A waterless utopia?

 Marc Lore, a billionaire as the result of his creating Diapers.com and selling it to Amazon, and later creating a hoped for competitor to Amazon that he smartly sold off to Walmart which repositioned it (jet.com) as its online offering, proposes to create a 5 million (!!!!) population city in the Southwest called "Telosa."

Telosa.

Like a lot of crazy proposals, Lore has engaged a starchitecture firm, BIG--Bjark Ingels--to give it some legitimacy. E.g. Richard Rogers, Zaha Zadid's firm, Rem Koolhaas' firm, etc. get a lot of these kinds of commissions.

The media coverage ("The Diapers.com Guy Wants to Build a Utopian Megalopolis," Bloomberg) is focusing on Lore's proposal of a nonprofit running the city and capturing the profits from land appreciation, using the principles of Henry George, who believed that taxing land but not improvements somehow would be better than the system we use.  From the article:

Lore is particularly attracted to the strain of Georgism that involves creating a trust that holds the land in a community and uses the income it generates to fund social services. From that idea, he’s come up with the modest proposal to start a private foundation, buy 200,000 acres or so of land, probably somewhere in the American West, and build a 5 million-person city from the ground up—a Georgist utopia that will serve as a demonstration project for a new, fairer phase of capitalism.

“If you went into the desert where the land was worth nothing, or very little, and you created a foundation that owned the land, and people moved there and tax dollars built infrastructure and we built one of the greatest cities in the world, the foundation could be worth a trillion dollars,” Lore says. “And if the foundation’s mission was to take the appreciation of the land and give it back to the citizens in the form of medicine, education, affordable housing, social services: Wow, that’s it!”

I have problems understanding high faluting finance, but I just don't see how this would make much of a difference when all land is valued highly regardless of the improvements.  I guess for it to make a difference you'd have to have a Houston-like non-zoning environment, where landowners could build anything they wanted.

I don't understand that none of the articles seem to mention the #1 pesky issue that dooms this proposal to the wastebasket that holds so many press releases about initiatives that never amounted to anything: water.

The average household uses 100 gallons of water per person per day.  Plus there is out of house use of water in office buildings and businesses.  More for industrial and agriculture uses.

Note that the CNN article, "Plans for $400-billion new city in the American desert unveiled ," does mention water:

The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert. The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system. A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes.

but provides no details.

The white rock represents the typical water line for Lake Mead at Hoover Dam.  The lake is down about 120 feet from its peak, and drops about one foot each year.  Photo: Ethan Miller, Getty Images.

The Southwest is in the midst of a mega-drought.  Water resources are diminishing to the point:

(1) where hydroelectric dams have to stop running ("Severe drought threatens Hoover dam reservoir – and water for US west," Guardian)

(2) canyons "drowned" by the creation of dams are re-emerging

(3) most communities have water use restrictions, and 

(4) the Utah towns of Oakley and Henefer have stopped approving residential building permits because they can't guarantee the house could be supplied with water ("As water wanes, two Utah towns stop building," Salt Lake Tribune).

Seven states -- California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada – and Mexico rely on water from the Colorado River, and have to reduce water use in response to the drought's impact on water supplies.

Just because you're wealthy doesn't mean your ideas are sound.

Which is the case for the creation of 5 million person city in the Southwest United States.

Pipes containing drinking water are shown at the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, U.S., June 22, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Desalination.  Many California cities desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean to provide potable water to their residential and business customers ("Desalination advances in California despite opponents pushing for alternatives," Reuters).  Dubai gets a lot of its water this way too.

I joke that might be one of the solutions for sea level rise combined with drought, water desalination and piping the water hundreds of miles to communities and farmers desperate for water.

The desalination plant in Carlsbad, serving the San Diego County Water District, was a billion dollar project, serves about 7% of the need that Telosa would have, and only involved 10 miles of piping not thousands of miles.

It would cost many billions to do this on a scale to support Lore's city.