Like many of you, I don’t always agree with every opinion I read in The Nevada Independent. As I don’t write for the Washington Post, however, I am professionally obliged to be somewhat careful in how I couch my criticisms of Bob Fulkerson’s recent column in The Nevada Independent.

There is, to be clear, much I agree with. He is undeniably correct that the Truckee River — the primary water source for Nevada’s second-most populous metropolitan area — provides a finite supply of water to the region. He is further correct that the demands placed against the Truckee River are rapidly approaching the practical limits of what local residents can realistically expect the river to deliver. He is also correct that, if the region develops as it largely has thus far — as mile after mile of cheaply built single-family homes, each surrounded by small lawns, a collection of foliage, and a slowly disintegrating patch of pavement — the region’s water and nearby open lands will be swallowed whole. Additionally, he’s correct that this issue can’t be fixed by piping fossil water from distant desert valleys into Reno. 

I even agree that this clearly destructive pattern of development is the product of indefensible property tax subsidies and other unpleasantly venal byproducts of intense political lobbying by well-connected special interest groups.

Where I disagree with conservatives like Mr. Fulkerson — I call him a conservative not because I think he’s a Republican (he is most assuredly not) but because, like William F. Buckley when he founded the National Review, Fulkerson’s proposed solution to these problems is to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop” — is not in the initial diagnosis. Instead, the problem lies in the fact that many conservatives, like Mr. Fulkerson, take much of the society they live in, and the assumptions that society is built around, as an inevitable, natural order instead of as the collective consequence of a series of conscious choices. 

Take, for example, the assumption the Truckee Meadows Regional Planning Agency made in 2008 that 3.18 residents will consume an acre-foot of water per year. With each acre-foot of water being the equivalent of approximately 325,850 gallons, that works out to just under 102,469 gallons of water per person per year, or a bit more than 280 gallons of water per person per day. That is more than twice as much water as Clark County and New York City residents currently use. Expecting each resident in a desert valley that receives roughly the same amount of precipitation as Phoenix, on average, to consume more water each day than two people in our nation’s largest city — a city which receives nearly 50 inches of precipitation each year — is a choice.

Truckee Meadows Water Authority’s below-market rates are also a choice. If a Reno resident consumes 280 gallons of water each day, or 8,400 gallons every 30 days, the charge is only $18.96 each month ($11.52 for the first 6,000 gallons, $7.44 for the next 2,400 gallons) for the water, not including the meter fee. By comparison, the same amount of water in Houston, Texas — which receives an average of nearly 47 inches of precipitation each year — costs $29.70 each month ($3 for the first 3,000 gallons, $29.70 for the remaining 5,400 gallons) — more than 56 percent higher than residents in Reno pay for the same quantity of water.

Imagine for a moment that Japan had cheaper gasoline than Saudi Arabia despite Japan having little domestic oil production. How fuel efficient would you expect a Toyota or Honda to be if the engineers paid less than half as much for each gallon of gasoline as we do?

Letting 636,000 people monopolize 200,000 acre-feet of water, instead of encouraging them to reduce their water consumption to the same 127 gallons per capita per day Clark County residents use so the same source of water can instead serve 1,400,000 people, is a choice — or, more accurately, the end product of several choices, each of which should and must be carefully reexamined.

Unfortunately, instead of carefully examining how we got to the point where desert residents believe they’re each entitled to use more water each day than residents of Gulf and Atlantic coast metropolises (if you’re about to write me an email pointing out how it’s easier to water a lawn when enough rain falls from the sky to keep it watered, you’re not making the point you think you are), conservatively-minded environmentalists instead arrive at a solution that, to paraphrase another famous conservative writer, is neat, plausible, and wrong: Just stop building anything near anyone.

This wrong solution, of course, is nothing new — it’s been the driving force of coastal Californian development for over two generations now. As Conor Dougherty effectively explained in his recent profile of Susan Kirsch, the founder of Livable California, in The New York Times, reflexive opposition to development was a reasonable response to the automobile and single family-focused development patterns of the 1950s and 1960s. Faced with the unpleasant externalities of endless tract housing paving over every hill and valley in sight — endless and polluting traffic, the destruction of open space — environmentalists of the era did their best to think globally and act locally by demanding cities and developers both stop doing any further harm.

For what it’s worth, the environmentalists of the era were absolutely correct. Newly-imposed parking requirements gutted previously walkable neighborhoods and replaced tax-paying residential and commercial buildings with empty parking lots. The flurry of highway construction begun under the Eisenhower administration led to the construction of hundreds of thousands of miles of roadway nobody has the money or resources to maintain. Automobile-focused development led to the construction of actively unsafe neighborhoods people barely want to drive through, much less bike or walk in. These harms absolutely needed to be stopped.

Unfortunately, you can say whatever you might about billionaires, venture capitalists, and developers, but they’re not why people frequently have sex and occasionally get pregnant. Whether housing is built for them or not, the people who currently live in the Bay Area or near Reno would still live somewhere, work somewhere, and raise their children somewhere. Children would still grow into adults and want to move out of their parents’ home, preferably to somewhere where they can safely and comfortably raise children of their own. 

Consequently, by categorically blocking housing construction, environmentalists didn’t just unwittingly create the housing scarcity that has since led to out of control housing and rent prices. They also permanently locked in the dysfunctional development and traffic patterns they abhorred by preventing the infill and neighborhood densification necessary to support mass transit and walkable neighborhoods.

That’s why housing more people in the Truckee Meadows (and Las Vegas, for that matter), will actually encourage Nevada to reorient towards lower impact, more environmentally sound development patterns. Those new people will have to live somewhere — and as Truckee Meadows is less than a sixth as large as Las Vegas Valley, most of those people will need to move into new, modern, more energy- and water-efficient housing built on the current sites of decades-old housing with decades-old plumbing and decades-old insulation. In other words, many of the single-family homes built in the area, along with their water-consuming yards, will need to be demolished to make way for new apartment complexes and condominiums. Thankfully, this won’t be done by force — new residents, or at least the developers who wish to cater to them, will pay existing residents handsomely for their land as the need arises (if we let them).

Even so, it’s undeniable that a few new residents might move into the North Valleys, Spanish Springs, or — if the Washoe County Lands Bill ever passes — into nearby foothills. Thankfully, our region’s geography may help protect us from our worst impulses. The maximum amount of car traffic that can leave neighboring valleys is geographically constrained, which is why commuting by car from those valleys to where most area jobs is already quite miserable, especially whenever an accident or inclement weather snarls traffic. We should take advantage of that by encouraging and permitting as many people as possible to live and work within Truckee Meadows itself so new residents are less likely to move into the urban periphery next to our diminishing open spaces.

If we want to preserve our open spaces, the way we do that isn’t by freezing our existing, broken suburban development pattern into amber while we flush the occasional homeless encampment full of people who can’t cough up $2,000 per month in rent into Pyramid Lake during each spring thaw. Instead, we should use the money of Reno’s and Sparks’ newest residents to fund the redevelopment of many of our existing neighborhoods into far more efficient, far less wasteful, and far less environmentally damaging forms of housing — the sort of housing we can not only afford to buy or rent now, but can also continue to afford to live in through an uncertain future.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].