When Water Rewrites the Rules

- Hello everybody. I'm Richard Green and I'm director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and this is Lusk Perspectives. A podcast that talks about the intersection of real estate and all kinds of other things and today we're going to be talking about water and we're gonna be talking about papa bear, mama bear, and baby bear water and it's interaction with cities and with real estate. And I'm very happy to, and very excited to welcome our guest this time, Roni Deitz, a hydrologist who I met in Ashville, North Carolina as part of an urban land institute panel on rebuilding that city in the aftermath of it's floods from a couple of summers ago and in a week I learned more from Roni about rivers than I had known my whole life up until that point. And you will find she is both a knowledging and engaging presenter on this material. So, Roni thank you very much for being here.

- Absolutely, thanks for having me.

- So, I like to always begin with people telling us about themselves. Sort of how they got to where they are and where they are and you are an engineer who started at Rice and sort of what led you into hydrology in the first place? And then, what was your path to get from hydrology to where you are? Who is an internationally distinguished hydrologist, she's done work all over the world. Here in the United States something our listeners will be familiar to the South Sea, the South Seaport area of New York City which of course was devastated by hurricane Sandy and of course she worked in Ashville and other places. So Roni, tell us about how you got to where you are today.

- Yeah, thanks again Richard for having me. So, I grew up in central New Jersey. An area that was not hurricane prone. I was certainly not familiar with those types of storms and I thought I wanted to be an architect. I applied to architecture school. That's how I found Rice University. Very quickly as I was preparing for college I learned that my drawing skills were not going to get me too far in the world of architecture but that my math and science brain and thinking was perhaps better suited for civil engineering. And so, as you said I went to Rice University and three weeks into my freshman year hurricane Ike made landfall. And so, while hurricane Ike was only a category two storm make no mistake, this was a monster storm largely because of it's size. I believe it was roughly 600 miles across and so it really impacted the entire Texas coast as it was coming in and making landfall. And so, there I am a freshman, 1400 miles away from home and I'm watching how this storm is impacting the Houston community but I'm also more importantly starting to see how the city came together and how it recovered and very quickly got interested in how water could shape a city. How it could shape the economics. How it could shape where neighborhoods came together and that got me immediately interested in starting to study this. And so, that was kind of like the first little rocket ship that took off and I stayed at Rice for both undergrad and masters focusing on, as you said, rainfall and hydrology. All of this got me going into the field but it really wasn't until hurricane Sandy made landfall in the northeast back in October, 2012 that I felt this call to action to come back to the northeast. To this area that I called home and to go and put the skills that I had learned really to work. To help New York City and to help the greater northeast with understanding what had happened during hurricane Sandy, what was likely to happen again in the future and then how to take action. How to protect communities. How to protect critical infrastructure and to think about those different systems at scale and at play. And so, as you've mentioned I've had the opportunity to wear lots of different hats on projects. Work with cities like New York, Boston, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Wilmington, Delaware, on similar issues and what could happen again if a storm was to make landfall. And then also just how to keep their cities safe and investible. I think also just quickly important to note is because you know, two hurricanes is not enough in a 14 year period, we then fast forward and hurricane Helene made landfall in western North Carolina in September of 2024 and my husband and I have a home in western North Carolina. It's where we now spend part of the year. I was always one of those folks who would chuckle and call it a climate haven. You know, sitting at 4100 feet above sea level rise, what could possibly go wrong? But then, hurricane Helene brought somewhere between 20 and 30 inches of rain to the region just over a short span of a few days and very quickly just saw how again, those systems, the infrastructure, the communities were dealing with a storm of unheard of proportions. And so all of this comes together to really shape where you and I then met at the ULI Ashville Advisory Services Panel drawing on lots of those different experiences to then say, how can we make Ashville resilient and sustainable as we move into the future?

- So, tell us a little bit about Arcadis. The company where you work now. I'm sure that they would like a bit of a shout out here.

- Sure. So, I've been with Arcadis about 13 years now and Arcadis is one of the leading global architecture and engineering firms. We have employees worldwide spanning the Americas, continental Europe, Brazil, and Latin America, as well as Australia. We do a lot of things really well. One of which I like to think is leveraging our Dutch expertise in water management to provide holistic systems based climate adaptation solutions. And so that's the practice that I lead, our global climate adaptation practice.

- So, you used a very important word which is investible, keeping places investible. And so I want to think about that in the context of a variety of places and I'd like you to start with the place that you and I spent a week together along with a group of about a dozen amazing people who made up this advisory panel. Is what happened in, just describe to us, what exactly was it beyond the sheer amount of rainfall that happened in Ashville that created the problems that Ashville faced? And I guess I'd like to use the fact that this is not the first time that Ashville has faced this kind of problem.

- Yeah. So, in September of 2024 this large system was, it made landfall, hurricane Helene and in the days leading up to the majority of the rainfall that Ashville experienced there was already a good amount of rain coming into the region and so why this is important is that the ground itself was already fairly saturated. You already were seeing water levels elevated in the two main rivers throughout Ashville. So, the Swannanoa and then the French Broad and you already were starting to see, you know, the ground just grappling with the moisture that was coming from the rain. So, then all of a sudden you start to get this really heavy and intense precipitation. You know again, 20 to 30 inches of rain over a period of days and you're also getting the wind that's coming from this hurricane and it wasn't at hurricane strength but it's still really strong gusts. And so ultimately what we saw happen was a few things. First, the land started to give out. There's only so much water that, you know you think about putting sand and water and you mix it together, there's only so much water that sand or any type of soil can hold before it just starts to dissolve and so you started to see land erode in a, in a way that really started to impact homes being washed away. Other types of infrastructure and services, water lines, power lines being washed away. You saw that there was a tremendous speed of the water that was coming as well and especially in a river like the Swannanoa River that is narrow but could really bring a strong velocity. You're taking that land and you're taking that infrastructure and it's ultimately being ripped out as it's moving further downstream and so now you start to see all of the systems being really threatened. Whether that's how you communicate. Whether it's with families. Whether it's first responders trying to communicate and get crews out there through to how you get basic water and those types of services online. And so all of this ultimately resulted in a fairly unprecedented type of storm. A tremendous amount of property damage, loss of life across the Ashville region. Across western North Carolina as a result of this and a prolonged recovery period as well because of the impact that this storm had on western North Carolina.

- So, but this was not the first time that Ashville had experienced a catastrophic flood, is that correct?

- That is correct and I would need to look it up but I think we mentioned that it was about somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago. They had also had a large rainfall event that started to highlight some of these underlying vulnerabilities across the system. Whether it was having sufficient policies and engineering solutions in place to manage storm water or whether it was a flood warning system that could notify residents and community members of what was coming. So, there was efforts and initiatives that had taken place prior to look at what types of solutions could support a more resilient Ashville and I think what we found was that those were in various stages of progress. Some had been implemented. A lot of them were though were plans that ultimately still needed to be funded and ultimately implemented in order to make the region more resilient.

- So, I think about resilience and I think about part of what we found at least this is my recollection is you can't use engineering to fix everything.

- No.

- And sometimes there are just places where you can't use engineering to solve the problem that people just shouldn't, or businesses just shouldn't be in specific places. They can be in places that are fairly nearby where there are engineering solutions but there are places where we need to respect the nature of say the rivers that run through them and the nature of a river that's narrow and speedy was something that I hadn't thought about until you taught it to me. That in terms of thinking about resilience part of it is thinking about what are places where we can actually harness things and what places do we need to be a little modest and say no there just shouldn't be economic activity here?

- 100% and I perhaps if it's okay, I wanna take a step back...

- [Richard] Sure.

- Because I think that it's worth unpacking this notion of how water actually behaves...

- [Richard] Yeah.

- And then also talking about land use. 'Cause I think there's a mismatch and I think it's important that we kind of break those two pieces apart a bit. So, if we start first with how water actually behaves and not just how we map it and so this was something that we learned in Ashville but I think it could really go across just about anywhere is that we're increasingly seeing water behave different than how we plan for it and how we then therefor make land use decisions. So, for the longest time and even still today flood plains are being treated as this fixed boundary and so for folks who may not know flood plains are, they're lines on a map that are backed by modeling of hydrology and water resources and they help to define what is a 1% annual chance storm. It's the hundred year storm event.

- Mm hm.

- And so, that might sound like, oo that storm has a really low probability of occurring, which it does on any given year but if you take a 1% chance of a storm occurring over say a 30 year mortgage you actually have a 26% chance of that storm occurring over your mortgage. And so now I would ask someone, are you willing to take that risk? You have a one in four chance over your mortgage seeing a storm like that come through a region? But so okay, getting back just to flood plains, you know you're either inside of it or you're outside of it. If you're inside of it and if you've built inside that flood plain there's typically additional levels of precautions and safety to either elevate or flood proof if you're going to be within that and then of course, if you're outside of a flood plain then you have a lower risk and you typically can build as usual. But so, you know, there's one piece of this which is that the risk is actually greater than perhaps we wanna believe that it is and the second is thinking that this risk is just static and it's going to stay a constant. But in reality and what we saw in Ashville is that water doesn't behave that way. It accelerates. It finds pathways and these maps they don't account for things like velocity which we saw for the Swannanoa River, it was really the speed and the force of that water that was determining the level of damage and how a region can function and respond both during and after a flood. And so, we're making these long term decisions whether it's today looking ahead into the future or even in the past about where to build based off of these static or binary type of designations but we have this dynamic risk that is expanding, it's compounding and it's making this type of plan even harder. So, then the other part of this which not to go too far into geeking out here but...

- No, please, please geek away, man.

- From the land use perspectives now we have this mismatch. We have this challenge of this dynamic and evolving risk but we're also seeing that we're continuing to intensify development in and around these areas. You know, populations are growing. We have just tremendous population growth and you know Richard, you and I talked about this but often it's the regions people are moving to. If you think about Texas or Florida, they're flood prone or just weather prone regions and we're also seeing more and more of an interest to consider developing regions like the flood plain because we're trying to figure out where to live and there's an affordability and a housing type of dynamic as well that comes into play and so that's where this all starts to play out, this mismatch. After hurricane Harvey, so just going back to my Houston roots, we saw that significant growth had occurred in and around that mapped flood plain and that flooding extended well beyond them and so those homes were unfortunately impacted. And then in Ashville we saw along the French Broad River, the River Arts District, that was located in the flood plain and it saw just such a tremendous amount of damage and devastation...

- Yeah.

- During Helene. We were there what almost a year after Helene and that area still had not returned and there was a question of could and should it return? And so I think it's important to just note that mismatch because I think that's the crux of a lot of the challenges we're seeing when we think about water and it's relation to land use.

- You know, you bring up, the binary nature of the way we characterize risk is really problematic. And I do think that this is a place where machine learning could help us. And even stuff before machine learning. So, I have spent a career running regressions and you could think of that as baby machine learning but instead of having, oh you're in the plain or you're out of the plain, you assign different probabilities to different places. It's not just a firm line because clearly if it's a 1% chance over here it's not gonna be a 20% chance next door, right?

- [Roni] Right.

- There's gonna be some sort of continuousness to the risk involved and that could interact with mortgage modeling as we think about pricing. So, and I love your point about 30 year mortgages because one of the things that puzzles a number of us is why there are 30 year mortgages in places that are very vulnerable. I mean, are unquestionably vulnerable to climate risk. But I, you know the way you put it was, if 1% a year means every 30 years there's 27% chance of a flood event happening, a major flood event happening, we could model that in thinking about mortgage pricing.

- Yeah.

- And basically you'd have a premium to the interest rate based on that risk but what I'm thinking is so, let's just say, you're gonna tell me I'm wrong about this but I would imagine Salt Lake City flood risk is a very, very, very low probability event.

- I would assume...

- [Richard] You're gonna tell me I'm wrong about that.

- No, I would assume as such. I am by no means an expert on Salt Lake City but I would imagine.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, yeah it's in the Great Basin. Rivers don't flow to anything. The Great Salt Lake is drying up. There's I suppose the snow on the mountains could melt in the wrong direction but it's, it's basically sitting in a desert at very high elevation. Desert like conditions in a very high elevation except for the Wasatch Mountains where there's snow. And so, the pricing of that risk in Salt Lake City would be basically zero but then there are places such as we talked about, you know, the southern tip of Manhattan, Miami, Galveston, where that cost would be very high and maybe so high that you say, maybe we shouldn't do this or maybe it's worth engineering our way around the problem somehow. I'm gonna get that question in a moment but to add my own geekiness to this thinking about risk in a continuous instead of binary fashion might be very helpful. And we now have the computational power to do that kind of thing. 30 years ago we didn't and so to those out there who do mortgage pricing I think, think about that. I do wanna come, so I do wanna, oh and I do wanna say one more thing about Ashville is, one of the things that was striking to me is we talked to the head of the Artists sort of Association and he got it. I mean, he said the key to the artists is they wanted to be close together. Sort of have what we urban economists call a glomeration economies in the arts but we don't need to be on the river that floods all the time. We can be at a higher up spot and thinking about trading land from one, taking land that hasn't been developed in a place that is at least safer from floods and designating that as the arts area, well sort of saying, we're not gonna do anymore we'll call it economic activity in this area that floods, again twice in 15 years catastrophically I thought was very sensible. And the artists were very sensible or at least their representative was very sensible in thinking about this. I wanna come to...

- [Roni] I...

- Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.

- No, I just wanna comment on that because I do think that, I think it's important for this discussion to acknowledge that populations are growing and there is an affordability crisis around us and when we think about why those artists chose to reside in the River Arts District and along the French Broad River, if I recall correctly and please tell me, I know you had more conversations with the artists was the affordability.

- Yeah.

- [Roni] Of that land.

- Yeah.

- And so, I think that it's important as we have this conversation, you know this is not necessarily a conversation about retreat at scale but it's about how we manage growth and how we do that in a way that acknowledges the reality of risk. You can take a place like lower Manhattan, it's in the flood plain but there's development there. They haven't necessarily turned away from development there. Now, New York City as a whole has certainly started to entertain new zoning, special coastal flood risk districts to limit housing in those types of areas, so there's definitely ideas and policy shifts on the table but I think the affordability element is something that's at leas worth acknowledging because that, that's what can attract someone to an area that perhaps isn't the safest. And that's an issue that I think needs to be discussed.

- Yeah. Yeah, and I think the answer to affordability is not to say, well you know, all you can afford is to be in a dangerous place, we're gonna have you...

- 100%, 100%.

- It's, it's how do we provide appropriate subsidy and in a case like Ashville the artists are clearly key to the economic vitality of that location. By the way, if anyone has not been out there yet, go, it is a magnificent city. It's, I think about places in the world I've been that vastly exceeded expectations and Ashville is one of them. Absolutely beautiful.

- Agree.

- A vibrant wonderful place. I wanna turn to an engineering question now and I wanna move from rivers to coast lines and we've already talked a little bit about Houston and New York and let's bring Florida into this as well. And we know the combination of hurricanes and rising seas are threats to all of these places but they're also extraordinarily, economically productive places. It would be hard to replace them. So, I just want to start with a very technical question. Are the engineering challenges different for those and I'm just gonna pick those three places, New York, let's say Miami, Houston?

- Sure.

- [Richard] And what are they?

- Help me understand the question. When you say the engineering challenges...

- Like do you use the, would you use the same technology to try to mitigate climate risk or do you use very different technologies for the three places?

- I got ya.

- They're all on a coast but my understanding, again I'm a total amateur here, so you might tell me it is the same technology for the three but I suspect they are somewhat different.

- Yeah, and I, you know I think, I was unpacking that word technology a bit. When I think of, we took those examples of, you know a New York, a Florida, let's call south Florida or Miami and then we wanna look at a Galveston type of solution, I think that it's, it's not necessarily only focusing on the engineering itself but it's how we plan. And so, how we, how we think about how we use land. Where we allow growth and how we start to incorporate risks into those decisions and I think that's important 'cause that's a policy element. It's how we make decisions. So, how do projects get funded? How are agencies starting to coordinate? And how is risk actually getting reflected into things like insurance and capital? And then there's lastly the how we build piece, that engineering solutions.

- [Richard] Yeah.

- And there is a tool kit of parts. You know, you think about coastal, coastal storms and when you're thinking about the types of solutions that can withstand those really strong wave forces that are coming in during a hurricane you know the tool kit are a combination of things that are more hardened infrastructure solutions and so you've got solutions like flood walls, sea walls, levees, and berms that have a wider footprint. There are certainly nature based solutions when you start to think about beaches and gentle run ups of slopes that can incorporate natural habitat all at the same time but these are also layered solutions and so thinking about how they work together along the coast. And then there are also solutions for the rainfall piece of this. For the storm water side because often a storm is a combination of both those heavy strong winds bringing the surge inland but also then accompanied with heavy precipitation or rainfall and there again, a combination of gray and green solutions. So, often folks love green solutions. They help to capture that water before it enters into the soil or enters into the pipe. It can be bio swells, retention basins, detention basins, and then there's also gray solutions which especially if you're talking heavier rainfall you may need. You may need additional piping or what we call conveyance. You may need a pump solution in the case of an area like Florida that is, it's very flat and so water's not going to just naturally flow in by gravity and so that's where pumps come in to play. But I wanna get at your question in terms of just the different cities too and sorry, I don't mean to give like an engineering background to some of this...

- This is very good. No, no, no, I want our audience to understand what it involves to protect these cities or even if it's feasible to protect these cities.

- Yeah, and I think that, you know, if you look across these cities you'd see very different hazards but you'd see the same underlying pattern and it's again, I keep coming back to this combination of where land use governance and infrastructure need to align in order to see progress. In order to see resilience. And so, when you don't see those three things line up you start to see stress and it first shows up in the systems. The drainage systems, the transit systems, things like that. But then you know, getting back to the piece of the finance it also shows up in the market because the market expects that these systems are going to be working and when they don't that's when you start to see challenges and investibility and insurability and some of those other elements that make it really challenging from an economic standpoint. So, New York, it's in my opinion one of the clearer examples of a city that is starting to align land use and governance and infrastructure around that longer term risk. It's not just building safe flood protection but it's integrating the coastal defense so a project like East Side Coastal Resiliency, it's the first phase of the big U if listeners are familiar with this large grand vision of integrating flood protection into public open space in and around lower Manhattan. And it also is thinking about drainage at scale. It's thinking about public space and it's also talking about voluntary buyouts and acquisitions because not everywhere should be hardened or as habitable. And so, I think New York is say, one example but then maybe I'll just quickly talk about Florida where I think you're seeing that opposite attention because you're continuing to get growth in these high risk areas alongside heavy investment in more of a localized protection or solution but we're missing that alignment on the land use piece and the governance piece. And so instead what we're seeing is like this underlying exposure is still increasing 'cause it's not being addressed and we're starting to see the market begin to reflect that through insurance, through affordability. And so, those are just two examples that I think do play out. You know, how you need all three to really align to become what I like to think of as resilient more so than trying to solve this in like a bit by bit type of approach.

- Just tell me a little bit about, so let's just go back to Florida for a second. I mean, you talked about if you don't do the land use right, sort of nothing else is gonna fix it but how is Florida attempting to, tell us a little bit about, this is where I use the word technology is, let's call it engineering, how they're trying to engineer their way around this problem.

- Yeah, I'm not an expert in Florida but in the Florida market we're seeing that they're tackling solutions through pumps and mechanical types of solutions. And they're looking to do things such as road raising and sewer reconstruction. You know it's an area that's already seeing impacts during just sunny day high tide flooding, but...

- Yes, I've experienced that, yes.

- And so you know, I've been down there and you're driving around and it's completely sunny outside and you haven't seen rain in days but you have these puddles on the street and it's because of that high tide and that type of sewer. But I think in terms of say a large scale coastal protection, I know the Army Corps has looked at different solutions but to my knowledge I don't believe that there's any preferred plan to ultimately bring together comprehensive coastal solutions down there.

- You know, it does occur to me that about 140 years ago Chicago raised itself up from the Chicago River and that was a very, you know the Chicago River flows backwards which is using dams and pumps and so on and it was for public health reasons. Not so much climate. People didn't talk about climate adaptation back then and it seems to have worked very well. I mean, Chicago is still standing and is, it's kind of amazing when you go to the lower level of Chicago and see how that's worked but I would imagine again, the soils there are very different. The geology is very different and so on from what you're looking at in a place like Florida.

- Totally, and the exposure and the risk as well. And you know, I think Chicago is also a great example of an area that didn't treat resilience as a standalone initiative but has really been seeking to embed resilience into broader sustainability and capital planning. And they've done quite a bit too to not only focus on say the shocks and the stresses but also on things like economic inequity and how those communities can really come together as part of also the investments.

- So, one of the things that's happening is for the first time in a very long time we're seeing some in migration to the Midwest. Not everywhere but some places in the Midwest and we are actually seeing, this is quite striking to me, if you look at southern Florida, Dade County, Broward County, Palm Beach County, there is net domestic out migration now. They're still growing because of foreign migration. We'll see what current immigration policy, the impact that that has. I mean, Florida as a state still has a lot of domestic in migration but those coastal areas also on the Gulf Coast, Pinellas County, you don't see that huge influx anymore and you are seeing that migration to the Midwest. Again, I don't wanna overstate it but of course the Midwest had out migration for years and years and years and years and one can't help wonder if part of it is, part of it is about climate. Now, part of it is almost certainly about affordability as well but still.

- [Roni] Yeah.

- We are seeing people move with their feet a little bit at least.

- Yeah, and you know, from a climate perspective, the Midwest it certainly has lower exposure to climate extremes, you know? There's no sea level rise. There's no hurricanes. There's lower wildfire risk. Now, look there's still certainly extreme rainfall and flooding and we are seeing increasing heat especially across the Midwest but I do think that it is important to note and I think that there's also just something worth noting about the water availability as a massive advantage. And I think that's something compared to say the out west where it is drought stressed and you're trying to manage these periods of intense rainfall and these long prolonged droughts. I think water availability is also really attractive and all of a sudden could be a massive advantage in a region like the Midwest.

- So, we've talked about papa bear which is coastal flooding, too much water. We just hit sort of on baby bear with the Midwest where it's pretty good. Let's talk a little bit about mama bear which is not quite, not enough water. You can think about California, had a drought a few years ago. Now we've actually not been in drought for I think three or four years now. We had good rainfall early this winter. We've had good rainfall, I think three out of the last four winters. But you have other places that are just desert climates. I mean, the thing about Los Angeles, people think of it as the desert but it's not really. It's a Chaparelle. It has about 14 inches of rainfall a year. The problem is in L.A. we never get 14 inches. We either get 3 or 30. I'm exaggerating but only by a little bit. But, how are we managing that kind of risk that arises from not having enough water?

- Yeah, and Richard correct me if I'm wrong but I think if we go back in time, Los Angeles really became a desirable city after the aqueduct was constructed and we were able to see water being brought in. We were able to see this real economic and population boom that came because you had water resources. And so Los Angeles is also a city that's really seen some of it's economic success because of the infrastructure and the engineered solutions and that's different than a place like a New York where the harbor itself was naturally deep. It had the connection to the Hudson River and so why I'm saying all this and why I think Los Angeles is important is because Los Angeles is a city that was designed for a set of conditions and those conditions because the climate around us is changing, because weather is becoming more extreme, it's starting to struggle as that variability increases. And so as you mentioned, we're moving from drought to intense rainfall and then that post fire flooding. And so here the challenge isn't just about engineering and about those solutions and are they designed to keep up with the types of weather extremes that we're seeing but I think that it's also water shed management and land use and thinking about infrastructure and the systems around it so that it can adapt. And so I think there it's interesting because it's an area that has been designed to really perform under a set of conditions and now we're seeing those conditions be stressed as the weather as you noted is becoming more extreme with either 3 or 30 inches of rain on either end of the spectrum.

- So, I, since we talked about water use, I mean a couple of things, one, and I know, and if you don't wanna go down this path we won't but, residential water use in Los Angeles is not that big a problem. It takes up a fairly small amount of total water uses. As we know California is the leading agricultural state in the country by far and there are certain things like almonds where California is a world dominant place. Okay, that uses a lot of water relative to other uses and then the other thing that we're just embarking on are of course data centers and data centers require a lot of water. So, as we think about where people settle and different uses of water, I guess, is it about settlement or is it about things beyond settlement that are very thirsty?

- I think it's both and again, I like to come at this and maybe it's just my engineering brain and so I think there's a solution to every problem, but I think it's also a part of the discussion about how water is managed. How it's reused and then how it's governed. Especially when we think about how demand grows and so I think about something like data centers and I can't help but think about, is there a way to co-locate that next to say, some type of water treatment facility? Does it need clean, fresh water or could there be some type of gray loop system? And I'm by no means a data center expert but I think that there are some innovative examples out there of where you can start to use smart water especially in an area like the southwest to then start to have better practices in areas that acknowledge that they're drought prone and that water is a finite resource that they have to manage. So, that's where I think that also needs to come into the conversation. I think that there are really strong global examples of where, you know, regions have taken water technology because they know that they're limited or they're landlocked and need to start to bring that in so that their economy can continue to thrive.

- Can you give some of those global examples?

- I think that there are lots of great global examples out there. And you know Arcadis being a Dutch, a Dutch firm in our origins I always look to the Dutch as someone who's just been very innovative...

- They've been doing it a long time.

- They've been doing it a long time. And so, the Dutch have approached water reuse as not a standalone solution but really thinking of it as a system. As that one water approach and we talked about that a bit in Ashville. And so, you know...

- Oh yeah, so let me, we'll come back to the Dutch...

- [Roni] Yeah.

- But I love that idea of one water. Tell us what that is and then we'll come back to the Netherlands. I...

- You got it.

- [Richard] Yeah.

- You know, when I think about one water it's, if folks aren't familiar, you can think about that whole water cycle that we probably learned back when we were in first or second grade of how when rain falls from the sky and then how it's managed and ultimately gets evaporated and so one of the things that we talked a lot about in Ashville is how to take a more holistic one water approach. How to do things to better manage storm water before it gets into the rivers downstream. Especially an area like Ashville where you have lots of topography. You get so much bang for your buck when you store that water further up in the water shed because as you think about it, water goes and rolls down a hill. It picks up velocity as it goes and if it all starts to catch at the bottom you have so much more water than if you can capture it more at the source and so that's one part of it. It's also thinking about where and how you get your drinking water from. How you store that water before it enters into any type of water treatment and gets to your home and then we also started to think about the waste water side. And you know, I think for the French Broad River, if you recall some of the challenges around water quality because of the septic tanks in and around that water shed is also part of how we just take a smarter one water approach to also cleaning up the water quality. And so this requires a lot of coordination and I think Ashville is an area that is starting to see greater collaboration whether it's at the city level, the county level, nearby city levels, the state because there's just so many different parties that need to come together to really take that one water approach.

- Yeah, water does not respect municipal boundaries.

- It does not and water's tricky because it's also really hard to manage it right where it falls and so to add to the fact that it's not gonna respect any boundary if you're downstream it becomes really challenging 'cause you have the most water to manage and it's not, it's typically not the easiest place to manage that water.

- Okay, so now let's, I interrupted you when you were talking about Holland. Let's come back to that please.

- You got it. Yeah, when we think about water reuse, so I work for Arcadis, I always think about just how innovative the Dutch have been and here again no surprise, the Dutch have approached water reuse as not a standalone solution but really as a system. Thinking about how to close the loop across industries, cities and those landscapes and to keep water in circulation rather than discharging it. And so they'll reuse treated waste water for industrial processes and recharge aquaphors to store and naturally filter supply and they're increasingly starting to pilot more of the building scale reuse and that helps to reduce demand at the source. And so there's some really great examples if readers wanna Google and explore further but I think that it's again, just a great example of a model where water availability isn't just about supply but it's about how you can efficiently manage that entire system and think about reuse and retaining it.

- So, getting these systems in place is not cheap. So how do, do you have a sense, how are these things usually financed? Is it bonds that are issued and then some sort of tax? Or is there a user fee? Or tell me about if you can sort of the public finance behind doing, what I'll again call the engineering part along with all this other, the land use part, the um, you can think of how we price water part and I'd like to come back to that in a minute but, just how do these things work? How do you actually get these things up and running?

- Yeah, so I wanna kinda shift gears a bit as we go back into the funding piece of this 'cause I think the resilient side is honestly the more exciting piece to pull on this thread.

- Okay, okay.

- You know for a lot of the water infrastructure around us we as home owners or property owners, we pay tax or we pay some amount of money into our water utility and for a lot of that drinking water and waste water you have some of those more stable pots of funding but I think it's really interesting to take a look at the climate adaptation and the resilient side of funding because there is where we have still a really large gap. There is not the same amount of funds that have been available and I'm gonna come back to an example in New York and so in the last few years we've been working with New York City and their resilience funding task force to understand how to close what I think is estimated at about a 50 billion dollar price tag to provide that comprehensive city wide coastal protection and so even when New York City got funding after hurricane Sandy which was certainly catalytic in nature, it was never expected that it was going to just cover everything. And so I think right now what New York City is doing in terms of looking at some of these new resilience funding and financing sources is really innovative and really necessary. Just last year we, the city released a report that started to layout some of the different elements and the new structures, one of which is a shoreline protection district. Starting to think about how to equitably look across New York City. How to start to group regions and how you could start to think about a surcharge or some other type of, I'm not gonna use the word tax but a certain way of, an incremental fee that could be applied to help with paying for these types of improvements. And then also the O&M, the operations and maintenance that comes to maintain this infrastructure as well over time but I think it's an important topic, Richard because there is unfortunately and there's no silver bullet. We're at a point right now where there is a huge gap in terms of how we come together and how we fund these types of solutions. And you know we can talk, we can take this conversation towards some of the different federal programs, how public private partnerships come together and then just other types of mechanisms that you're probably more familiar with too that can help to close that gap.

- So one thing I, so you talk about 50 billion in New York, there are about 8 million, 9 million people, 8 and a half million in New York, so that comes to about 6, $7000 per New Yorker.

- I also think what's interesting to note though is you know, New York City's role in the national economy, in the global economy...

- Yeah.

- In the fact of how much transit and goods go through the greater New York Harbor and so there's probably a whole research project there too to think about just how to appropriately assign the costs and the benefits across the entire region of benefits from something...

- No absolutely, I mean, New York contributes far more to the American economy than it gets back from it so if you wanna look at it that way, yeah you could even spread the costs more broadly but the point I'm trying to make is 50 billion is a very intimidating number but it's not as bad as it sounds if you think, because it's a capital expense. It's not an operating expense.

- [Roni] Correct.

- And so it seems to me if you're doing a cost benefit for New York it's a no brainer. And I would be, and I'm not gonna ask you this because I know you know New York but I'd be curious what that number would be for a south Florida and what that number would be for Houston, Galveston if we were to think about those places. Um, we have about six minutes left and so I do want to ask you a very open question which is, the audience of this podcast is made up of people who are either buying and selling real estate or developing real estate. So, beyond what we've talked about the last 50 minutes or so, what should they know about water that they probably don't know?

- I think perhaps important to note is just how dynamic the water around us is and if we haven't hit that part hard enough I think it's so critical that we note that we are in a very interesting world where the base line around us is shifting. We are seeing more intense rain events. We are seeing back to back storms. We're seeing more frequent tidal flooding. Like in southern Florida and so what we're seeing is that these systems don't really get time to recover. What used to be considered nuisance type of events they're becoming chronic disruptions. And so, I think that's really important to note. You know, we're using this terminology of a hundred year storm, a 500 hundred year storm and really the risk is so much closer to us than I think it ever was. I remember going to Houston post hurricane Harvey, I was working with Arcadis helping on some of the recovery efforts and I go to this public engagement meeting at night and residents were wearing shirts that said survivor of the third annual 500 year storm. Like think about that for a minute.

- [Richard] Yeah, yeah.

- And so, that's where I think there is almost a call to action of you know, what type of rain events are we using to be making these maps? How are we communicating risk? How do we start to align that better with that land use decision? And how we plan, how we decide, how we build? Because that, those are the crux of how we get to be resilient when the world around us is so dynamic and we have this force of water that's just throwing all of the baseline considerations out the window.

- So, beyond land use, it seems to me that what you are talking about is implications for what we build and one of the things that's very striking to me about Japan is between World War II and the Great Canto Earthquake of 1923, the attitude of the Japanese is, nothing is permanent. And so when they build houses they build them to last 30 to 40 years. Not forever the way we do in the United States. Now the real downsides to that, if you ever visit a friend in their apartment in Tokyo you will notice that you hear everything going on next door, above you, below you, et cetera but the whole idea behind how they build is we're not gonna pretend to think we know the structure will survive 70 years, 100 years. And so, we're gonna build for 30 or 40 years. We don't do that in the United States. Our building codes basically require us to build stuff that's expected to remain standing for a very long time. Does resilience mean we need to rethink even the expected life of the buildings that we build?

- It's a great question and I'm gonna be honest something I hadn't thought about until...

- I haven't thought about it until you just said what you said, yeah.

- But I do think that resilience requires a paradigm shift and a societal shift in terms of how we live with water. How we live with heat. Perhaps how we build. You know, I think about air conditioning and I think about the comfort that all of us have in terms of just being able to set our thermostat to the temperature that we want but there's an environmental impact to that and so should there be minimums in terms of what you can reasonably set it to? I think from a living with water perspective, what does that look like? What is our expectations of how much water we can see on a street and what it means to keep our feet dry? And I think that also comes into how we build. Are there temporary or pop up uses that we put into a flood plain? It doesn't need to be a rebuilding, for example the River Arts District but do something that's programmable that can be temporarily installed and removed. Or maybe there's ideas and solutions. You know with floating houses and other types of structures. And so I think the great part about resilience is also that there, at this moment is so much opportunity if you don't let the fear and the threats scare you to say, how can we redesign our systems to be better? To withstand the future shocks and stresses and how do we as residents, community members, and stewards of this infrastructure, what do we need to do as part of that process as well?

- So, Roni Deitz, those are very wise words for us to end with. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. I know that our listeners, viewers will know a lot more about water than they did when they started this. We appreciate you joining us today.

- Thank you so much for having me.