Filling a bathtub two ways and Colorado River Basin farmers surveyed on water. One driver of high housing prices is rich people competing for property but what can you do about that?
You can fill a bathtub two ways: turn up the tap to overcome the loss or minimize the loss down the drain.
That's in brief a couple of approaches I wanted to highlight with the two thematically-related articles below.
If you're a thirsty city running up against a water need, you have two approaches to "filling your tub": you can get more water in to slake the thirst of a growing population, or you can look at ways to minimize need for growing population.
The first article linked below follows the first way above. It's about crews working to fix and re-line a repurposed railway tunnel that carries water through the mountains to Pueblo and Aurora (the Busk-Ivanhoe transmountain diversion tunnel).
It's a fascinating look at how the process of diverting water across river basins work (as well as some of the constraints that workers who work on these sorts of remote big projects face).
Uncovered in the article (as it should be) is the question of whether or not this is a good or moral practice. What do you think? Is it right to take water and bring it under the continental divide to feed the Front Range? This project is old and established enough that it would take quite an effort to stop it (and there are enough votes along I-25 to ensure that this will almost certainly never happen), but what would you think if a new proposal to do something like this were to come up?
Below the link to this story is another one, this time a Sun article about how the town of Buena Vista, CO is seeking to limit water to new development (and/or also tie it to affordability requirements for new housing). I suppose you could look at this effort, among other ways, as answering the question: what will communities that need water for people do in order to conserve water (though Buena Vista is far from the I-25 corridor).
It's an interesting approach, and, as I say, it's not entirely about water conservation, but focusing just on the water issue here, it boils down to this: you have a growing town that has a mix of senior and junior water rights. If the senior water rights are not sufficient to support the size of the town, what are you going to do to get a reliable source of water in lean years (when someone with the senior rights where you have junior ones gets their water ahead of you)?
Some of the steps are well known. The town is limiting loss by fixing leaks and they are "buying and drying" some farmland upriver.
The novel approach here lies, however, in tying approval for water sourcing for a new development to the kind of development it is. You might look at it as lowering the difficulty for getting a project built (in terms of getting your water source approved) as long as you build something the city wants. I.e. a way to "price" the water based on the type of development you'll do.
This would be another one that seems fraught with questions. A few that spring to my mind: are you owed water if you build within city limits? Is the town council effectively deciding what you can do with your land morally okay? Where do you put the line on property rights and the ability to do what you want with your land vs. the needs of the town to conserve water?
Interesting reads both. Worth a look.
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/crews-working-to-repair-busk-ivanhoe-transmountain-diversion/
https://coloradosun.com/2023/09/12/buena-vista-development-housing-water-limits/
Related:
Farmers in the Colorado River Basin were recently surveyed. The results probably won't come as a shock to you if you know any farmers personally.
--70% of the respondents said they are already taking steps to respond to water shortages. Small wonder: farmers have limits and/or have to pay for their water use. They're also not heartless monsters driven purely by profit.
--They don't trust Federal and State programs and prefer to deal mainly with local water agencies. Again, not a surprise. I would much rather deal with local people than the other levels of gov't. The higher levels of government DO NOT listen.
--For a variety of reasons many are not using the programs where the gov't will pay them to not use their water rights. As I say, there are a variety of reasons for this, but, tossing in my own two cents here, I can tell you that I'm somewhat glad. I think that we need to start having the discussion about cities and towns (Las Vegas, with your fountains and lawns in the desert I'm looking in your direction) having to cut back IN ADDITION to Ag. If this forces that discussion to the fore, I'm glad for it.
More in the link below.
https://www.kunc.org/news/2023-09-26/colorado-river-growers-say-theyre-ready-to-save-water-but-need-to-build-trust-with-states-and-feds
Related to the earlier post, one driver for housing affordability that would be a tough one to address.
I read something recently and it's stuck with me since. One driver of housing supply is demand.
I know you already knew that, but I mean a particular kind of demand. I mean demand by wealthy people for houses and land that drives up home prices.
In what I read, it was said that this particular kind of demand, and its associated price drivers, is immune to building affordable housing (the previous post was about Buena Vista's novel approach to both save water and encourage affordable housing by "pricing" water usage permits for new development according to what kind of development it is).
Let me break this down. Let's say that you have a town where lots of people are wanting to move. The more wealthy that are moving there can, obviously, outbid everyone else and so prices rise to a level where only the wealthy can afford to buy and live there.
So, you build a bunch of condos with lower prices, say, by offering the developer a tax credit if the price of any of the new condos is below 70% of the median like-for-like home value in the area. So the lower-priced (and presumably more modestly built and furnished) condos hit the market.
Guess what might happen? Wealthy people might look at those things and see them as good vacation homes. Investors might see them as good investments for short term rentals. And even though they sell for less, they're scooped up by people who will not be using them for the purpose envisioned by those who set up the incentives.
That's what I read and it makes decent sense to me. I'm not sure how accurate a prediction this is (About all I could find that touched on anything close to this subject is the link below--something that ought to be taken with a grain of salt based on what I know of sourcing accurate things on the internet).
This, like the questions raised in the earlier post, raises a few thorny moral questions because the next thing to consider after thinking through this particular issue is: if this is a problem, what are going to do about it?
Do you want to tell developers and/or others who to sell to? Do you want to bar people above a certain income from buying and do the same for investors? No clear easy answer and no clear morally-superior answer either.
One last thing before wrapping up. I want you to consider the political dimension here too. What politician would propose a solution to this particular problem? What politician would even THINK about saying something like "we are not going to let the rich move in here"?
Yeah. That many. And, without having sympathy for rich people that want to move somewhere, I don't blame them. It's fraught with problems: one the one hand from the potential donors and on the other from people who would accuse you of socialism.
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/how-investors-affect-housing-shortage/