FOLSOM,
Calif. — Evert W. Palmer has a vision for this city famous for its
state prison: 10,200 new homes spread across the rolling hills to the
south, bringing in a flood of new jobs, new business and 25,000 more
people.
Yes,
Mr. Palmer, the city manager, is well aware that Folsom Lake, the sole
source of water for this Gold Rush outpost near Sacramento, is close to
historically low levels, and stands as one of the most disturbing
symbols of the four-year drought that has gripped this state. And that
Folsom is under orders to reduce its water consumption by 32 percent as
part of mandatory statewide urban cutbacks.
But
Mr. Palmer, like other officials who approved the ambitious plan to
expand this city, said he was confident that there was enough water to
allow Folsom’s population to grow to nearly 100,000 by 2036. It would be
economic folly, he said, to run things any other way.
“That
would create unnecessary economic hardships here to benefit others,”
Mr. Palmer said. “And while I’m a citizen of the planet, I’m also paid
to manage the home team.”
The
drought that has overrun California — forcing severe cutbacks in water
for farms, homeowners and businesses — has run up against a welcome
economic resurgence that is sweeping across much of the state after a
particularly brutal downturn. It is forcing communities to balance a
robust demand for new housing with concerns that the drought is not
cyclical but rather the start of permanent, more arid conditions caused
by global warming.
At
a time when Gov. Jerry Brown has warned of a new era of limits, the
spate of construction, including a boom in building that began even
before the drought emergency was declared, is raising fundamental
questions about just how much additional development California can
accommodate. The answer in places like this — and in other parched
sections of the state, from the Coachella Valley to Bakersfield to the
California coast — is, it seems, plenty.
“They
say we can’t stop building and developing because weather is cyclical,”
Jennifer Lane, a Folsom planning commissioner, said as she drove around
Folsom Lake last month, where expanses of lake bed were exposed to the
sky and recreational boaters had been ordered to get their vessels out
of the water.
“I
say we are looking at this whole new world here,” she said. “Global
warming. Where are we going to get the water? As a planning
commissioner, I say let’s be prudent. Is this the new normal?”
While state authorities can set some requirements on how things get built — such as recent restrictions
on the size of lawns permitted for new homes, and a law requiring
developers of projects of more than 500 homes to demonstrate where they
will get water — decisions on land use are left largely to local city
councils and planning commissions. And water consumption is not
necessarily the first concern of local officials as they approve grand
25-year development plans, with their promises of jobs and tax revenues.
“It’s
very hard to be a local elected official and say no,” said Max Gomberg,
the senior environmental scientist for climate change with the State Water Resources Control Board,
the agency with primary responsibility for regulating the water supply.
“All the reasons to say yes are very powerful, starting with tax
revenues. And of course, the self-interest of wanting to be re-elected.”
More
than 280,000 housing units have been approved for construction across
the Sacramento region alone, where Lake Oroville, a major source of
water for the region, has also fallen to alarmingly low levels. Another
3,000 homes and two schools are planned for Shafter, Calif., outside
Bakersfield in the Central Valley, where communities like East
Porterville have run out of water.
In Newport Beach, where seawater often seeps into the groundwater, a
project to build more than 1,300 new homes has won approval from the
City Council and is now before the California Coastal Commission.
Across
the Coachella Valley, an inland stretch of Southern California dotted
with oases of affluence, local planning officials are weighing
applications for development in the desert, including 7,800 new homes
approved by the city of Coachella last summer, even as authorities warn
of continuing declines in the aquifer and in the Colorado River, which
provide water to these communities. California has a population of about
38 million; it is projected to hit just under 50 million by 2050.
Folsom
officials describe the expansion here as the kind of well-planned
development that has characterized their trim and attractive city since
it was founded in 1856. “Housing doesn’t create growth — people create
growth,” Mr. Palmer, the city manager, said. “It’s happening all over
California. When you are in the city business, you accommodate market
factors.”
Mr.
Palmer noted that Folsom was not now using its entire allocation from
the lake, and said that he was confident there would be enough water to
supply the future development on the books.
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Ms.
Lane said projects like this one, and others that continue to show up
on the docket of the planning commission, stand in denial of the climate
problems that are confronting a state that scrambles even in rainy
times to find water needed for farming in the Central Valley and for the
ever-growing spread of Southern California.
Ms.
Lane, a retired elementary schoolteacher who has lived on a quiet
neighborhood street here for almost 30 years, stopped her car at the
edge of Folsom Lake to step out and snap a photograph of the declining
water levels to post on her Facebook page. “This is why I’m going to
vote against 300 more homes they want to build here,” she said. “See all
that white out there? That should be water. And it is only July.”
Two Sides of a Shortage
The
water shortage is sharpening a perennial battle across a state that has
symbolized the pioneering growth of the American West.
On one side are people like Diane Underhill, a member of the Ventura Water Shortage Task Force, who has been pushing Ventura, 65 miles up the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles, to adopt a building moratorium.
“Ventura
is in a multiyear drought with mandatory water rationing,” she said.
“There is not enough water to serve existing businesses and residents.
Ventura residents and businesses will pay more to use less water.
Citizens want to know how we can, in good conscience, keep adding more
new development under these conditions.”
On
the other side are developers and many elected officials, who tend to
champion growth and point to the state’s history of innovation and
overcoming the challenges posed by nature.
“This
industry produces close to $40 billion worth of economic activity for
this state,” said David Cogdill, president and chief executive of the California Building Industry Association.
“You have to seek a balance when you start talking about appropriate
ways to deal with the drought. We think a limit on new construction will
do more harm than good.”
As
has been the case in previous droughts, there is no evidence that
falling water supplies have resulted in any decline in construction. “We
are in the fourth year of a millennial drought, and yet our urban
economy continues to grow faster than the national economy,” said
Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “We can’t unplug our economy every time we get a dry year.”
But
many local officials and scientists argue that these are different
times; that because of climate change, the state is witnessing not
another cyclical drought but a new normal in which there will be less
water. As Mr. Brown put it in announcing the mandatory water restrictions, “you just can’t live the way you always have.”
An aerial view of Folsom Lake, which is at 29 percent of its capacity.
Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Accordingly,
the question of economic growth versus the environment, which has
animated policy and politics here since Mr. Brown first served as
governor in the 1970s, is not as clear as it once was, reflecting a
changing technological landscape, increased oversight by state water
officials, and Californians’ increasing awareness of conservation,
demonstrated most recently with a report
that urban water use had dropped 27 percent in June, exceeding Mr.
Brown’s 25 percent mandate. The homes being built today are different
from the water guzzlers that once commanded sweeping lawns in
communities like Shafter.
Homes
now have low-flush toilets and restrictive shower heads. And they are
surrounded, most critically, by less grass. Developers say there is less
demand among younger home buyers for the vast lawns of their parents,
and just to underline the point, the California Water Commission in July passed regulations restricting grass to no more than 25 percent of the landscaped area of a home.
A recent report by the California Homebuilding Foundation,
an industry group, found that new three-bedroom homes built for four
people needed 46,500 gallons of water a year for indoor use, half of
what was used by homes built in 1980. And that did not account for water
savings that would be presumably realized with mandates for
drought-tolerant landscaping.
“I
don’t think they should hold back building at all,” said Alex Martinez,
a senior consultant with John Burns Real Estate Consulting, which does
research for housing developers. “When you look at the data at how many
gallons of water a new home uses compared to ones built in 1975, it uses
at least half as much water. You look at who uses the most water: It’s
largely agriculture. And on the residential side, it’s the old houses
that use more water.”
In
Coachella, Mayor Steven Hernandez said that given the Colorado River
and the groundwater, he was confident that there was enough water to
supply not only the 7,800 housing units approved last summer but an
expected huge increase in the population, to 135,000 from 43,000, by
2035.
“I’m
not worried,” Mr. Hernandez said. “As long as we can continue to
recharge our basin, as long as we can continue to implement water
conservation and invest in using water two or three times, I know we’ll
do a great job of being around — we are not going to be in a water
crisis.”
Mr.
Hernandez acknowledged that the Colorado River was drying up, but noted
that his city had acquired senior water rights to it nearly a century
ago, putting it at the front of the line should cutbacks come.
“Before
one drop of water was cut here, it would have to be cut off in Arizona
and Nevada,” the mayor said. “We are going to fight for our water.”
The
central question is whether water savings technologies in new housing,
as well as some applied to old housing, such as new requirements for
water meters and leak reduction efforts, can achieve what would seem an
improbable result: no corresponding increase in the use of potable water
from a significant population growth. “This generation of water
managers are committed to knocking down per capita demand,” said Mr.
Quinn of the Association of California Water Agencies. “We have enough
water to build in California if we change how that translates into
demand for water.”
In
Sacramento, developers and environmental leaders drew up a regional
plan in 2000 setting water consumption standards for new housing that
officials here said should ease anxiety about the kind of building on
the horizon for places like Folsom, which is 20 miles to the east.
“There
is concern — when I read letters to our local publication, I hear
voices of people who are wondering whether continued development is
wise,” said Tom Gohring, the executive director of the Sacramento Water Forum,
an organization of area water agencies and environmental groups that
monitors regional water use. “The drought has hit us hard: I can tell
you I’m not watering my lawn this year, and it’s pretty brown. But the
water use in Folsom with the new development is expected to be the same
as the water use today.”
So
it is that state officials who are trying to manage the drought —
seeking at once to carry out immediate reductions but also to cultivate
long-term changes in behavior to accommodate increasingly dry times —
have stopped short of suggesting that new building be curbed statewide.
“It
is concerning to us at the state policy making levels that there may be
areas of the state where development is putting an increased strain on
water resources at a time when we know we are experiencing more droughts
and more severe droughts,” said Mr. Gomberg of the State Water
Resources Control Board. “And in certain parts of the state, that’s
really problematic.”
“On
the other hand, new developments are, by and large, pretty darn water
efficient,” he said. “The developments taking place are not the
old-school developments with a house on a lot and a pretty large lot and
an irrigation system that just blasts water. The new development is not
going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
A Front Line in the Battle
Newport
Banning Ranch sits on 401 acres on a bluff overlooking the Pacific
Ocean in Newport Beach. For years, it has been the subject of one of the
most environmentally charged battles in the state: Developers are
looking to build 1,375 homes there, as well as a hotel and 75,000 square
feet of retail space. The Newport Beach City Council approved the plan,
and a court threw out a challenge by opponents who claimed that the
project would violate state environmental laws. The matter is now before
the California Coastal Commission, which has to approve any building
along the coast.
Opponents are now invoking the drought, pointing to the already high use of water in Newport Beach, which at one point was ordered
to reduce its water use by 35 percent. They are raising the question of
where a new community of that size would get the water it needs to
exist.
“I get it: Development means jobs,” said Penny Elia, a member of the Sierra Club there who has battled the project. “But if you don’t have the water, you don’t have the water.”
While
the state can set long-term planning goals and study how population
growth affects water consumption and air pollution, it is largely
limited from imposing development limits or telling communities what
kind of building they should allow.
“The
state has not gotten into determining where growth should and should
not occur,” said Peter Brostrom, the head of the water efficiency
section of the state Department of Water Resources. “We are not trying to reduce California’s population or hold it in check as a water-saving measure.”
Builders
and some municipal leaders argue that in many cases, longtime foes of
development in places like Newport Beach have seized on the drought as a
new tool. “The same old antigrowth advocacy groups are and will try to
use this time of hardship to their advantage,” said Mr. Martinez, the
real estate consultant whose clients are housing developers.
Yet
for many community members, frustrated with local developers and City
Hall, it is a matter of adapting to what they see as the reality of a
new era.
“I
think the water is going to run out,” said Jeff Morgan, a leader of the
Sierra Club in Coachella Valley, which fought unsuccessfully to block
the Coachella development. “Whether it’s five years or 50 years, I don’t
know. But it’s going to run out.”
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