WATER POLITICS

The desert Sun Belt states of Arizona and Nevada have seen some of the fastest growth in the United States for the past half century, but if climate projections are accurate, that growth might turn into a decline as temperatures soar and critical resources like water run low. But it’s not only climate change that’s challenging their growth models: from affordability to education, the states are facing a need to update the ways they attract migrants to replace an aging population that’s having fewer children. Without a strategic reaction to the pressures on population growth, Arizona and Nevada could start seeing a slowdown in migration — and even an exodus, as the years wear on. If that happens, it’ll create pressures on the strategic industries, from tech to defense, that call the region home, and could bring a new form of populism — Dust Belt populism — into American politics that demands radical solutions to their problems.

The Rise of the Sun Belt

The American Sun Belt spans the whole of the southern United States, from Los Angeles in California to Charleston in South Carolina, and is characterized by mild winters, hot summers, and lots of sunshine hours throughout the year. For centuries, it was notoriously underdeveloped by the Spanish, French and British empires and then the United States, as its climate and resource base favored wide-scale cash crops like cotton and tobacco but little industrial development up until the end of the 19th century. After the Civil War and the rapid colonization of the American West, industrialization rapidly reached the milder climates of coastal California. 

But notably, settlers largely skipped over the Sun Belt’s harshest region — the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of Arizona and Nevada. With little water (and much of the groundwater brackish) and long hot summers, only the more enterprising of miners seeking gold, silver and copper strikes, and farmers living by unstable desert rivers like the Salt River, could eke out a living in the tiny communities that would one day make up the heart of the American Southwest. 

As the 20th century dawned, however, technology began to erode the bitterness of life in the desert. Railways brought food, fuel and luxury goods to budding communities like Phoenix and Yuma. Hydroelectric dams, starting with the Salt River Project in 1903, eventually brought lights — and most importantly, water. Industrialized, corporate mining tore through the landscape at a much greater speed and efficiency than the wildcat miners of the 19th century (one of Arizona’s nicknames is ”The Copper State,” and even in 2017 it produced 68% of U.S. copper). Farming communities sprang up that could grow East Coast summer crops in the dead of winter, while air conditioning, invented in 1903 and widespread by the 1930s, took the edge off the harsh desert summers. With the climate now tamed by technology, there came the region’s economic slogan of ”the five C’s” — climate, copper, cotton, cattle and citrus. 

The U.S. federal government saw interest in the region, too. With World War II and the Cold War, Washington needed lots of cheap land to test new weapons (like the atomic bomb, the F-16 fighter jet and the F-117 stealth fighter), often in secret, bringing the military and swarms of contractors to Arizona and Nevada. Mushroom clouds were visible from Las Vegas as late as the 1950s, while Nevada’s infamous secret bases, including possibly Area 51, based the Cold War U-2 spy plane and served as the proving ground for stealth technology. 

And because the region was last to be settled in the United States, land remained cheap in Arizona and Nevada, leading to a boom in single-family housing that sprawled across the desert expanses. Economic growth abounded in the post-war years and brought millions to the region. Between 1950 and 2020, Phoenix’s population grew from just over 100,000 people to 1.6 million people (with 4.9 million in the metro area, which includes satellite cities like Tempe, Glendale, and Peoria). Within that same period, the population of Las Vegas also grew from 25,000 to 641,000 people (with 2.3 million in the metro area, which includes satellite cities like North Las Vegas and Paradise). 

As a result, the two states grew in political and strategic importance. Despite still being dwarfed by more populous states like California, Texas and New York, both Nevada and Arizona parlayed their rising stature into national influence, Arizona produced swing-state senators like John McCain and libertarian ideologues like Barry Goldwater, while Nevada contributed former Democratic majority leader Harry Reid. This political influence helped cement their importance for federal spending in defense and education, creating the ecosystem that has since lured big tech companies like IBM and Motorola to the region, as well as more recently chip manufacturers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Company (TMSC).

Beginning to Blister

But the first of those ”five C’s” — climate — is turning sour. The region has been in a so-called ”megadrought” since 2000 (though there’s now a debate as to whether it’s really a drought or if this is an ”old normal” that’s reasserted itself after a wetter-than-usual 20th century). On Aug. 16, the U.S. federal government announced that starting in January 2023 it would impose water cuts on all the states (and Mexico) that rely on the dwindling Colorado River. Of those states, Arizona and Nevada will take the biggest hits, losing 21% and 8% of the water they currently receive from the river, respectively. For Arizona and Nevada, these cuts will hammer at least three of their other ”C’s” — citrus, cattle and cotton, which are among the water-hungry agricultural sectors that will be first to cut back. 

But climate change is not just affecting water. Projections suggest summer temperatures in Phoenix and Las Vegas will average well over 110 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, placing them among the ranks of current cities in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Such scorching temperatures will wither crops, feed wildfires, and contribute to the perception that perhaps the desert is once again unlivable, deterring tourists from the Las Vegas Strip and Arizona shopping malls for parts of the year. 

There’s also the challenge of remaining an attractive place to live, work and (in the case of the region’s substantial retiree populations) die. Both Arizona and Nevada are now both performing poorly on ”best places to live” surveys, driven by low state spending on education, worsening cost of living, and healthcare affordability. In 2022, CNBC ranked Nevada the 39th best state to live in the United States; Arizona ranked dead last at 50th, driven by poor education systems, worsening cost of living, and controversial political climate. 

Arizona and Nevada rank toward the bottom for education spending, with the former spending only $8,800 per student and the latter spending barely above $9,100 per student (compared with Texas’s $9,900, California’s $13,600, and New York state’s $24,900. Both Arizona and Nevada struggle with teacher shortages as well due to the low wages offered by schools in both states, which deter people from entering the profession. For those considering relocating with children, neither state’s schooling systems are necessarily a selling point. 

Like many cities across the United States, the once-cheap housing tracts in Phoenix and Las Vegas have also skyrocketed in value in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, pricing out many first-time buyers. Phoenix alone saw a 32% increase in home prices, the steepest in the nation, in 2021. Internal politics suggests that the price increase could be a permanent one: strictly enforced single-family zoning means that denser, cheaper housing is in short supply (and will continue to be so), while newer homes will be built farther and farther out from the amenities, workplaces and services new residents want. Long commute times aside, some will weigh in their minds the possibility of another sudden surge in gas prices — like the one caused by the global shocks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — as another reason to avoid cities that force miles of commutes. 

There are also both looming political problems in Arizona and (to a lesser extent) Nevada. Arizona, in particular, is at the center of ongoing controversies surrounding the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. With the state’s politics focused more on such national issues, mitigating crises within Arizona — like housing, education spending, and water management — is left up to cities with limited resources. Meanwhile, the states themselves are squabbling over who should face cuts, worried about domestic political backlash from citizens who find lawns drying up and farmland collapsing. 

The Rise of a Dust Belt?

Arizona and Nevada will cement their reputations as being poor places to live without improvements to these climate, economic, social and political problems. Both states may welcome fewer and fewer new residents, while current residents — including critical businesses — increasingly consider packing up for greener pastures (figuratively and literally) as well. As the years wear on toward the 2030s, Arizona and Nevada might also fail to replace their Baby Boomer retiree populations, as that sizable segment of the population begins to die, taking with them the jobs and services that are used to support their retirement communities. 

This decline has happened before in U.S. history — in the Rust Belt, the stretch of states from New York to Illinois that rapidly industrialized in the 19th and early 20th centuries and then found themselves unable to adapt to the challenges of the modern era. Even now, the populations of some cities in those Rust Belt states, like Syracuse in upstate New York, continue to shrink. 

This migratory pattern is possible because the U.S. is the fourth largest country in the world by land; Americans can readily relocate to an entirely new climate and geographic landscape — all without having to leave their home country, as they did from the Rust Belt when the region began to lose its luster. Those living in U.S. desert cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas can also more easily escape to cooler and wetter areas, compared with desert cities elsewhere in the world like Riyadh, where Saudis have more or less no choice but to face climate change head-on given the lack of climate diversity in their country. 

Indeed, a narrative that the deserts are increasingly unlivable could collide with expensive or unattractive housing and lifestyles and deter fresh migration. In that case, a so-called Dust Belt might emerge, with stagnating or shrinking populations in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma creating a reputation of decline that only furthers the decline. And once that reputation takes hold, it’s very hard to shake off. 

And when declinism becomes the narrative for a city, it also accompanied rises in drug abuse and crime, which only furthered the narrative of decline. Cities like Detroit and New York saw surges of organized and individual crime throughout their toughest years in the 1970s and 1980s. But unlike the Rust Belt, the Dust Belt would be on the border with Mexico, where the influence of cartels could more readily creep northward through the social decay. That could make the Dust Belt a much greater strategic problem than the Rust Belt ever was. 

A Dust Belt would also pressure those strategic industries that rely on well-educated workers. It would be no simple feat for the military, defense and tech companies to relocate, especially when they’ve already invested heavily in major infrastructures like factories and military bases. They might be stuck with struggling to attract talented workers and paying more for those they do attract. Meanwhile, those that could, especially in the private sector, would likely be planning their own exit from the region. 

And if there is a Dust Belt, it’s likely it will accompany the invention of a new type of populism that will further destabilize American politics. The resentful politics of the Rust Belt helped produce the anti-globalization and nativist populist nationalism that has gripped America’s right in the past decade; their uniting quality was anger at the ruling establishment that they saw as sending their jobs overseas or undermining their wages through immigration. 

Those who stay in the Dust Belt will doubtless be just as angry. It’s hard to say exactly what Dust Belt populism would believe in, though assuredly it would demand expensive investments in the region to offset climate change (like the increasingly touted Mississippi-to-the-Colorado River canal or pipe system that early estimates suggest would cost $23 billion). If the cartels exploit social decay, this Dust Belt populism would probably be deeply nativist as well, even nationalist, as the cartels could bring the kind of crime to Phoenix and Las Vegas that New York and Detroit experienced in the 1970s. And there is also a chance that Dust Belt populism might even be radically environmentalist, demanding rapid shifts in Federal policies to slow the climate decay of their own region. They might embrace the environmental rhetoric of groups like the Extinction Rebellion, demanding a rapid end to fossil fuels, or even become a base of recruitment for extremist environmental groups that engage in eco-terror throughout the United States. 

Not a Fait Accompli

However, none of these trends are fatal or deterministic. New York City went through similar Rust Belt challenges but by the early 1990s had returned to growth; by the 2010s, had even pushed down crime to record low levels. The city met the economic challenge of deindustrialization, pivoting into finance, technology and tourism, to solve its economic woes, while embracing new technologies and police tactics to combat crime and investing in rehabilitating its abandoned homes and apartments to fight the image of a city in permanent decline. With adaptation, New York City overcame the challenges of its era.

But as a warning to the Sun Belt desert cities, not all Rust Belt cities were able to do as well as New York. Some, like Gary, Indiana, could never find a replacement for their vital industry — in Gary’s case, steel — once that industry moved on from the city. And as a result, Gary remains in decline. Detroit, Michigan, was able to hold its vital industry — automobiles — but still couldn’t fight the perception of a city still falling apart; Detroit lost 10% of its population between 2010 and 2020. 

In the Rust Belt, New York City, as it turns out, was more exception than the rule. More importantly, none of these changes happened overnight. The Rust Belt’s decline began in the 1960s and continues in some places to this day, driven by major headline-making events like the race riots in Detroit in 1965, along with less publicized (but no less substantial) trends like rising labor costs and changing patterns of government spending. 

There remains some time before the prospect of a Dust Belt becomes a real existential threat to Phoenix, Las Vegas, Yuma and Tucson. But as the experience of the Rust Belt shows, if the process gets steadily underway, it will take years, even decades, for the region’s governments to turn the perception around.