A few years ago I started the process of buying a second home in a warm part of the United States.  Living in Chicago, I wanted to find a place that, through the years would be where I would spend an increasing amount of time during the winter months.  The first step in this process was looking at the various real estate web sites that displayed listings in the Southwest and in Florida, where the weather usually stays above freezing. 

The first thing I experienced of course was sticker shock.  In the few years since I had last looked at second home prices in places like Arizona and Florida the prices seemed to have doubled.  This of course made me accelerate the process.  I came into this process with a bias toward Florida because of a life long history of visiting the state for a number of reasons, mainly vacations and family.  That being said, I have always liked the stark spiritual aspect of the desert, so I carefully looked at Arizona in particular, and also Nevada.

There was however, one thing that kept nagging at me about the Southwest: water.  During the 1990s and early part of this decade I started to see that there was a developing scarcity of water in Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.  Water rationing and contentious relationships between states regarding water from the Colorado River all grew dramatically during those years.  The first reason of course was that unchecked real estate development and sprawl was covering …