Kyle, Texas: A City That Is Too Hot, Too Dry – and Booming August 25th, 2024
Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, an article on Kyle, Texas – one of the U.S.’s fastest-growing cities – but with extreme heat and limited water supplies, that isn’t necessarily a good thing:
People and businesses have flooded into Kyle, Texas, since the pandemic, making it the second-fastest-growing city in the U.S. The influx is creating wealth but also contributing to a big problem: Kyle is getting hotter and running low on water.
Housing developments pop up seemingly overnight on this patch of hills and prairie between Austin and San Antonio. Amazon.com recently opened a 308,000-square-foot sorting center in town. Tesla built a megafactory nearby.
But climate change can make living here brutal. Underground, the aquifer that Kyle relied on is shrinking. The city for three years now has had to buy water rights from nearby San Marcos to satisfy its growing population. Temperatures hit nearly 100 degrees before this summer even started, and drought conditions persist. People wear neck fans, limit outdoor time to early morning and nighttime, and keep their children inside.
Cities across the South and Southwest, in states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, have been growing like gangbusters, especially since the pandemic. Newcomers arrive looking for low taxes and ample space. Expanding populations attract new employers and commerce, which raise property values and bolster tax rolls.
But many of these boomtowns, including Kyle, are hot and dry, and getting more so. They face unique—and costly—challenges, such as where to get enough water and how to heatproof the new football field.
The more people move in, the bigger the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the number of people exposed to harsh weather that can turn deadly.
Fastest-growing cities in 2023, increase from a year earlierSource: Census BureauNote: Includes cities with a population of 50,000 or more.
Water has been growing scarcer for decades here, but the shortage is worsening. Creeks and watering holes are drying up, hurt by prolonged droughts and the faster evaporation caused by higher temperatures.
Hays County, where the city of Kyle is located, will likely experience extreme droughts at least one-quarter of each year by 2040, according to data provider ICE Sustainable Finance.
Last summer, Kyle and other municipalities limited the use of sprinklers and soaker hoses to once every other week, a problem because many Texan homeowners must moisten the soil under their foundations to avoid settling and cracks. The city banned washing cars at home and using local water for construction projects.
Stephanie McDonald, who bought her home in Kyle in 2015, worries about its foundation because the soil underneath can dry up and sink during drought if it isn’t watered. At city council meetings this spring, McDonald, 62 years old, told officials that there wasn’t enough water for the new housing developments they were approving.
Homes and businesses in Kyle needed 4,382 more gallons of water per minute at peak consumption times last year than the city could supply, up from 571 gallons in 2021, according to an engineering report commissioned by the city.
Trying to fill the water gap has been expensive for the city and its residents.
The minimum water bill for households rose 6.8% annually on average from 2012 to 2022, according to city budget reports. That is nearly double the average of about 3.5% in the Southern U.S. over the same period, according to the American Water Works Association, a think tank.
Travis Mitchell, mayor of Kyle, said the city will adapt. The restrictions on lawn watering have already helped, he said, and a new pipeline is supposed to start importing water into Kyle over the next year.
The city is also considering recycling wastewater for agricultural and commercial use and requiring new homes to install landscaping that requires little water, he said.
“We don’t get to choose between moderate or slow growth,” Mitchell said in an interview in the city’s new 64,000-square-foot municipal building. Texas law gives municipalities fewer levers to curb construction than in other states, Mitchell said, so Kyle focuses on attracting developers, then bargaining with them to ensure they build sustainably.
A crew works on installing a pipeline to import water to Kyle from an underground aquifer about 40 miles away.
The scheduled new pipeline costs about $250 million to build and is run by a utility called Alliance Water. The project is supposed to pipe water from an underground aquifer about 40 miles away to Kyle and other cities that funded it.
Alliance planned to start delivering water last year but has struggled with construction delays. Alliance now says the pipeline will start pumping water into Kyle in 2025.
Graham Moore, Alliance Water’s executive director, said the pipeline should provide water to Kyle, San Marcos and Buda for at least 50 years.
Robert Mace, executive director at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, said the aquifer could run dry much sooner, likely within 10 to 20 years. Utilities servicing other Austin suburbs and San Antonio are also tapping the same aquifer, accelerating its depletion, he said.
Top, Robert Mace stands by what is usually the swimming area at Jacob’s Well in Wimberley, Texas. Drought-like conditions and increased water consumption are drying up creeks and watering holes.
Bob Gregory sees opportunity in the harsh conditions. He has started desalinating the brackish water 700 feet under his landfill business, Texas Disposal Systems, located 13 miles north of Kyle. The company plans to start producing drinkable water for sale next year.
“It’s a matter of time before the price of water will go up to offset the price I pay for desalination,” Gregory said.
100 degrees and higher
It costs money to manage heat, ranging from medical bills and missed workdays to increased road repairs and some more unusual expenses. Buda, the city just north of Kyle, rented a walk-through cooler for its “Red, White & Buda” Fourth of July parade, so that overheated celebrants had a place to pop in.
The heat index, which accounts for heat and humidity, reached a record 118 degrees in the Austin area in June 2023 and hit 115 in June this year.
In May, emergency medical services in the Austin area responded to 125 heat-related calls, more than double the amount a year earlier. Heat-related deaths across the state hit a record 341 last year.
“I had people working in factories or at an Amazon warehouse taking precautions and going to work with a big jug of water and they still ended up in renal failure,” said John Turner, the medical director of four emergency and urgent-care facilities in the area.
Renal failure occurs when dehydration causes toxins to build up in the blood, potentially damaging the kidneys. A few patients crossed over into rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition that causes muscle tissue to break down.
The Amazon sorting center in Kyle has air conditioning, ensuring an average internal temperature of 74 degrees Fahrenheit, a company spokeswoman said. No employees working there reported heat-related illnesses in 2023 or 2024, she said.
Alex Stockton is a member of the Laborers’ International Union of North America who runs construction crews that drilled underground to lay conduits for telecommunications at a new housing development in Kyle. He moved to Buda a year ago from a suburb of Milwaukee.
He is happy in his new life, and recently got engaged and bought a house and truck. Texas is the modern land of opportunity, he said, attracting droves much like California did in the 1848 gold rush.
Still, the heat is extreme.
“I’ve seen people completely black out,” Stockton said. “I’ve blacked out myself.”
Officially, his crew gets only a 30-minute break during the day, he said. But now when a member turns pale or starts slurring words, Stockton makes them sit down.
“A lot of companies don’t like that style,” Stockton said. “They come by and say, ‘Why’s he sitting there?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know, so he doesn’t die?’”
Breakneck growth
Still, the heat and the water scarcity haven’t deterred new arrivals to Kyle, which now has about 63,000 residents.
A wave of newcomers from higher-cost cities fueled a 35% increase in Kyle’s population from 2020 to 2023, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Census Bureau. One of the few U.S. cities that grew faster in that period, Georgetown, is just on the other side of Austin.
In Kyle, signs of growth are everywhere. Organic-food retailer Sprouts Farmers Market is opening alongside dollar stores that long lined the roads. Electric-vehicle charger company XCharge Technologies has opened a flagship U.S. workshop. The city’s annual revenue from taxes and fees has quadrupled over the past decade to $65 million.
Bill Curran came to Kyle in May 2022 from small-town New Hampshire. He moved in with hometown friends who bought a newly built house in a giant development called Plum Creek, which has 6,000 units and counting. It was much nicer—and cheaper—than anything they could afford in the Northeast. Curran, 30, got an administrative support job in tax preparation in Austin that more than doubled the salary he made in the north.
The move also gave him confidence to branch out socially. “I’ve found my little place here,” he said.
But the heat has forced him to alter daily routines. He exercises in the early morning now, stays indoors more and guzzles water to stay hydrated. Curran left Kyle in March because the growing population slowed traffic, turning his 45-minute commute into an hour. He moved to Austin—whose own growth has been turbocharged by an influx of wealthy coastal émigrés and technology companies such as Oracle and Apple—to be closer to his job.
In Kyle, Mayor Mitchell plans for the city to build a $98 million sports complex to host athletic tournaments that he says will attract hotels and restaurants. Synthetic turf for soccer and football fields would need to be built under artificial shade or irrigated to prevent it from getting too hot. A proposed splash pad for children drew pushback from a city council member concerned about the lack of water.
The water scarcity hasn’t deterred new arrivals to Kyle.
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