SW-NCA-color-FINALweb

Urban Areas 281Figure 13.10 Per capita water use in Southwest cities (2000–2010). Source: Great WesternInstitute (2010), Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities (SLCDPU 2009), Los Angeles Departmentof Water and Power (LADWP 2011), City of Albuquerque (http://www.cabq.gov/), City and County ofDenver (http://www.denvergov.org/), Southern Nevada Water Authority (http://snwa.com/), Salt LakeCity Public Utilities (http://www.slcclassic.com/utilities/), City of Phoenix (http://phoenix.gov/), LosAngeles Department of Water and Power (http://www.ladwp.com/).employment base for urban development. The Southwest became the home of new techniquesfor mass home building (also made possible by the expanding water supplies)and populations in the metropolitan areas grew rapidly (Nash 1985; Kupel 2003). TheKaiser Company, for example, built worker housing in Los Angeles near its manufacturingfacilities, pioneering the development of planned, dense, automobile-dependent,single-family tracts with nodal shopping malls and other services. Home building wasmodeled on assembly-line aircraft construction, making it possible to considerably acceleratethe pace of construction (Hise 1997). These factors have made cities of the Southwestboth expansive and relatively denser than other cities in the country: ten of thefifteen densest metropolitan areas in the United States are located in California, Nevada,and Arizona (Eidlin 2010). Growth of the Southwest cities coincided with both automobile-dominanttransportation and federal investment in it, including the Federal HighwayAct of 1956, a Cold War-related national system built for defense purposes. As aresult, the morphology of Southwest cities is densely suburban. Nationally, the automobile-dependenturban form is a product of post-war suburban growth, with highwaysand home mortgages subsidized by the federal government.