The water has dried up in California

          We’ve all read about California’s current drought conditions. Local and regional governments have started rationing water, especially in Southern California.

          Lawns are brown out there (normally, lawns are green in winter – because the weather is wetter then -- and brown during the summer). Lakes and rivers are dry. The man-made Salton Sea, in the Imperial Valley, is so dry it is now hard to find where the puddles might be. There is no snow in the region’s mountains so, as it stands now, there will be no water in the rivers and lakes when the spring and summer come because there is no snow to melt.

          The fact of the matter is Southern California has been short of water for about

three decades now. 

         

          The leading cause of California’s shortage is the rampant over population the state has allowed to happen. California has spent more than half a century over-building. The same local governmental bodies now restricting water use and praying for rain have, through the years, routinely rubber-stamped the building requests from developers rather than restrict growth.

          New housing tracts spring up everywhere. Places where people have never lived are now paved over. Wildlife is overrun.

           In Los Angeles, locations where single-family homes stood for decades have been rezoned for condominiums. If you know a neighborhood, you can see where houses have been replaced by complexes with 30 condos or more. The number of people living in a given spot might grow from, say, 16 (four houses with four people each) to 90 or more (30 condos with roughly three people each). The number of cars soars from perhaps eight (four homes, two cars each) to as many as 60 (30 condos, two cars each).

The politics of water can be complicated in California.

Traffic snarls and the difficulty of finding a spot to park a car is approaching the two worst parking towns your loyal blogger has ever seen, Philadelphia and Boston.

Farm land is getting eliminated at an increasingly fast rate. Acres once used for growing crops now sag under the increasing population of neighborhoods. Not only has the water use dramatically increased, the value for the use has decreased.

Growing food is a pretty good thing, a high value use of land.

In a lot of cases, neighborhoods are growing in areas that typically get very little rain (we call these areas ‘deserts’). That means that there is little natural water in the area and no rain.

But the population just keeps growing and not just in California. Look at Arizona: Plenty of people, no water.

California’s share of water from the Colorado River was trimmed a few decades ago, making long stretches of rainless/snowless periods more difficult to deal with than they used to be in the state’s southern-most counties.

The issue, of course, is not identifying the problem. The issue is solving the

This is Phoenix, where water is scarce but people
are not.

problem. Local governments must throw off the yoke of domination by real estate developers. The local city councils and county boards must stop allowing zoning changes that result in high density population growth.

That’s an easy thing for your loyal blogger to write but a difficult thing for politicians to do. New housing is a business booster. It also gives local governments an increased tax base. Politicians need money like crops need water.

But too many people need too much water for the supply Southern California has historically had at its disposal. In times of drought, the supply goes quicker when too many users can twist the taps. That is what is happening now.

The problem is clear, the cause is obvious. The sticking point is the cure.

It’s like watching a drowning man: The problem is that he is drowning. The cause is that he can’t swim. The sticking point is teaching him to swim before he sinks.

Good luck with that.

 

Thanks for reading.