Oh, lookee here. This just popped up in the NYT. It begins. But, what they really have to do, and this will be much more delicate of a matter, is to convince the Mormon faithful to make less babies.
Groundwater and streams vital to both farmers and cities are drying up in the West, challenging the future of development.
www.nytimes.com
A Drought So Dire That a Utah Town Pulled the Plug on Growth
Groundwater and streams vital to both farmers and cities are drying up in the West, challenging the future of development.
OAKLEY, Utah — Across the western United States, a summer of record-breaking drought, heat waves and megafires exacerbated by climate change is forcing millions of people to confront an inescapable string of disasters that challenge the future of growth.
Groundwater and streams vital to both farmers and cities are drying up. Fires devour houses being built deeper into wild regions and forests. Extreme heat makes working outdoors more dangerous and life without air-conditioning potentially deadly. While summer monsoon rains have brought some recent relief to the Southwest,
99.9 percent of Utah is locked in severe drought conditions and
reservoirs are less than half full.
Yet cheap housing is even scarcer than water in much of Utah, whose population swelled by 18 percent from 2010 to 2020, making it the
fastest-growing state in country. Cities across the West worry that cutting off development to conserve water will only worsen an affordability crisis that stretches from Colorado to California.
In the little mountain town of Oakley, about an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City, the spring that pioneers once used to water their hayfields and filled people’s taps for decades dwindled to a trickle in this year’s scorching drought. So town officials took drastic action to preserve their water: They stopped building.
During the pandemic, the real estate market in their 1,500-person city boomed as remote workers flocked in from the West Coast and second homeowners staked weekend ranches. But those newcomers need water — water that is vanishing as a megadrought dries up reservoirs and rivers across the West.
So this spring, Oakley imposed a
construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want of water. But it could be a harbinger of things to come in a hotter, drier West.
“Why are we building houses if we don’t have enough water?” said Wade Woolstenhulme, the mayor, who in addition to raising horses and judging rodeos, has spent the past few weeks defending the building moratorium. “The right thing to do to protect people who are already here is to restrict people coming in.”
Wow, 18% growth in a few years. That's what I'm talking about when I say that SLC skiing has been ruined by crowds. Too bad, awesome snow.
www.glassdoor.com
www.forbes.com
