Hoover Dam and the social nature of infrastructure

A view of the Hoover Dam, showing its massive concrete structure with distinctive art deco intake towers rising from the water. The dam is surrounded by rugged, rocky terrain and a body of water. In the background, a highway bridge is visible spanning the canyon.

Hoover Dam in the fading light of a hot summer evening

A water nerd friend and I made a pilgrimage yesterday evening to Hoover Dam, spanning the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border.

We’d had dinner at one of the restaurants on the docks at Hemenway Harbor, and driven up to the old abandoned boat ramp at Boulder Harbor, two Lake Mead landmarks for me, places I often visit. It was late, and hot as hell, and we were tired, but it didn’t take much persuasion for my friend to say “yes” to a last stop at Hoover Dam.

I’m here in Southern Nevada to be part of a PBS Newshour livestream Wednesday: “Tipping Point: Colorado River Reckoning.” I came out a couple of days early to see some friends and do the sort of “place-based” stuff that’s at the heart of my Colorado River work. I’ve been coming to this place – Lake Mead and Hoover Dam – for the last 15 years, watching the reservoir rise and fall, using this place as a conceptual anchor as I write my books.

My best guess based on hazy childhood memory is that I first visited Hoover Dam 60 years ago. We were on our annual summer car-camping trip, and I remember five-year-old John being both awestruck and uneasy – a bit frightened? – at the scale of the thing. Many years later, on one of many return trips, I stumbled on the thing that I remember most vividly: off the side of an embankment, massive concrete plugs that had been removed from the turbine tubes, dumped off the old rail line, lying today in a ravine.

It was a vague thing, fuzzy and just out of reach, but seeing them again on a bike ride along the Hoover Dam rail trail, the memory jumped up out of the ravine at me. As my friend remarked when I told them the story last night, I got bitten early.

Deb Chachra and the social nature of infrastructure

In an interview published last week in Public Books, the engineer Deb Chachra said a kaching thing about Hoover Dam that captures why I keep coming here, why I anchor so much of my thinking in the dam itself:

To borrow an idea from Joan Didion, who used it to describe driving in Los Angeles, these older forms of infrastructure, especially charismatic megastructures like bridges and train stations, can be secular cathedrals. We recognize that these are things that we made for ourselves and for each other. People have been visiting the Hoover Dam in droves since it was brand-new, so I don’t think it’s nostalgia per se—I think it’s more about celebrating this idea of the collective, these collective or communal projects. If we’re nostalgic, I think it’s less about the physical structures and more about the idea of working collectively.

A frieze on Hoover Dam includes descriptions of all the dam's legally authorized uses

The Boulder Canyon Project Act, carved in stone

Five years ago, on my umpty-first tour of Hoover Dam, a friend steeped in the “law of the river” led me to the elevator tower on the dam’s Nevada side to look at the decorative frieze. It’s a stone carving (or maybe cast concrete), visualizing the statutory purposes embodied in the Boulder Canyon Project Act, the act of Congress that authorized construction of the dam.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purpose of controlling the floods, improving navigation and regulating the flow of the Colorado River, providing for storage and for the delivery of the stored waters thereof for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses exclusively within the United States, and for the generation of electrical energy as a means of making the project herein authorized a self-supporting and financially solvent undertaking, the Secretary of the Interior, subject to the terms of the Colorado River compact hereinafter mentioned, is hereby authorized to construct, operate, and maintain a dam and incidental works in the main stream of the Colorado River at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon…. (emphasis added)

This is what Chachra is talking about. We often view Hoover Dam as a remarkable achievement of physical engineering, and it is. But it is, more importantly, an act of collective will. We came together in the 1920s, in community, to envision a desired future – of cities and farms in a place with too little water for either without infrastructure. We wrote a set of rules – the Colorado River Compact, the Boulder Canyon Project Act – that instantiated that collective will in the construction of a physical object – Hoover Dam.

And then we did the same thing, again and again, across the West. This enabled the places that tens of millions of us now call home.

Yesterday evening it was 110F (43C) after sunset, the parking lots were closed, and the tourists still came. My friend, who may be more of a Hoover Dam/Lake Mead/Colorado River nerd than I am (this is saying a great deal) was talking about the dam’s aesthetics – the care paid to the art deco flourishes – like the Boulder Canyon Project Act frieze. It’s a testament to the understanding of the people who built it that it was more than physical infrastructure – that it was a monument to collective action, the point Chachra so eloquently made.

This is why I’m confident, despite the current conflicts over how to share the shortages we face as a result of climate change, that we’ll figure things out. Collective action is at the heart of what we’ve been doing, it’s often hard, but we do it.

A note on Chachra’s book

Chachra’s book, How Infrastructure Works, is a terrific look at the social nature of infrastructure. Highly recommended.

The 2024 Runoff Season Comes to an End – How Did We Do?

By Jack Schmidt, Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies

How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years?
In Summary:

Total basin-wide reservoir storage is an appropriate metric to describe the status of the regional water supply and its year-to-year changes. Reclamation provides data on the storage contents of 46 reservoirs in the basin that are primarily managed by the Bureau of Reclamation but also by municipal water agencies and water conservancy districts. Whether destined for within-basin use or for trans-basin diversion, the total amount of water in these reservoirs is the carryover storage available to sustain use during dry times.

Accumulation of storage in those reservoirs occurred between mid-April and early July 2024, and basin-wide storage increased by 2.5 million acre feet. This amount is only 30% of the increase in storage that occurred during the same period in 2023. Nevertheless, basin-wide reservoir storage increased by 300,000 af when the summer peak of 2024 is compared with the summer peak of 2023, because consumptive uses and losses in the intervening time between the two runoff years was only 2.2 million acre feet. Despite the modest runoff of 2024, water managers were able to increase reservoir storage, because they had done such a good job of limiting consumptive uses following the 2023 runoff season.

Today, 62% of the total basin-wide storage is in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The combined contents of these two largest reservoirs in the United States peaked on 8 July at 18.5 million af. Most of 2024’s snowmelt runoff was stored in Lake Powell, and storage in Lake Mead declined during spring and early summer 2024. Now that the runoff season has ended, some of the contents of Lake Powell will be gradually transferred to Lake Mead.

The Details:

On 6 July, storage in the Colorado River basin peaked for the year at 30.0 million acre feet (af), approximately 50% of capacity of the reservoir system1 (Fig. 1). The combined contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell peaked on 8 July at 18.5 million af, approximately 37% of the capacity of those two reservoirs. The last time total basin reservoir storage was as much as this was in early January 2021, and the combined storage of Lake Mead and Lake Powell had last been at its present volume in very late April 2021. Thus, reservoir storage has not yet recovered to the average conditions between 2005 and 2020.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in the Colorado River watershed between 1 January 1999 and 15 July 2024.

The season of water accumulation, when inflow to reservoirs exceeds outflow, that began in mid-April has now ended. How did we do in the continuing effort to recover reservoir storage? How much reservoir storage accumulated from this year’s snowpack, and how does that accumulation compare to other years?

The snowpack of the Upper Basin peaked on 3 April at 16.8 in of snow water equivalent (SWE)2. For comparison, the median peak SWE for the past 30 years, as computed by the Natural Resource Conservation Service, was 16.0 in., so 2024 was a pretty good year. Nevertheless, 2024 was not nearly as good a year as 2023 when the peak SWE was 23.9 in. Preliminary estimates of natural flow at Lees Ferry for Water Year 2024 are that this year’s natural flow3 will be 12.1 million af, although that estimate may change slightly by the end of the water year.

The relation between peak estimated SWE in the Upper Basin and natural flow at Lees Ferry has a reasonably good correlation for data from 2000 and the years of the 21st century (Fig. 2). There is year-to-year variation in this relation caused by springtime weather that affects the rate of melting and the amount of sublimation. Variation is also caused by the intensity of the summer North American monsoon that augments the natural flow but is unrelated to snowmelt. Estimated natural runoff in 2024 was well predicted by the general relation.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Graph showing the relation between peak annual snow water equivalent for the Upper Colorado River basin and natural flow at Lees Ferry, estimated by Reclamation. The solid line is an exponential relation fit to these data.4

The amount of water added to reservoir storage is very well predicted by the natural flow at Lees Ferry (Fig. 3), and this relation shows that much more of the natural runoff is captured by reservoirs in wet years than in dry years. In 2024, approximately 20% of the estimated natural flow was stored, consistent with comparable years (2010, 2014, 2015, and 2016) (Fig. 3). A higher proportion of the natural runoff was stored in the wet years of 2005, 2011, 2019, and 2023, when more than 40% of the natural runoff was captured in reservoirs. More than 30% of the natural runoff was stored in 2008, 2009, and 2017.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Graph showing increase in basin-wide reservoir storage as a function of natural flow at Lees Ferry. The solid line is linear relation fit to these data5.

The combined contents of Lake Mead and Lake Powell peaked on 8 July, but storage in each reservoir followed very different trajectories (Fig. 4). Lake Powell, which is upstream from Lake Mead, captured the inflowing snowmelt runoff and increased in storage by 2.2 million af between mid-April and early July while Lake Mead lost approximately 900,000 af.  Now that the inflow season has ended, storage will gradually decline in Lake Powell and increase in Lake Mead.

Figure 4

Figure 4.  Graph showing the distribution of reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River basin between 1 January 2021 and 15 July 2024.

The storage gains resulting from the 2024 runoff compensated for the consumption of reservoir storage that had occurred after the 2023 runoff season (Fig. 5). This year’s peak of 30.0 million af is slightly more than the peak storage in summer 2023 that was 29.7 million af. This small increase in storage occurred despite a modest 2024 runoff season, because the basin’s water managers had done a good job in conserving the gains of last year (see blog post of 21 May 2024). Only 2.2 million af was consumed or lost following the 2023 runoff season, and the gain of 2.5 million af in 2024 exceeded the preceding loss. Thus, basin-wide storage is ever so slightly better than last year, because we used so little water last year. We now begin a 9-month period when the job in front of us is to continue to reduce consumptive uses and losses until the onset of the 2025 snowmelt season.  Let’s not lose focus. We’re all in this together.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Graph showing changes in reservoir storage between 1 January 2023 and 15 July 2024.

 1. These data are for 46 reservoirs whose daily storage contents are reported by Reclamation at: https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/hydrodata/reservoir_data/site_map.html. The data summarized here are through 15 July.
2. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Snow water equivalent data accessed at: https://nwcc-apps.sc.egov.usda.gov/awdb/basin-plots/POR/WTEQ/assocHUC2/14_Upper_Colorado_Region.html.
3. Bureau of Reclamation. Natural flow data accessed at: https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/NaturalFlow/provisional.html. Lees Ferry data were released on 22 April and are provisional and based on the April 24-month study. This estimate will be revised in August.
4. This relation is y = 4,048,600 * e(0.06632 x) , where y is the annual natural flow at Lees Ferry for the water year, in acre feet, and x is the peak snow water equivalent of the year, in inches. The R2 of this relation is 0.73.
5. This relation is y = -6,484,000 + 0.75833 X , where X is the annual natural flow at Lees Ferry for the water year, in acre feet, and y is the increase in basin-wide reservoir storage that occurred during the snowmelt season typically between mid-April and mid-July . The R2 of this relation is 0.92. Data used to calculate this relation do not include 2002 and 2012 when basin-wide storage decreased during the snowmelt season.
We encourage the use of these figures in your own work with appropriate credit (Jack Schmidt, Center for Colorado River Studies). Please contact us if higher resolution images are required.

Colorado River 2023 Water Use: An Optimistic Narrative

Line graph showing consumptive use of main stem Colorado River water by U.S. Lower Basin states from 1964 to 2022. The trend line fluctuates but generally increases from around 6 million acre-feet in the 1960s to a peak of about 8.5 million in the early 2000s, followed by a decline to approximately 5.5 million by 2022, with notable variability throughout the years.

Lower Basin U.S. use

Preparing for A Thing I’m doing next week, I updated the Crazy Fleck Spreadsheet this morning of data from Reclamation’s annual Lower Basin decree accounting reports.

Amid all the angst and rhetoric, it is easy to miss the salient fact made clear by this graph: Lower Basin water users have reduced their take on the Colorado River substantially since the early 2000s.

  • Nevada’s use was the lowest since 1992.
  • Arizona’s use was the lowest since 1991.
  • Records that far back in time are tricky*, but California’s take on the river in 2023 was appears to have been the lowest since the late 1940s.

To be clear, the use in the late 1990s and early 2000s was unsustainably large. Praise is due for shrinking Lower Basin use, but the praise should be tempered by the fact that that they didn’t do it until the reservoirs had dropped to scary low levels.

But – crucially – everyone’s economy is doing fine. We’ve absorbed dramatic water use reductions without harming the basic structure and function of the Lower Colorado River Basin communities that depend on the river.

Upper Basin Data

Line graph showing Upper Basin States' water use from 1971 to 2023. The graph displays a generally increasing trend over time, starting around 3 million acre-feet in 1971 and reaching about 4.3 million acre-feet by 2023. The line fluctuates throughout, with notable dips in the mid-1970s and early 2010s, and peaks in the late 1990s and early 2020s. Overall, the trend shows gradual growth in water usage with significant year-to-year variations.

Upper Basin water use

Working with Upper Basin data is trickier*. There’s a new dataset from Reclamation that uses remote sensing to estimate consumptive use from 1971 to 2023. There’s been a good deal of back-and-forth among Colorado River data nerds because of some confusing aspects of the data, which we hope to sort out soon to enable a more useful analysis. But the top line numbers tell a different but also ultimately an optimistic story.

The curve appears (see data nerd confusion caveat above) to show an upward trend since the 1970s with a huge amount of interannual variability. So we haven’t hit the conservation brakes yet, at least at the basin scale. But it also is clear that the Upper Basin is using far less than the 7.5 million acre feet tagged for us in the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

We Can Do This

It is easy to get tangled these days in the anger and finger pointing about who should cut, and by how much, about who has already cut and how and why, about questions that are both technical but more importantly deeply emotional about equity and fairness. We need to remember and learn from our successes.

* A Note on Data

The Lower Basin data from 1964 to the present is contained in the decree accounting reports, prepared by the Bureau of Reclamation since the Supreme Court ruling in the Arizona v. California case back in the 1960s. Prior to that, I have stitched in a dataset created by the numbers wizards at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

The Upper Basin data comes from the new Upper Basin Consumptive Uses and Losses reports published by the Bureau of Reclamation. The were originally published in May, then a revised set was published in June, I’m cautious in my analysis and citation because there are still some things I don’t understand about them.

 

 

Water flowing again in the Rio Chama

Our friends at the Abiquiu News (yay local journalism!) have an update on the sediment plug on the Rio Chama that’s been playing havoc with Rio Grande flows:

The Rio Chama is officially on its way back into its original channel as of Tuesday evening. Workers from the US Department of the Interior Bureau of Reclamation literally broke ground on Tuesday afternoon to let the waters flow into a mile of empty river bed in Medanales.

Tribal access to water – filling a key gap

Picture of water tank and windmill with "Biipartisan Infrastrure Law" tribal water handbook text

Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation
Reduction Act Funding Handbook

Congress set aside substantial sums of money in 2021 and ’22 in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to address needs for access to safe, clean drinking water. But, as John Echohawk puts it:

While the appropriation of funding for infrastructure is a critical first step, it is only that – continuing and concerted efforts must be made to ensure that Tribal communities are able to access and deploy this funding and that meaningful gains are made in reducing the water access gap in Indian country.

Echohawk makes those comments in the introduction to the new Handbook from the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities project, out today. The challenge now is for Tribal communities to navigate the complexities of federal funding process which are, to see the least, a significant challenge.

We’ve written about this challenge before in this space – a staggering 48 percent of tribal homes, according to the Universal Access project’s analysis, lack access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. Money helps, but getting the money to the communities that might benefit requires negotiating a maze of federal process.

The new handbook (link to the handbook and a summary document here) outlines the many different pathways and requirements to translate Congressional intent to water projects on the ground.

The report is crucial for helping move down the path. Also, bonus points to the team that put it together for the stunning Tara Kerzhner photos.

In New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande, the wheels are coming off

Talking to Jake Bittle for his Grist piece on the trials and tribulations of El Vado Dam, he asked me a question I loved: “What does this mean in the larger scheme of things?”

My answer:

We’ve optimized entire human and natural communities around the way this aging infrastructure allows us to manipulate the flow of rivers, and we’re likely to see more and more examples where infrastructure we’ve come to depend on no longer functions the way we planned or intended.

We seem to be living through a grand convergence of aging water infrastructure failure on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande this year.

We’ve talked in this space before about El Vado – built in the 1930s, unusable today. But it is only one example among many right now. If we are frank in recognizing that the main Rio Grande channel is a human artifact, dug in its current place and form in the 1950s, the list right now is long. The Flood Control Acts of 1948 (Public Law 80-858) and 1950 (Public Law 81-516) established the Middle Rio Grande Project and assigned the Bureau of Reclamation the job of performing Rio Grande channel maintenance.

The channel is infrastructure.

And it’s not just human water use that has optimized around the infrastructure. I was very careful in my comment to Jake – “entire human and natural communities” have optimized around the temporal and spatial flow of a century of altered river systems. When we taught together in the UNM Water Resources Program, my friend and collaborator Benjamin Jones spent significant time on the concept of “coupled human and natural systems”. This is that.

Here’s my current list, feel free to add your favorites in the comments.

Rio Chama downstream from Abiquiu

The Army Corps of Engineers has had to curtail releases out of Abiquiu Dam on the Rio Chama because sediment has plugged the river. That means decreased flows downstream. They’re working like crazy to dig a pilot channel. It is not yet working.

Corrales Siphon

The Corrales Siphon, built (like El Vado) in the 1930s as part of the early Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District works is (like El Vado) broken. The district has installed temporary pumps, but with the reduced flows out of the Chama, there’s not enough water in the Rio Grande to feed the pumps, which means irrigators in Corrales have no water.

Lower San Acacia Reach

The Rio Grande’s Lower San Acacia reach, heavily altered by channel reconstruction and management from the 1950s onward, is – I believe the technical term is “a fucking mess”. It’s increasingly difficult to get water through this reach to users downstream who depend on it. Lots more on this situation here.

Low Flow Leak

The Low Flow Conveyance Channel (Yay 1950s engineering!) sprang a kinda big leak the early 1990s. It’s still leaking, much to the delight of endangered willow flycatchers – to the human water users not so much.

 

A reminder to be careful how you think about “wasted” water

A team out of Wyoming, including my Colorado River Research Group colleague Kristiana Hansen, has a new paper that reminds us that we need to be careful about how we thinking about conserving water that is being “wasted.”

Their case study is an area on the New Fork in Wyoming, a tributary of the Green, which is a tributary of the Colorado, where producers use flood irrigation on timothy grass to grow livestock forage.

Flood irrigation is often seen as “wasteful.” One approach is to install “more efficient” irrigation technology. But – and this is one of my repetitive talking points with students in the graduate water policy course I teach every fall – you need to flag the word “waste” when you see it in a water policy discussion and think carefully about how you’re using it.

That water is going somewhere, and doing something. You have to include this in your analysis. Maybe it’s really being “wasted”. But you may find that the place the water is going, and the thing that it’s doing, is valuable!

That’s what the Wyoming team found. Flood irrigation recharges the shallow aquifer – reducing the spring peak in the area’s streams, and slowly releasing that water back into those same streams in late summer. Which is crucial, in this case, for economically valuable fisheries – recreational brown trout fishing, to cite their analysis.

This is at the heart Bruce Lankford’s oddly named work on the “paracommons,” which has provided an enormously helpful analytical framework for my thinking about this stuff.

Cleaning up our urban sewage for reuse is super popular right now, and can in some cases be an enormously powerful water policy response to scarcity. But we’ve got to be mindful about where that “wasted” water is going and what positive benefits it is providing. Lots of inland urban cities in the southwestern United States treat their wastewater and return it to rivers, where it feeds ecosystems and downstream users.

We always have to consider the tradeoffs.

Important update on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City lawn

In my book Water is for Fighting Over, I delighted in this cheap shot at the Bureau of Reclamation’s Boulder City office –

… a grandiose white building atop a hill … surrounded by an expanse of lawn that is embarrassing in a desert city that averages less than six inches of rain a year.

I am happy nine years after I wrote that, via Daniel Rothberg’s excellent water news, to correct the record. In response to Southern Nevada’s “non-functional turf” regulations, Reclamation will be tearing out the lawn. In classic federal fashion, the project is accompanied by a 400-page NEPA analysis:

According to the report, about 4 million gallons of water were used to maintain the landscapes at the two building. Redesigning them as desert-friendly xeriscape could result in water savings of more than half, or about 66%. The bureau started this work, at a cost of more than $4 million, and it recently opened up the project to the public.

I’ll be back in Boulder City week after next, I’ll check on how things are going.

Rothko at the LA County

Poster with text reading “ROTHKO” and a painting with purple, orange and yellow blurred rectangles.A friend visiting New York, knowing of my fascination with Mark Rothko, texted me a picture of one of his paintings (in MOMA or someplace?).

This led to a conversation with my wife, Lissa, who reminded me that she and I, years before we knew one another, had both been to see the 1979 retrospective of Rothko’s work at the LA County Museum of Art.

It’s a fun game for us, remembering the shows we’d both been to see in those years, disentangling the memories of things we saw separately, and those we saw together once we met. Lissa was a young artist living that life in L.A. I was the son of an artist – Dad took me to see all the most interesting shows. It was a way of life for both of us.

My sister, Lisa, joins in the game sometimes. She was around both before and after Lissa and I met, and art.

Lisa wasn’t around for the Rothko show, but we all three for sure saw the Art and Technology show at the LA County in 1971. There were lasers and bubbling mud pots and Claes Oldenburg’s giant undulating ice bag. Dad took teenage John and sister Lisa. My future wife, Lissa, who I wouldn’t meet for another dozen years, went as a young art school student.

In 1986 – by that time Lissa and I were married, and my wife and my sister, Lisa, were converging on their own deep, lifelong friendship – the three of us were back at LACMA together to see what remains one of the most significant art exhibits I have ever seen. It was a collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings from the Hermitage in then-Soviet Russia. It was a magnificent unfolding, in a single time and place, of the birth of the modern.

There was this through line you could see, standing before these magnificent canvases, all compressed into a single show, one after the other, from the Impressionists to Matisse to this ragged Picasso, Three Women, one of the companion pieces to Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. There was Lissa, the young love of my life, leading me through it, talking about what she saw. I’d lived around cubism my whole life – some of my earliest art memories are Dad’s cubist landscapes from the ‘50s – but I’d never really thought through what the birth of the modern meant.

I’ve written before about how Lissa taught me to see. The Hermitage show is one of the places where that happened.

The Grants Pass decision

I don’t write about homelessness much here because I don’t know enough to feel like I have much useful to add to the words and work of those who do. But I do think about it a lot. I also think a lot about the challenges of collective choice and collective action. Which is at the heart of this, from Steve Berg:

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

It’s important to note that this case may prevent certain lawsuits, but it doesn’t force communities to take any specific actions or to actively engage in criminal punishment of unsheltered people. Instead, it makes it easier for communities to do exactly that if they choose.

Elected officials who insist on going down that path will quickly learn that it won’t change the realities of homelessness. Criminal penalties such as fines, tickets, and arrests make homelessness worse, and cost communities a lot of money that should otherwise be spent on housing, supportive services, and street outreach. With record numbers of people entering into homelessness systems for the first time (more than 18,000 people per week in 2023, according to new U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] System Performance Measure data) we must remind leaders that what solves homelessness is housing, together with supportive services needed to help people stabilize in housing. And these are investments that benefit the entire community, not just folks who are experiencing homelessness.

Of concern in the majority opinion in this case are the statements that basically repeat the “homeless by choice” contention. These comments were based on gratuitous statements in amicus briefs in the case, written by people who are looking to cast blame on people other than themselves. The only choice involved in homelessness is the choice by alleged leaders to ignore the housing needs of people with the lowest incomes.

We know what to do to end homelessness. We still have homelessness because we haven’t done those things. This Supreme Court has made clear that we shouldn’t look to them for help. We intend to succeed without them.