Ten New US Cities: New Lakes

This is part 7 of the series of short articles Where to Create Ten New Cities in the US.

The groundwork for this series came here:

• Deserts, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Snow, Paradises, Swamps: Why Do People Live Where They Live in the US? (premium)

• The Top 50 US Cities: Why Are They Where They Are? (paywalled)

The first six articles in this series are:

• First Principles on Where to Create New Cities (premium)

• 1. Guantanamo City

• 2. Starbase

• 3. Presidio

• 4 and 5. The Salton Sea: Salton City and Bombay Beach

• Ten New US Cities: Reviving Lakes (premium)

You don’t need to read them in order.

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In the previous post, we saw proposals to build new cities near endorheic lakes—those whose water doesn’t flow into the ocean. But is that a fantasy? Is it actually doable? Yes, this is not a pipe dream. That’s exactly what Salt Lake City is:

Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake to its northwest

And Provo!

Utah Lake is a freshwater lake, while the Great Salt Lake is brackish (salty), as its name suggests. That’s because Utah Lake empties into the Great Salt Lake: It carries water, and with it, salts. Those end up in the Great Salt Lake, where water evaporates but salts remain.

Look at this community that developers are building on the shores of Utah Lake, in Provo:

They call it Utah City

Looks cool, right? They can do it because they have a great lake nearby. Same thing with Silicon Slopes, an area just north of this that hopes to attract tech talent.

There are other such valuable lakeshore communities, like those on Lake Tahoe:

Lake Tahoe, between California and Nevada, is one of the most valuable tourist destinations in inland California. Real estate prices there are through the roof.

What if we created another Tahoe, but in the desert?

8. Tahoe-Vegas

We could make it whatever we want:

Or better, a mix of Tahoe and Vegas:

A Tahoe – Vegas – Dubai:

A city that would prove that the US stopped creating new cities in new sites simply because we ran out of will, and that with renewed will, we could settle it again.

Where would we put this city (or cities)?

Most lakes already host existing communities, and the ones I shared in the previous article are probably hard to turn into Dubai. So we would need to create new cities from scratch, which would mean creating new lakes. For that we have three requirements:

1. Lots of water

2. A flat area surrounded by mountains to contain the water

3. Most of that land should be available—that is, not taken already

Let’s start with the water.

Today, most of the Colorado River water goes to California:

But since California has a lot of coast, all of its water could come from desalination. We gave an example the other day with the revival of the Salton Sea.

What if we replaced all of California’s water with desalinated sea water? How much freshwater would we have to spare? What if we took some of that and sent it upstream, to Nevada, instead?

In the early 20th century, the Colorado River was diverted by mistake into the Salton basin, which was dry at the time, and the Salton Sea formed in just two years. That’s how much water the Colorado River carries. Similarly, within a few years, we could create a new lake in Nevada. Why Nevada?

Source

Because a huge amount of land there is federal!

But not all federal land is the same. Some belongs to Native American reservations, some to National Parks. Surprisingly though, the majority is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management, so it doesn’t have much use!¹

Source

If we zoom in on the Southwest:

Yellow is Bureau of Land Management land. Pale green is US Forestry Service. Source.

More than 85% of Nevada is federal land. Most of it is not National Parks, but is controlled by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Nevada has the highest concentration of BLM land!

There’s a reason for this, though: It’s pretty mountainous and desertic.

Las Vegas is in the middle of the desert, but it was made possible thanks to waters from the Colorado River. Could we do the same in some other part of Nevada? It’s worth looking at the land nearby. In this video, you first see Las Vegas, and then we make a trip inland.

Notice that some areas are green? These are usually the mountain tops that capture water from the air. The gray areas in between are the endorheic basins between them—like the Salton Sea, Lake Tahoe, or Mono Lake. You can see that in this map:

These are Nevada’s rivers. At the bottom right, you can see the Colorado River in blue. Do you see that most rivers here don’t go anywhere? That’s right, Nevada is mostly made of endorheic basins! And just a few thousands of years ago, most of these basins used to be lakes!

Any endorheic basin near the Colorado River would work. Here are some examples of such endorheic basins, with the Colorado below them: