for many years, check out their Water 2120 plan for more information: https://www.abcwua.org/uploads/files/Water%202120%20Approved%20Policy%20Document.pdf https://www.abcwua.org/uploads/files/Water%202120%20Approved... Is it enough? Probably not, but Albuquerque hosts more than half the population of the state, so if only they get their act together it'll still cover most of us. I think it's likely that well water will be mostly sufficient for most of the rural communities for a long time. I would hope that Las Cruces develops a similar plan, but Santa Fe's population is not that high and the cost of living there helps keep it down.