Ten New US Cities: The Salton Sea
This is part 5 of the short series Where to Create Ten New Cities in the US.
The groundwork for this series came in these two articles:
The first four articles in this series are:
You don’t need to read them in order.
Today, I’m sharing two cities instead of one. You’ll see why.
4. Salton City
Salton City is a ghost town.
It has seen better days.
It wasn’t meant to end this way. Salton City was supposed to host 40,000 residents, but it only has 5,000 today. Nearly 40% of habitable residences are empty.
The city built dozens of streets leading to nowhere.
Why? Because of water.
This is where Salton City lies:
Salton City is on the shores of the Salton Sea. As I explained in this article, the Salton Sea used to be full of life because water was plentiful. Imperial Valley farmers used to flood their fields with Colorado River water, which then reached the sea.
But water became scarce in California. People started fighting for Colorado River water. The allocation to farmers was reduced, and they started being much more careful with their water. Less water meant no runoff into the Salton Sea. As the Sea dried up, salt concentrated, fish started dying, birds escaped, the dusty air became unbreathable, and people never came.
But as I explained here and here, there’s a pretty simple solution: Refill the Sea with seawater!
The Salton Sea is below sea level.
We can build a canal from the ocean (the Sea of Cortez) to the Salton Sea:
By refilling the Salton Sea, animals would come back and air would stop being toxic. The water flowing into the sea would generate hydroelectric electricity, which we could use for water desalination, bringing all the water needed for Salton City’s development. To give you orders of magnitude, desalinating water would cost 0.1 cents per gallon, or about 90% less than the current cost of municipal water in San Francisco, and about 80% less than the current cost of industrial water in that city.
As salts accumulated in the sea, they could be harvested, including the very valuable lithium.1
The total cost of a project like this is between $20B and $150B2, but that compares positively with the cost of doing nothing: Revitalizing the area could create immense wealth, whereas leaving it as is will create losses in the tens of billions in healthcare costs, environmental costs, and the loss of real estate value.3
I like the visual aesthetic vision that Casey Handmer has for this area, which he calls Hyperdrive City:
This city would be designed to be lived in, with industry linked to the area’s energy, desalination, and salts harvesting. But the shores could become full of life again thanks to another industry as well: tourism. And this is no pipe dream, because there used to be a tourism industry here.
5. Bombay Beach
Bombay Beach is on the other side of the Salton Sea.
And like Salton City, it’s a ghost town.
A dead town.
But it wasn’t always like that!
It used to be a tourist destination.
Raising the water levels and providing cheap desalinated water would eliminate the two barriers to the rebirth of Bombay Beach. The investment would not only be recouped through more tourism and real estate income, but also by the reduction of healthcare costs in the area, thanks to the reduction of respiratory issues caused by the Salton Sea’s shrinkage, which today affect hundreds of thousands of people in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys. A win win for everybody!
And why is federal involvement needed here? For three reasons:
The Pacific coast is on the Mexican side. This requires an international agreement.
Refilling the Salton Sea affects Colorado River water rights, which are split across several states.
This would require a hefty financial investment, which California could technically afford, but would be unlikely to approve given how conservative the government there has become with regard to land development.
So this is why I suggest Salton City and Bombay Beach as two of the new 10 cities the US should create. Technically, they exist today, but they’re so moribund that they need a fresh injection of life. That’s what a federal initiative could achieve.
But we’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of lakes for new life. The next article, we’re going to explore this idea much more!
They’re harvestable today, but as far as I know this hasn’t been done. If we added more water, we would dilute the salts, but a section of the lake could be dedicated to evaporating water to harvest the salts.
The $20B excludes desalinating the water from the Sea of Cortez. The $40-50B comes from Casey Handmer, linked in the article. It assumes water will be desalinated. The $150B comes from university professors at the Universities of Arizona and California. I personally think that this last calculation is wildly conservative. If lawmakers really wanted to, they could get this done for cheaper.
The winds pick up the salty dust and push it down people’s throats in the region. Hundreds of thousands breathe it, causing widespread respiratory diseases that cost tens of billions in healthcare.
I see that the difference in elevation is about 74m. Building a canal large enough could enable ocean ships to load cargo for import/export, but an accompanying pipeline could generate an incredible amount of electric power as the Sea refills. Eventually, the inflow would subside to the rate of evaporation, but even that would generate a reasonable amount of "free" electricity, especially because the tidal range at the end of the Gulf of California is about 6m.
twice a day!
I can understand that Mexico would not be thrilled with polluted Salton Sea water entering the Gulf, but to be fair the innermost end is pretty polluted now and the initial filling + twice daily flow would actually clean that area. The economic benefits would certainly spread into that area of Mexico.
My thought about the cities we have now is that due to the increase in population in them since they were developed, the infrastructure is insanely inadequate. Building new cities elsewhere is a great idea. I lived in Nairobi as a kid and it was fabulous. Now, having well outgrown its infrastructure, it is no longer easy to live there. I think we are ruining my current city, Boulder in the same way.