Building moratorium caused by drought may make Utah town miss out on remote-worker-fueled real-estate boom

Some of the last new homes being built in Oakley before the moratorium (New York Times photo by Lindsay D'Addato)

Small towns all over the nation are hoping to bring in new residents looking to move away from the city during the pandemic. Oakley, Utah, is one of them, but the drought may cause it to miss out.

"During the coronavirus pandemic, the real-estate market in their 1,750-person city boomed as remote workers flocked in from the West Coast and second homeowners staked weekend ranches. But those newcomers need water — water that is vanishing as a megadrought dries up reservoirs and rivers across the West," Jack Healy and Sophie Kasakove report for The New York Times. "So this spring, Oakley, about an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, imposed a construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want of water in a new era of megadroughts. But it could be a harbinger of things to come in a hotter, drier West."

Mayor Wade Woolstenhulme told the Times he's had to spend a lot of time defending the decision. But he stands by it: "Why are we building houses if we don’t have enough water? . . . The right thing to do to protect people who are already here is to restrict people coming in."

Oakley's economy could use new residents, as the record-breaking drought dries up groundwater and streams farmers rely on. "While summer monsoon rains have brought some recent relief to the Southwest, 99.9 percent of Utah is locked in severe drought conditions and reservoirs are less than half full," Healy and Kasakove report. "Yet cheap housing is even scarcer than water in much of Utah, whose population swelled by 18 percent from 2010 to 2020, making it the fastest-growing state. Cities across the West worry that cutting off development to conserve water will only worsen an affordability crisis that stretches from Colorado to California. Farmers and ranchers — who use 70 to 80 percent of all water — are letting their fields go brown or selling off cows and sheep they can no longer graze."