From the suburban boomtowns of the Colorado River Basin to the postindustrial cities of the Northeast, communities across the United States can benefit from integrating land and water planning in the face of increasing water demands, climate change, and other risks, according to a new Policy Focus Report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

In Integrating Land Use and Water Management: Planning and Practice, author Erin Rugland of the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy explains how integrating land and water can help communities deal with increased drought or flooding as they navigate the uncertainty of a warming planet and changes in their communities. She outlines best practices in land use planning and water management, provides a detailed menu of policy tools, and shares four success stories from vastly different places: Evans, Colorado; Hillsborough County, Florida; Philadelphia; and Golden Valley, Minnesota. 

“Water is not only essential to life and to thriving communities, but it brings value to land,” Rugland writes in the report. “Land use determines the character of communities and in turn greatly impacts water demand, water quality, and flooding risks. Connecting land with water and understanding these resources in the context of issues like equity, resiliency, and climate change is critical for building and sustaining healthy communities for the future.” 

Although land and water are inextricably linked, land use planning and water management have historically occurred in silos. Rugland clearly explains each discipline, focusing on a key policy framework for each—the comprehensive plan and the water management plan. Comprehensive plans lay out a community’s long-term vision, with an emphasis on themes like economic development, transportation, and housing. Water management plans vary more widely from place to place; some focus narrowly on drinking water supply, while others incorporate wastewater and stormwater. 

As the report describes, state policy can play a significant role in promoting the integration of land and water planning, whether through mandates or resources. Colorado, for instance, requires utilities to consider how land use efforts can reduce water use. The state also supports the Colorado Water and Land Use Planning Alliance, a peer learning group for local practitioners. Pennsylvania is one of five states to require a water element in local comprehensive plans. And Minnesota’s state legislature established the Metropolitan Council, one of the strongest regional planning agencies in the country, which helps communities in the Twin Cities area coordinate development plans with water supplies and requirements. 

The report shows how four communities, driven by state policy and their own initiative, have integrated land and water planning in different ways: 

• Evans, Colorado, used a new water efficiency plan to secure buy-in and resources to implement a fixture replacement program, landscape design regulations, and other measures.  
• Hillsborough County, Florida, which includes the Tampa metropolitan area, added a new One Water chapter to its comprehensive plan, leading to policies to encourage development near existing water supplies, deal with environmental damage, and invest in stormwater infrastructure.  
• Philadelphia enacted a plan to use green infrastructure to filter stormwater, reduce pollution, and improve quality of life.  
• Golden Valley, Minnesota, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis, is working with neighboring communities to protect water quality, mitigate stormwater runoff and flooding, promote conservation of drinking water, and renovate aging infrastructure. 

The report offers four key recommendations for policy makers based on the experiences of these communities and others: collaborate locally, coordinate regional expertise and oversight, build capacity through funding and technical assistance, and use state mandates. 

“Integrating Land Use and Water Management is relevant, informative, and necessary at this moment in time,” said Chi Ho Sham, president of the American Water Works Association and vice president and chief scientist of Eastern Research Group. “In the age of specialization, we have created many silos. As problems with the urban water cycle become more complex and multidimensional, collaboration with other disciplinary experts is needed. This report provides a practical bridge to facilitate collaboration between land use planners and water management.” 

Image: Master-planned community in Chandler, Arizona. Credit: Art Wager via Getty Images.

At Capital City Farm, the first commercial urban farm in Trenton, New Jersey, more than 37 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and flowers grow on two formerly abandoned city-owned acres. The farm, run by the D&R Greenway Land Trust, is a financially self-sufficient operation that donates 30 percent of its produce to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and sells the rest to nearby markets. A local community development and environmental nonprofit runs a well-established youth gardening program at the farm, which has won several awards since its founding in 2016. 

There’s no question that Capital City Farm is a success story on many levels, from repurposing a trash-strewn lot to involving the local community in its development and operations. Now the city is hoping to emulate that success, working closely with local residents as it sets out to convert additional vacant lots into community gardens. The effort is part of a recently launched plan called Fight the Blight, which will include property demolition and redevelopment. 

Trenton, population 83,000, has a disproportionate number of neglected and vacant properties: 1,500 of them in a city that covers just 7.5 square miles. As the city embarks on addressing this issue, officials are sensitive to the fact that, for residents in neglected urban neighborhoods, municipal improvement efforts can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, fixing up vacant lots and tearing down condemned buildings yields major quality of life improvements, including improving public safety and increasing community morale. But on the other hand, the sudden arrival of plans and projects developed without local input can be an unwelcome signal to residents that the future of the neighborhood is out of their hands and might not include them. 

“Trenton . . . has historically been behind the eight ball” on securing local input in revitalization efforts, said the city’s principal planner, Stephani Register. “The way we’re approaching it now is this idea of ‘let’s give the people back their power.’ If we do that, we as an administration get better participation from residents. The question is, how do you do that for communities of color who have been disenfranchised for so long because they didn’t have the right information, and the tools that are out there have been used against them.” 

An interdisciplinary team from Trenton is exploring these issues through its participation in the Lincoln Institute’s Legacy Cities Communities of Practice project. Over the past year, teams from three legacy cities (Trenton; Akron, Ohio; and Dearborn, Mich.) have met regularly to facilitate peer learning, gain insights from expert faculty on issues ranging from racial equity to fiscal health, and access resources and support to tackle entrenched citywide policy issues with place-based project approaches. Trenton’s team includes Register, mayoral aide Rick Kavin, Jamilah Harris, an analyst from the state Department of Environmental Protection, and Caitlin Fair, executive director of the nonprofit East Trenton Collaborative (ETC). 

Legacy cities like Trenton are places that have experienced population and economic decline that has left them with common infrastructure and demographic challenges. Many of them have vast areas once full of people and industry that have now been abandoned and neglected. Smaller legacy cities have many of the same challenges as larger legacy cities like Detroit or Baltimore, said Jessie Grogan, associate director of Reduced Poverty and Spatial Inequality at the Lincoln Institute. But they tend not to draw the same national attention from think tanks or large philanthropic funders, and they tend to have smaller municipal staffs and budgets. 

“These cities are kind of left to solve really complex problems on their own,” she said. “These smaller cities are in a tough spot where they have enough capacity to know what the problems are, but not enough to know what the potential solutions are or what their peer cities are doing that’s working.” The Legacy Cities Community of Practice gives them an opportunity to compare notes, get new ideas, and support each other’s work. 

Trenton, for example, is now working to engage the community in its Fight the Blight program using strategies employed in Syracuse, N.Y., and Flint, Mich., and detailed in the Lincoln Institute’s Policy Focus Report Revitalizing America’s Smaller Legacy Cities. Rather than the city taking the lead in projects like the effort to expand its community gardens, officials have turned to community organizations. Kavin said Capital City Farm has been advising the city on the youth apprenticeship aspect of the proposed community garden project. And Fair says the ETC would like to see community gardens become year-round, accessible neighborhood resources that support workforce development and a healthy community. 

“The idea is to marry [the gardens] with our youth employment program and for the city to create an opportunity for kids in the community to have a paid apprenticeship,” she said. “A goal of this initiative is to create a very public, community-oriented space that is open to everyone to use.” 

The vision is for Trenton’s new community gardens to be financially self-sustaining, providing a steady source of local jobs and local food thanks to greenhouses and hydroponic gardening that make cultivation possible during the winter months. Allowing year-round structures such as greenhouses on lots operated as community gardens required a zoning code change, which the Trenton team collaborated on and achieved by mid-2021. In the fall of 2021, the ETC began working on deciding which vacant lots in East Trenton they want to turn into community farms. 

Ultimately, the Trenton team sees the community farm project as just one way to start breaking down barriers between local government and residents and approach planning from a more holistic perspective. To that end, the city has also launched “how-to” informational sessions aimed at increasing small business owners’ access to capital and city contracts. Other sessions help homeowners figure out how to access grant money or loans to fix up their historic homes. And last year, Trenton launched an “Adopt a Lot” program that gives residents temporary access to vacant lots for their own gardens or other greenspace use. 

“With all of these programs, we’re trying to foster an environment where all local residents can have a say,” Kavin said. “Not just in their city’s planning, but also in their own future.” 

Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center.

Image: Volunteers plant seeds at Capital City Farm in Trenton, New Jersey. Credit: Capital City Farm.

This article is adapted from a report on a project funded by the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy and the Water Research Foundation. Several municipal staff members in Aurora, Colorado, generously provided data and support for the project, including Lyle Whitney, Zach Vernon, and Timothy York at Aurora Water and Karen Hancock, principal planner with the City of Aurora. 

The Front Range of Colorado, an urban corridor east of the Rocky Mountains that includes Denver, Boulder, and other densely populated areas, increasingly faces a perilous combination: rapid population growth and a capricious water supply. With a semi-arid climate and a history of lengthy drought periods, the region is experiencing an increasing imbalance between water supply and demand, a situation aggravated by climate change. Water managers are faced with the challenge of securing an adequate water supply for future growth and new development.  

Our research at the University of Colorado applies an innovative methodology to water demand forecasting that provides key insights into the relationships between development decisions, water needs, and growth. This in-depth analysis of residential outdoor water use in Aurora, Colorado, uses a novel housing typology to inform 50 unique future development scenarios, providing a water blueprint for future projected growth, a methodology that can be applied to other communities. The study forecasts future water demand under various growth, climate change, and design scenarios, and demonstrates the inherent value and necessity of connecting water management and land use planning. 

Projecting Water Demand in Aurora 

The study area is the City of Aurora, Colorado, a growing municipality located in the Denver metro area. Like most communities in the region, Aurora is facing intense population growth and development pressures, with close to 2 percent annual projected growth to 2070, which will almost double the current population (Data & Demographics: Population, 2020).  

While Aurora has prioritized securing water rights to ensure the community has the needed water supply to support that growth, these are predominantly surface water supplies. They are vulnerable to drought and climate change and can be usurped by those with higher-priority rights to Colorado River water. These circumstances leave the community’s water security vulnerable, providing ample incentive for developing a better understanding of a variety of possible trajectories of future water demand, which can also inform and prioritize land use policy changes.  

Based on the best available data for population growth, land use, and water use, this study generated growth scenarios out to the year 2050. The study methodology is based on the creation of a unique housing typology, which reflects the current housing stock in Aurora. The housing types were defined by yard size, home value, and current outdoor water use. This data was then analyzed to determine the key housing characteristics that predicted significantly different water use, based on built environment characteristics. The two most significant variables were house value and pervious lot areas—in other words, larger houses with larger yards predictably used more water. This is consistent with other findings in the literature pointing to income levels and yard size as key drivers for water demand (Arbues and Villanua 2006, Dalhuisen et al. 2003, Locke et al. 2018, Rogers 2002). The analysis allowed for the classification of all residential units in the data set into eight distinct housing types.  

The scenario development was initiated by establishing a baseline growth scenario which projects full build out of Aurora’s approved master planned (MP) developments. The housing typology was matched to the expected future units in the MPs, based on an analysis of their yard sizes and home values. Using the water use data for each house type, the outdoor water demand was calculated for the projected MP developments. This calculation was used as the baseline scenario for comparison with 50 subsequently developed scenarios. 

The subsequent scenarios combine six factors: predicted development extent, pervious area, home values, climate change severity, landscape design, and level of irrigation efficiency. A portion of the scenarios includes projection of growth beyond the extent of MPs, simulating unplanned development of what is currently open space prairie lands. Because the distribution of housing types in these unplanned future development areas is unknown, the researchers used Aurora’s Unified Development Ordinance guidelines to develop scenarios with different combinations of housing types.  

Landscape design, irrigation efficiency, and climate variables were added to the scenario model as multipliers that either increase or decrease overall outdoor water use per unit area. The 50 scenarios were organized into ten groups of five scenarios, which had the same sequence of landscape design, climate change extent, and irrigation efficiency values. This allowed for a clear understanding of the impact of the multipliers and the development extent.  

The resulting scenarios address a wide set of possible future circumstances that were designed to reflect a range of realistic possible outcomes. By providing insight into how impacts may change based on factors like climate and population growth, this methodology can inform management and policy decisions related to lot size and landscaping standards. For example, the results show that having a development ordinance that limits lot sizes for single family residential development and requires at least 50 percent low-water (xeric) landscaping would yield water savings up to 35 percent.

Conclusions and Scalability 

Given the multiple constraints on sustaining future water supply in the Colorado River Basin, creating a portfolio of reasonable outcomes can be critical for managing sustainable growth. The key factors within the bounds of land use planning include growth boundaries, lot sizes and housing types, landscape design regulations (e.g., xeric requirements or turf limits), and irrigation efficiency standards.  

The results from this model show that new development that requires 50 percent xeric landscaping combined with efficient irrigation significantly reduces outdoor water demand, even when using the highest climate change impact multiplier and the greatest extent of development scenarios.  

Notably, this model uses only half-xeric yards, versus modeling the entire outdoor pervious space with xeric design. This is because the current UDO calls for low-water-use front yards, while back yards have no regulatory parameters on landscape design.  This suggests that creating a 100 percent xeric landscape yard would likely prove twice as effective. The half-xeric yard was chosen due to the guidelines of Aurora’s UDO ordinance, which requires small lot homes to have xeric designed front yards. Expanding that ordinance to 100 percent xeric landscaping for future growth would significantly contribute to meeting water supply goals, while still accommodating growth projections.  

The scenario modeling in this study provides a unique look at the coupled effects of multiple factors that influence outdoor water demand. The results show that best practices for low water use landscape design and irrigation efficiency can lower water footprints for high population growth in a warming climate, as predicted for Aurora. These outcomes reinforce the importance of integrating land use planning and water management.  

The conservative projections for climate change used in this study are likely estimates of future realities, and our results reveal that community planning that includes water smart land use zoning, building code improvements, and landscape requirements yields positive effects for future water resilience.  

Beyond the direct usefulness of this study to Aurora, much of its value lies in demonstrating that the methodology is feasible, yields reasonable results, and is scalable to larger regions.  

Many cities in the Colorado River Basin and throughout the West are facing similar growth pressures to those seen along Colorado’s Front Range. Our findings support the recommendation for jurisdictions to carefully consider where and how development occurs, before extending future populations away from the urban core through annexations of undeveloped open spaces, prairies, and greenfields. Moreover, this water demand forecasting model demonstrates the promising opportunities available for the arid West to use water-smart land use planning to create a more resilient future. 

Gretel Follingstad is a PhD candidate in Geography, Planning & Design, with a research and pedological focus on Climate Resilience Planning, in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver 

Austin Troy is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Lead image: A waterwise yard in Aurora, Colorado. Credit: City of Aurora.

References 

Arbues, Fernando, and Inmaculada Villanua. 2006. “Potential for Pricing Policies in Water Resource Management: Estimation of Urban Residential Water Demand in Zaragoza, Spain.” Urban Studies 43(13): 2421–2442. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980601038255. 

Dalhuisen, Jasper M., Raymond J. G. M. Florax, Henri L. F. DeGroot, and Peter Nijkamp. 2003. “Price and Income Elasticities of Residential Water Demand: A Meta-Analysis.” Land Economics 79: 292–308. http://ron-griffin.tamu.edu/x677/readings/dalhuisen.pdf. 

Data & Demographics: Population. 2020. Aurora Colorado. https://www.auroragov.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=16242704&pageId=16394086. 

Locke, Dexter H., Rinku Roy Chowdhury, J. Morgan Grove, Deborah G. Martin, Eli Goldman, John Rogan, and Peter Groffman. 2018. “Social Norms, Yard Care, and the Difference between Front and Back Yard Management: Examining the Landscape Mullets Concept on Urban Residential Lands.” Society & Natural Resources 31(10): 1169–1188. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2018.1481549. 

Rogers, Peter, Radhika de Silva, and Ramesh Batia. 2002. “Water Is an Economic Good: How to Use Prices to Promote Equity, Efficiency, and Sustainability.” Water Policy 4(1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1366-7017(02)00004-1.