next_migration | A comment on the state of the Southwest (Reply)

Here’s another digression. In today’s Grauniad, there’s an ominous story about the state of water use in a less-discussed part of the Southwest. Take a quick guess: what do you think is the fastest-growing city in the United States?

It is, reportedly, St. George, Utah. This city, of about 182,000 people in July 2020 and 191,000 people in July 2021, is located by the lovely, if stark, Zion National Park. Its population growth within one year was estimated at 5.1%.The awe-inspiring scenery attracts an ever-increasing number of retirees and remote-working residents. Additionally, many thousands of short-term tourists pass through annually.

Utah’s landscape includes high aspen forests as well as desert-like environments such as those around St. George, but its water is certainly limited, and it’s within the region that will suffer from the developing megadrought. Thus it’s surprising and alarming to read that Utah has both the highest per-capita water usage of any state in the country and the cheapest water. Many residents have irrigated grass lawns, and in touristy areas, resorts offering golf courses and large lawns are spreading: there are 13 golf courses within 20 miles of St. George.

Is the state government trying to push conservation, or raise water prices to discourage unsustainable use? Surely you jest. Instead, they’re promoting schemes such as building a pipeline to Lake Powell to obtain its water and drilling deep wells to extract fossil water from aquifers. If you’ve been following Southwestern water issues at all, you’ll know that Lake Powell is already approaching three-quarters empty, and the places whose residents are already dependent upon its water don’t want another big straw sucking it dry even faster.

As for tapping fossil water: suppose they do this, it works, and they can afford the fossil fuels to keep pumping, for an extended period of time: what then? With water still seemingly “cheap and plentiful,” the population will continue to grow and to use water extravagantly. Then, what happens when the local supply or extractability of underground water inevitably starts to dwindle? The number of households and businesses facing an inability to carry on “business as usual” will be greater than if nothing had been done. It reminds me of what the old peak-oilers used to point out: as depletion proceeds, we physically won’t be able to keep increasing oil production every year so long as anything is left ... but if we could, it would mean a truly spectacular sudden crash afterward. Responding to pressures on local water supply by extracting more water that will not be renewed within a human lifetime is doing the same thing.

The cited ABC story is of interest for additional information on recent migration patterns. Nine of the ten cities that grew fastest between 2020 and 2021 were in three states: Utah, Idaho, and Florida, though several of the counties that grew fastest were in Texas. There is a trend to net migration out of the most grossly overpopulated metro areas (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago) and into smaller cities. To me, this is a good sign, indicating that Americans are starting to recognize that megalopolises are not the best or healthiest place to live.

On the other hand, the fact that the fastest-growing destination towns are in states that have limited water supplies for large populations or that may soon start going underwater is not a good sign. Perhaps people are migrating with immediate quality of life in mind, or, given the timing, avoidance of pandemic-related urban risks and disruptions, but not long-term sustainability. Some may also be migrating to participate in a superfactional “Big Sort”; portions of Utah and Idaho are very white and have many residents who are, to put it politely, very conservative.

While those states have much appeal for Red faction adherents now, I’d strongly encourage most migrating conservatives to consider the Southeast instead. Utah and Idaho will be getting hotter and likely drier, and the energy resources necessary to procure water for increasing populations will decline in availability and affordability. In hard times, beautiful scenery does not compensate for not being able to water a garden; the scenery in Zion National Park ought to give a big hint that water scarcity will be a problem in that area. Deserts are beautiful in part for their starkness and emptiness, which is to say their lack of teeming masses of humanity—which is because under normal circumstances, they do not provide enough food or water to support large populations.

Another point is that those rapidly growing cities have rapidly escalating home and rental costs, as, in fact, do Utah and Idaho as a whole. Because housing has become such a center of greed and speculation, developers do not build simple affordable housing if they can possibly avoid it. If a city’s population may shoot up by over half within a decade, impossible to accommodate with existing housing stock, the new housing that gets built is more expensive, and owners and landlords of existing housing know that a seller’s market empowers them to jack up the prices to a point that can price the working class out of the market.

It is for this reason that I suggest that migrants should spread themselves out to avoid increasing local populations too quickly, and should actively avoid particularly fashionable areas whatever their water supplies look like. Instead, move to unfashionable areas where people who do the kind of work you do can still afford to keep roofs over their heads. Home prices in Utah and Idaho are not two or three times higher than those in Arkansas because the neighbors or ruling class will be two or three times better people, nor because average incomes will be far higher (they aren’t). A good bit of it is simply because the scenery is more impressive. In an age of decline, this is a really poor reason to choose a home. Move someplace cheap and learn to find the nearest state park beautiful. (It will be.)