The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

I can feel for the people who have been living there for a long time and now have to deal with the water situation. But I can&#x27;t understand the attitudes of people who are choosing to move to such a place where access to water is such a risk.<p>I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner&#x27;s insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it&#x27;s quite hard to have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this?

This was an interesting read for me.<p>I have a cabin on some land near Joshua Tree. There&#x27;s water in the ground (300-400ft down) but I haven&#x27;t bothered to put in a well, instead just hauling what little I need from the nearby town&#x27;s bulk water dispenser.<p>Unlike AZ apparently, CA doesn&#x27;t allow any new construction without a secure and sufficient water supply. Installing new cisterns for receiving hauled water is no longer permitted, but existing cisterns are grandfathered in. It seems like they never make any exceptions. A nearby fire station permanently closed when their well water was found to be too toxic and they weren&#x27;t permitted to install a cistern for hauled water.<p>It seems like AZ could solve this issue state-wide by adopting a similar permitting requirement, instead of having these parcels-of-5 loopholes enabling entire subdivisions to be built without water.<p>The problems my area has been dealing with are illegal agriculture (large marijuana grows) depleting the ground water, and there&#x27;s always some hare-brained commercial plan trying to plow through the red-tape and resell the cheap but finite groundwater in one form or another.

The final quote is chilling:<p>“We got two great offers in, and neither of them cared about the water situation. They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”<p>We&#x27;ll see what happens in 2023, when Scottsdale no longer sells water to the water haulers.<p>The Water Knife feels more and more prophetic.

I can&#x27;t find it anymore but I read a long form article like this probably 10 years ago on the problem of suburbs public infrastructure.<p>Basically they ran the numbers and figured out that more than 50% of cities simply cannot afford to maintain the suburb infrastructure no matter what they do with the budget. Even if they did something crazy like tripled taxes tomorrow they still could not afford it. The called them zombie cities or something like that.

I&#x27;ll voice an unpopular opinion: people <i>should</i> live in these dry areas.<p>Deserts have wildlife, yes, but they have much less biomass than the other places humans live. A person living in Arizona or Nevada is displacing much less natural wildlife than a person like me, living in Seattle.<p>So I say let&#x27;s embrace people living in water-starved areas like the Southwest. We can enable it by smart water usage, like you see in Vegas, combined with things like smart water diversion and desalinization.

I read that as being harshly sarcastic but I&#x27;m now thinking it might be unintentional the way they make these people out to be obviously the source of their own issues.<p>It seems like the suburbs who actually pay taxes to provide the water are being prioritised for water access and the people who intentionally built were there were no rules are upset that other people aren&#x27;t following the rules.

On a planet that is 2&#x2F;3 water, I think we can find a solution. Desalination comes to mind. We built an interstate highway system. We can build an interstate water distribution system for desalinated Pacific Ocean water.

I&#x27;ll be a resident contrarian and argue that building more houses in the SW is a <i>good</i> thing.<p>- The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall)<p>- Cooling is more energy efficient than heating.<p>- Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc).<p>- People like it<p>But the question is how to get water to these places? Especially knowing now that the Colorado River Compact was designed when rainfall was at historic highs. But I don&#x27;t think there is any long term solution that doesn&#x27;t involve California giving up on taking other state&#x27;s water to grow high-intensity agriculture.

I wonder how much this situation is being affected by large-scale deep agricultural wells? I think Arizona is a big foreign exporter (Saudi and China) of alfalfa for animal feed. Kinda wild to drain aquifers for export...

I highly recommend anyone interested in solutions to read “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond” by Brad Lancaster. Link below. Also, he has a great video on YouTube with some of the concepts at a high level (from a TEDx) - don’t let his enthusiasm at the beginning detract from the seriousness of his message!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;49338099" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;49338099</a>

&gt; “Like, a scrambling-for-your-toilet-water-every-month kind of thing.”<p>A few years ago I saw this coming and invented the Waterless Toilet. It&#x27;s like a kitty litter box but for people who live in areas like those discussed in the article. Why scramble for toilet water when you can just use the Waterless Toilet?<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to get funding for this so please reach out if interested.

this isn’t really the suburbs. it’s a more rural area with water wells and not hooked up to the main water service<p>new suburb developments in az are required to prove they have a 100 year water supply

California refuses to desalinate, which would solve all the problems. I thought they were smart, instead they&#x27;re political. They&#x27;d rather kill off the southwest. Assholes.