Water policy and the West’s housing market

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One of the intellectual frustrations with trying to wrap my head around water policy in the western United States is that it’s really sort of everything policy. There’s climate science and hydrology and history and law and agricultural economics. And, the subject for this afternoon, there’s urban development economics.

Much of the policy struggle has been driven by the explosive growth in sunbelt cities. We started building houses in the 1980s like gangbusters, without a whole lot of thought about how we were going to get enough water to flush their toilets. Here, for example, is single family homes by number of annually issued building permits in Las Vegas:

 

But then, as you can see, around about 2006 or so we stopped building so many houses. What’s up with that?

Here are the three major metro areas that interest me right now – Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (indexed so that 2001=100 so you can get a feel for the trends in all three, independent of absolute numbers):

My former Albuquerque Journal colleague Richard Metcalf wrote about our situation in this morning’s paper:

The pace of home construction in the Albuquerque metro area has taken a step backward during the first five months of the year, getting off to the second slowest in what is likely decades, according to building permit numbers from DataTraq.

“Population is a huge driver of home construction,” said John Garcia, executive vice president of the HBA, the home builders group in the metro. “We focus on job growth, where we’re at the mercy of business. We need to improve our population growth.”

There’s a rhetoric around this, which you can see in Garcia’s comments, that suggests that many of the region’s economic boosters presume that growth is the norm, and the current situation is not the norm, that we’re gonna somehow “pull out of this slump.”

I’m frustrated that I don’t know enough about the economics of urban development to understand what’s going on here, because the water policy implications of whether this is the new normal, or a slump we’re going to pull out of, are huge. I suspect that if I did understand more urban development economics, I’d simply have a clearer understanding of why we can’t really know what comes next.

What does all this mean as a matter of water policy? Mainly, I guess for now it means that the west’s water policy problems are a lot easier right now, since we’re not building so many new houses. It means that those pie-in-the-sky population growth projections that have driven a lot of the planning and analysis about how much water we have and will need (like the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study) are wrong, in a good way. (Yay, our growth-based economies have tanked! We don’t need as much water!)

 

On “water wars” rhetoric and policy options

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This, by OtPR, on the why the “water wars” “fight or die” rhetoric in the midst of California drought is not only wrong but harmful:

This rhetoric narrows people’s perceived choices, keeps their limbic system activated and postpones mutual solutions.  Responsible reporters and editors should stop using it.

I have long thought the various possible roles of journalists maps nicely to Roger Pielke Jr.’s typology of possible roles for scientists in assisting in the policy process. I prefer for myself the role he characterizes in which a scientist engages in “an effort to expand (or at least clarify) the scope of choice for decision-making in a way that allows for the decision-maker to reduce choice based on his or her own preferences and values.” As OtPR correctly observes, “water wars” rhetoric in our work does not expand the range of political and policy choices. It narrows it.

Reclamation funding preliminary Rio Grande basin study work

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It’s not a full-on “Basin Study” like the Colorado River got, but the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation today announced $84,000 for preliminary work to define the scope of a Middle Rio Grande (that’s lingo for the New Mexico big) basin study. There’s bigger bucks in the announcement for Salinas and Carmel River Basins in California and the Santa Cruz in Arizona.

These are important bits of institutional infrastructure, providing some dollars and technical muscle in a collaboration with basin stakeholders to improve shared understanding of resources.

Walton on native water rights in the Colorado River Basin

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Brett Walton has done us all a great service with a thorough look at the issues surrounding Native American water rights in the Colorado River Basin. Importantly, he’s looking at it not just as a problem, but as an example of what the solution space can look like. The stuff from Kathryn Sorensen, Phoenix’s water manager, is a great example:

Years of careful negotiations, spurred by a desire to avoid long-running court battles, produced legal settlements that provide water for tribes, cities, and industries. Beneficial to all sides, the settlements were a catalyst for urban development and a tool for funding Indian water systems. Perhaps more importantly, the settlements are the foundation of a partnership, an inescapable union, between tribes and their neighbors, a union that will grow in importance as water becomes scarcer in the warming and drying American West.

“We’ve developed tremendous and valuable relationships with each other from being in the same room for years,” Kathryn Sorensen, director of the Phoenix water department, told Circle of Blue. “Water is always important and contentious in Arizona. But having relationships helps you have conversations when you want new solutions.”….

Creative also means selling the temporary right to use water to others, an action called leasing, which is common in the Phoenix metro area. Home to 4.5 million people, Phoenix and its Sonoran Desert neighbors are the biggest beneficiaries of these creative arrangements.

Phoenix leases water from three tribes, and a fourth agreement is nearing completion. The terms of the deals are straightforward. Phoenix makes an upfront payment, typically millions of dollars, to the tribe and pays an annual charge to cover the cost of pumping the water to operators of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal, which transports Colorado River water hundreds of miles to the dry heart of the state.

I recommend clicking and reading the entire article.

Some thoughts on the bathtub ring and Lake Mead’s historic drop below 1,075

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I’ve had my head down the last ten days reading and writing about 1940s and ’50s-era Los Angeles water management, and I look up to see that Lake Mead last week dropped below elevation 1,075, a level freighted with meaning. But what meaning, exactly? Drew Beckwith at Western Resource Advocates, in Caitlin McGlade’s story, wins for quotability:

“This is the check-engine light,” Beckwith said.

I agree. But rather than start with the usual imagery of the bathtub ring, let’s start with some engine diagnostics, courtesy of a talk the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Terry Fulp gave today as part of an on line series organized by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science:

Colorado River water supply and use, courtesy USBR

Colorado River water supply and use, courtesy USBR

The green line is scary as hell, as is the gap between green and yellow. We’re using more water than the system seems capable of providing. But if we’re going to make sense of the decline in Lake Mead, we also have to think through why the yellow line, the line showing water use in the Colorado River Basin, is bending down.

The L.A. history stuff I’ve been working on for my book is a chapter about the development and evolution of water management institutions Southern California’s “West Basin” (beachy cities like Santa Monica and inland communities like Hawthorne and Inglewood). I’m using it for two reasons: first, it’s an example of a collective water management regime in a group of communities that successfully confronted shortage. The result was a transition from a rapidly dropping aquifer to an aquifer that was healthy enough to provide a drought buffer when later dry times hit. How did they do that? Secondly, I’m using it because it’s where Elinor Ostrom did her thesis, and a) she is awesome, and b) her thesis is a gold mine for a storyteller. (spoiler alert: squabbling mayors)

The basic message, seen time and again in arid western North America, is that people tend to speed recklessly toward the water supply cliff, but when they near it, they almost inevitably hit the brakes. It would be great if we weren’t so reckless in the speeding part, but that seems to be an inevitable result of historical contingency, the problem of path dependence, and human nature. Blame our historical selves if you must, but whatever. That’s done. The key here is the “hitting the brakes” part.

So what bent the yellow curve down?

The first thing is the undertold story of the reduction in California’s Colorado River allocation. Up until 2002, California regular was allocated more than 5 million acre feet of water from the river, for use in desert farming and urban/suburban communities. In 2002, it peaked at 5.3 maf. In 2003, that was cut to 4.4 maf. In response, Southern California showed remarkable adaptive capacity with conservation, conjunctive ground-surface water management, innovative ag-to-urban transfers and a bunch of other stuff. (Buy my book! As soon as I quit with all the blogging and write the damn thing!)

The second thing is just same old same old in the Upper Basin. As Mike Cohen likes to remind me, when you’re up at the headwaters part of the system without a big reservoir above you, when there’s less snow in the mountains above you, you use less water. “Shortage” is a normal part of variability. These people have the “adaptive capacity” already built in.

There are two common themes that emerge here. The first is a boundary condition: once the water gets scarce, people use less water. The second is the nature of the adaptive capacity, which is a bunch of fuzzy social and human and institutional stuff that you’ve got to be able to call on to either succeed or fail when the boundary condition whacks you upside the head and says, “Yo, less water this year!” It’s that adaptive capacity (the ability to pivot to conservation, or ag-urban transfers, or some such) that determines whether you succeed or fail.

The yellow line on Terry’s graph suggest we’re already stomping on the brakes, but yellow is still above green, meaning water use still exceeds supply. What can we learn from the stuff that’s already working to help us step on the brakes a bit harder?

With that out of the way, here’s the obligatory picture of the bathtub ring, with bonus ominous sky:

Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97

Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97, by John Fleck

Drought adaptive capacity, Kings County CA edition

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In your latest reminder that California agriculture has shown some remarkable capacity to adapt to that state’s crushing drought, Todd Fitchette in Western Farm Press reports that total agricultural farm gate receipts in Kings County, in California’s drought-devastated southern Central Valley, were up 9 percent last year:

Kings County agricultural values advanced 9 percent from the previous year’s figure to over $2.47 billion, due primarily to strong commodity prices for dairy, tree nuts and processing tomatoes.

 

Your 1952 Aquifer Queen of Central Water Basin

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Los Angeles water, management, circa 1952:

"WATER WARNING! - Bonnie Myers, 17, South Gate High School home-coming queen, has been named Aquifer Queen of Central Water Basin to help spotlight water problem. Wouldn't it be sad if shower water failed?" L.A. Times, Nov. 27, 1952

“WATER WARNING! – Bonnie Myers, 17, South Gate High School home-coming queen, has been named Aquifer Queen of Central Water Basin to help spotlight water problem. Wouldn’t it be sad if shower water failed?” L.A. Times, Nov. 27, 1952

There are many reasons for the diminishing underground water supply. Foremost among them, probably, is the vastly increased demand created by an unprecedented population influx and the constant press of industrial expansion.

But there are important contributory reasons.

Prolonged dry spells of little or no rain leave water-bearing aquifers aquifers unreplenished by nature. Flood control paving and river channels and extensive sewage drainage keeps runoff water from percolating through the ground back into the underground reservoir.

Arizona’s Colorado River zeitgeist

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In this morning’s Arizona Star, Tucson journalist Tony Davis asks, “Is California trying to take our water?”

In journalism, there’s a joke known as “Betteridge’s Law“: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

As Tony’s story strongly suggests, the notion making the rounds these days in some Arizona political circles that California is out to steal away a share of Arizona’s Colorado River water is crazy talk. No one in Arizona has presented any evidence beyond their state’s historic paranoia about their larger and more politically powerful neighbor’s alleged water ambitions. And all the experts Tony interviewed (disclosure: including me, I’m one of that now apparently) converged on a central conclusion. “That’s crazy talk.” We were mostly more polite, except for Pat Mulroy, who can be counted on to be impolite when the occasion warrants:

Talking like that is “a pathway to mutual destruction,” Mulroy said.

“+1”, as the kids on Slashdot used to say.

But here’s what’s interesting to me about this episode.

Colorado River Basin politics is hampered by a historic distinction between basin scale issues and individual state water politics. At the basin scale, those working on the Colorado River’s politics understand, as Mulroy points out in Tony’s blog sidebar thing, that a negotiated solution is the only way to deal with the basin’s problems, and that it’s likely involve shared sacrifice. That’s abundantly clear when I interview people working at the basin scale. But then each person in the room in those negotiations has to go home and sell whatever deal they come up with to a domestic politics that doesn’t want to hear about the need for shared sacrifice because it’s our water dammit and screw California. Arizona’s century-old fear that California wants to steal its water, as untrue as it seems to be in this situation, is a signature feature of that state’s domestic water politics.

This conflict between the inward-facing talk behind the mostly closed doors of basin-level discussions and the often very public domestic politics within each state seems to me the most likely path to having the whole thing blow up. Domestic political ferment like this, fomenting a sense of interstate water wars, increases the risk of such an explosion.

This is why I’m watching the Arizona situation with such keen interest. This episode, for better or worse, is goin’ in my book, especially Pat Mulroy’s “!!!!”.

Running out water – again with the governance

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This Alex Breitler story reminds how running out of water is almost invariably as much a problem of governance as much as it is of drought:

MOUNTAIN HOUSE — Years before the first shovelful of earth was turned on this master-plan community near Tracy, developers and county officials knew that its sole source of water could someday be interrupted.

It wasn’t severe drought that they feared, necessarily, but the high level of state and federal scrutiny that surrounds any diversion of water from the delicate Delta.

Whatever the cause for their worry, it wasn’t enough to stop county officials from approving the developer’s plan for what eventually would be a community of 44,000 people. The approval came even after an earlier requirement to write a water shortage contingency plan was scrapped.

And in the following two decades, even after construction began, nothing was done to secure a second source of water.
So it is, some say, that Mountain House’s mad scramble to acquire emergency water last week shouldn’t have been such a surprise after all.