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Water and My Community: How Smart Growth Can Reduce the Cost and Challenge of Water Delivery - Paula VanLare
Published: 1/9/2005

2004 Southeast Watershed Roundtable Presentaion Click here for full agenda

The choices we make about how and where to grow have a direct impact on the cost and availability of water. Development patterns have a very real impact on communities’ ability to respond to these challenges. Understanding the connection between development choices and their impacts on water can help communities adopt an approach to growth that reduces both overall demand for the limited supply of water, and the absolute cost of water provision through lower investment expenditure and less leakage. The effects of growth on water supply and demand are broad and complex. Population growth increases demands for water that are fulfilled first using local underground and surface water sources, and then more distant aquifers and dams, increasing costs and decreasing supply efficiency. At the same time, how communities grow can contribute to water shortages. Dispersed development that requires more roads and parking lots, for example, interferes with the natural process of recharging underground aquifers. It may also contribute to more polluted runoff and stormwater overflow, both of which degrade water quality. The net effects are growing treatment and distribution costs, and a strained supply of easily accessible water. The complex relationship between growth and water is the subject of much research. This paper aims to contribute to the broader discussion by focusing on a narrow yet important aspect of this relationship: the opportunities that a more compact, centralized approach to development provides for reducing the cost of and demand for water. This paper examines water demand, and considers only the costs and resources associated with delivering water from a treatment facility to the end user. As this paper will demonstrate, water demand is influenced by the policies and practices of many. Federal, state, and local governments, citizens, and other private and public sector actors all play a role in determining how and where growth occurs (and therefore its attendant water demands) or how water is provided. As such, myriad opportunities exist to improve water provision and reduce demand through decisions on land use, infrastructure investment, development patterns, water pricing, and other such issues. This paper is intended to support those involved in this broad range of decision-making opportunities by demonstrating the linkages between smart growth and water demand, and highlighting opportunities to increase efficiency, lower costs, and reduce household and commercial demand for water.

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