[nurple]

One thing I'm very frustrated by is my city's(Salt Lake) push for water conservation to the point they're paying residential owners to xeriscape their property. We've spent over a century terraforming the desert into a beautiful green canopy, and every day they're building more concrete and asphalt jungles with nearly no greenery while existing properties are tearing out greenery and replacing it with rocks. We even had one politician try to say we needed to cut the trees in the canyon down to save the Salt Lake, because they're absorbing too much water.

In the state, residential water usage is almost a single-digit percentage and unmetered secondary water systems have been a standard feature of neighborhoods built over farmland. They're now going around putting meters on the secondary water systems and no new developments even have them at all.

I'm really worried as the city is beginning to resemble hellscapes like Las Vegas and LA. The developer-captured legislature is just pushing shit through without much thought for their livability or scalability. Couple legislative sessions ago they removed the requirement for them to review referenda brought by concerned residents, which is one of the only methods we still had to push back against overdevelopment.