Housing Developments and Water Shortages: Overview
Housing developments and water shortages represent a significant environmental and urban planning challenge, particularly in rapidly growing metropolitan areas. As new suburban housing projects expand, they often pave over large areas of land, which disrupts the natural process of rainwater seeping into the ground to replenish aquifers. This leads to increased stormwater runoff that can erode land and carry pollutants into rivers and lakes, exacerbating water quality issues. The conflict between suburban sprawl and sustainable water management has prompted discussions about the need for government intervention in housing policies, advocating for denser urban housing that relies on existing infrastructure and minimizes new road construction.
The impact of climate change, marked by heightened drought frequencies and rising temperatures, further complicates the water supply landscape. Regions like Arizona have experienced acute water shortages, prompting local governments to halt new housing permits in certain areas to preserve dwindling groundwater resources. Critics of unchecked suburban expansion argue for careful planning and regulation to balance residential needs with sustainable water usage. In contrast, some believe that market forces should dictate development patterns, suggesting that increased water costs will naturally deter construction in water-scarce areas. This ongoing discussion underscores the complex interplay between urban growth and environmental stewardship, highlighting the need for sustainable solutions to ensure a resilient water supply for future generations.
Housing Developments and Water Shortages: Overview
Introduction
The natural process during which rainwater seeps through surface soil to an underground layer of permeable rock, called the aquifer, provides the supply of safe, clean drinking water, which is then taken from wells or reservoirs. This process is interrupted when paved-over areas result in rapid runoff into streams and rivers, depriving the underlying aquifers of the opportunity to be recharged.
As new suburban housing developments result in hundreds of thousands of acres of newly covered ground, less rainwater can seep underground, and more is sent gushing into nearby streams, causing land erosion and sending pollutants downstream, without the natural filtration of soil and aquifers.
This apparent conflict between natural systems generating drinking water and new housing has brought calls for government control over new housing subdivisions, including policies that would encourage rehabilitating existing built-up areas and emphasize more dense housing patterns served by mass transit and requiring fewer roads.
Understanding the Discussion
Aquifer: An underground geological formation that contains or conducts water.
Drought: A period during which rainfall falls below normal levels. Droughts can last for short periods, or for several years. Droughts are caused by natural, periodic shifts in weather patterns. Some scientists predict that global warming could exacerbate droughts in some regions.
Impervious surfaces: Areas like parking lots, streets and driveways, and roofs that channel water into storm drains, rather than allowing it to seep into the ground.
Open spaces: Undeveloped land around cities and towns where new housing developments are banned, often because cities have bought up land with the intention of leaving it open.
Sprawl: A pejorative term for new single-family housing developments built on the outskirts of cities, usually in areas previously used for agriculture.
Storm water: Water that quickly flows off impervious surfaces into sewers or storm drains after a rainstorm.
Background
The water that comes out of kitchen and bathroom faucets travels through a network of pipes that run from a city's reservoir. In some cases, the reservoir is a lake on the edge of town. In other cases, such as New York City, reservoirs may be several hundred miles away; they collect water from remote rural regions and send it via huge pipes to be used by urban dwellers.
All reservoirs have one source of water: rainfall. The amount of rain that falls on any one region varies from year to year, usually by small amounts. But periodic shifts in weather patterns can cause a prolonged reduction in rainfall, a period known as drought.
The term "hydrological drought" refers to a shortfall in the volume of water stored underground in a layer of the earth referred to as an aquifer, as well as a reduction in the volume of water in lakes that serve as reservoirs. Hydrological droughts can follow shortages of rainfall but can also result when the level of water usage exceeds the fresh supplies.
Assuring that houses have an adequate supply of potable (drinkable) water requires complex planning on the part of hydrologists, the professionals who study water supplies. A rapid increase in the population of a metropolitan region such as Atlanta, Georgia, or Phoenix, Arizona, can overwhelm the water system's ability to meet all needs, even in normal years. In years of below-average rainfall, the imbalance of supply and demand can be even greater.
Normally, large reservoirs designed to serve metropolitan regions hold several years' supply of water. Only a prolonged drought lasting several years would threaten the system's ability to deliver drinking water, although residents may be restricted from watering their lawns or washing their cars to save water.
The gradual warming of the earth's climate into the twenty-first century raised concerns that weather patterns that determine rainfall were changing, resulting in more rainfall than normal in some regions, and less in others. Even without droughts, hydrologists remained concerned about other developments that could threaten their ability to meet the demand for water. One of these threats involves the aquifer.
Much of the earth's surface acts like a giant sponge, soaking up rain (or melting snow). As precipitation seeps into the soil at the surface, it trickles down to the aquifer. An aquifer can be a layer of porous rock, or a layer of sand or gravel. Once rainwater has seeped through the soil to the aquifer it is called "groundwater." Often it drains into a stream or river that leads to a reservoir. Besides directing groundwater to wells, springs, or streams, aquifers serve another vital purpose: they filter water, removing sediments picked up from the surface.
Following World War II, the rapid development of suburbs had a significant impact on the physical layout of the United States and, in turn, the ability of the aquifer to filter water. At least two generations of Americans, World War II veterans and their children of the "baby boomer" generation, created an issue called "sprawl." Sprawl describes the covering over of agricultural land with networks of new highways, streets, and shopping centers with acres of asphalt. Water falling on such impervious surfaces no longer trickles down to the aquifer; instead, it runs off quickly into storm drains and into nearby creeks and rivers, flowing unfiltered into lakes and contributing to a rise in pollution in reservoirs.
The population shift from densely packed urban areas to spread-out suburbs poses a challenge to the supply of unpolluted drinking water.
Housing Developments & Water Shortages Today
By the 2020s, noted periods of extreme, sustained drought as well as record-high temperatures in several areas of the country, combined with unsustainable water demand and usage, led many commentators to stress the importance of the need to address the issue of depleted and/or damaged groundwater supplies. At the same time, this period was marked by a particularly low supply of housing insufficient to meet population needs.
Hydrologists say there are several measures that can be taken to address possible shortages of fresh water. One solution often proposed is to maintain as much open space as possible. Since housing developments are inevitably a joint project of private home builders and the government agencies responsible for both above-ground and below-ground networks (that is, roads and water systems) that serve these houses, critics of suburban sprawl have urged that the government take a stronger role in helping direct future developments toward denser urban centers and away from suburbs.
In the most extreme cases, critics urge that issuing new building permits should be slowed, or even suspended, to discourage patterns of migration that may be incompatible with the volume of rainfall (which includes snowfall in mountain areas that melts and flows into reservoirs) available to supply some metropolitan areas. Actual shortfalls of rain during periodic droughts makes this problem even worse, especially in normally arid areas of the Southwest (e.g., Arizona) and West (e.g., Colorado), areas that have experienced a rapid influx of people over the past decade. In 2023, the state of Arizona halted some new housing construction permits in areas around Phoenix dependent upon groundwater because of the extent of the supply shortage at that point; building projects that had previously gained approval could not find enough groundwater to continue.
Efforts to estimate the volume of water not seeping into the aquifer have suggested that around cities experiencing rapid growth in the past several years, the amount of water being lost to rapid runoff amounts to tens of billions of gallons per year in each city.
Some critics believe that government should not interfere in private investment decisions. Instead, these critics say that if the availability or the cost of water results in large increases in water bills, people will naturally be disinclined to buy new houses or move to areas with insufficient water supplies.
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