Texas is the new Arizona – and not in a positive sense

A man carries a case of water to his car that he received at a water distribution center in Houston. (TNS)

Mark Gongloff, Tribune News Service

People can survive entire days without food, shelter, or internet, but they can't go long without water. That's why it's so odd that Americans are increasingly moving to areas where water is becoming increasingly scarce. The latest hotspot of drought is Texas. Two fast-growing Texas cities have been in the news recently for their water shortages. The first, Clyde, was unable to pay off a municipal bond because it didn't have enough water to sell to customers. Clyde, a neighbor of Abilene, is on the edge of West Texas, where the water reservoirs that served hundreds of thousands of people have shrunk due to the ongoing drought. (A lake in San Angelo, where I was born, has virtually disappeared, filled to just 0.8% of its capacity.) Clyde is small, with only about 4,000 residents, but since the turn of the century its population has grown by more than a third—a familiar story in a state that draws people from across the country.

The second newly famous place is Kyle, a city of more than 60,000 residents about a half-hour drive south of Austin. It was the second-fastest-growing city in America last year among places with 50,000 or more residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Its 9% growth in 2023 was surpassed only by Georgetown, about a half-hour drive north of Austin, which grew by nearly 11%. Kyle has grown by more than a third in the past three years alone. Kyle became famous because the Wall Street Journal wrote about how its rapid development is running up against dangerous heat and water shortages.

Clyde and Kyle join a long list of increasingly hot, dry places with booming populations, raising new questions about why Americans are so relentlessly moving toward the climate crisis rather than away from it. People fleeing wildfires and high housing prices in California, for example, are heading down paths of new disasters, with new possibilities of financial ruin. As the planet warms, these places face a choice: Either deter these newcomers and the nice, nice tax dollars they bring, or expensively renovate their infrastructure to accommodate them. “We've always built where we wanted to build, let people move where they wanted to move, and hoped we would find the resources to meet their needs,” Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group in Oakland, said in an interview. “Now we are facing a difficult reality: the realization that there is not necessarily enough water to meet our future needs.”

Arizona is a poster state for this problem. Three of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in the suburbs of Phoenix, which has long topped these lists despite rapidly rising temperatures and water scarcity. But climate change is turning Texas into the next Arizona, only much bigger. As University of Texas climate scientist Jay Banner explained to me, the state is bisected by the 100th meridian, which for a long time roughly marked the dividing line between the dry southwest and the green, wet southeast. As the earth has warmed and soils have dried out, that dividing line has slowly shifted eastward. In coming years, it will run across the Interstate 35 corridor that connects San Antonio to Austin, Dallas, and all the cities in their vicinity, including Kyle. These metropolitan areas alone are now home to about 12 million people, and that population is expected to double by 2050.

At the same time, rising heat will dry out the soil and cause its water to evaporate. Central Texas will start to look like Arizona. Development that accompanies the population boom will make this worse as more and more ground is concreted over, making groundwater recharge more difficult and increasing the urban heat island effect, driving temperatures even higher. “Demand is going up sharply, supply is going down sharply, which is not a sustainable future for Texas' water resources,” Banner said. There are solutions, but they require political will, vision and money. Lots of money. First, Texas could get to the root of the problem by encouraging a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, thereby slowing climate change and limiting warming. Asking that of a state dominated by the fossil fuel industry seems unrealistic. At the same time, Texas leads the nation in renewable energy deployment, taking advantage of its abundant sun and windy plains despite a hostile state government. So maybe there is hope.

In the meantime, Texas should take a longer-term approach to its water problem, rather than solving crises as they arise. A local utility, for example, is building a $250 million pipeline to pump water from 40 miles away to Kyle. The water will quench thirst for the next 50 years, it claims. A water expert at Texas State University told the Journal that a more realistic estimate is 20 years. The math tells us that 20 years is shorter than the 30-year mortgages most homebuyers take out to live in Kyle. Arizona, on the other hand, requires new buildings to prove they have a water source that will last a century. Of course, that's unpopular with developers, and 100-year projections are hardly accurate. But at least the idea speaks to a water consciousness that Arizonans have developed over centuries of drought. Texans don't have that much time.

Fixing aging water infrastructure is also critical. According to the Texas Water Development Board's recent audit, Texas lost 129 billion gallons of water in 2022 due to leaky pipes, enough to flood downtown Austin 2 feet deep. Booming populations and weather extremes will put even more strain on aging systems. Texas lawmakers recently approved a $1 billion fund for maintenance, but that's just a fraction of what's needed. Texas could help cover those costs while preventing waste and curbing in-migration at least a little by simply raising water prices. Residential customers in Texas pay an average of just about $37 a month, according to an estimate by Forbes Home, putting them right in the middle of U.S. states. Texas law limits how much utilities can raise their rates, but they need more leeway to charge high fees to heavy users. And the state needs a more robust system for buying and selling water rights.

As politically painful and expensive as these ideas may seem, they will only get more expensive the longer Texas waits. As Banner notes, the state has an opportunity now, long before the I-35 megalopolis—San AusDal?—reaches its full bloom, to make infrastructure and building codes more water efficient, including making it easier to reuse “gray” wastewater. Of course, this problem could resolve itself, as Texas may be able to expect temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more for a third of each year in the future, and droughts become more frequent and severe: Climate migration may finally be retreating from Texas. But there are no signs yet of that happening. And millions of people who don’t have the means to break camp or sell their homes without adequate water supplies will be stuck. As with so many other issues related to the climate crisis, the sooner Texas addresses this problem, the better.