Can Developers Save the Great Salt Lake?

The Great Salt Lake is disappearing — visibly, measurably, at a pace that has scientists, regulators, and now developers paying urgent attention. Since the 1980s, the lake has lost roughly half its volume. Its surface area has shrunk by nearly 50 percent. What was once a 2,500-square-mile ecological anchor in the American West now sits dangerously low, exposing lakebed sediments laced with arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals to the wind — and to the 2.5 million people living along the Wasatch Front.

The question isn't whether developers have a role in this crisis. They do. The more pressing question is whether the industry is ready to treat that role as a responsibility rather than a liability.

This isn't a story about villains. It's a story about systems — how water gets allocated, how land gets developed, and how decisions made parcel by parcel, project by project, add up to consequences that dwarf any single stakeholder's intentions.

The Current State of the Great Salt Lake

To understand why developers matter here, you need to understand where the lake's water actually goes.

The Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake — it has no outlet. Every drop that flows in either evaporates or stays. Its primary water sources are three river tributaries: the Bear, Weber, and Jordan Rivers. Combined, those rivers once delivered enough inflow to keep the lake at a healthy elevation. The problem is that roughly 75 percent of the water that would naturally reach the lake gets diverted first — for agriculture, for municipalities, and increasingly, for the sprawling residential and commercial development that has defined Utah's explosive growth over the past three decades.

Utah is one of the fastest-growing states in the country. The Salt Lake metro area added more than 150,000 people between 2010 and 2020 alone. That growth is not slowing down. Every new subdivision, every new commercial campus, every new irrigated landscape represents another draw on a water system that is already overcommitted.

The ecological stakes are not abstract. The lake supports 10 million migratory birds annually — it is one of the most critical stops on the Pacific Flyway. Its brine shrimp industry generates roughly $57 million per year and feeds aquaculture operations worldwide. When the lake drops below a certain elevation threshold, that ecosystem doesn't degrade slowly; it collapses.

How Development Practices Affect Water Resources

Developers rarely think of themselves as water users in the same way that farmers do. But the infrastructure decisions made during land development — irrigation systems, landscaping requirements, impervious surface ratios, stormwater management — have compounding effects on regional water budgets that persist for decades.

A typical suburban development in Utah will install turf grass across common areas and individual lots, specify conventional irrigation systems, and connect to municipal water supplies without any meaningful efficiency requirements beyond code minimums. Multiply that template by hundreds of projects across the Wasatch Front, and you have a structural water demand problem baked into the built environment.

The more insidious impact is indirect: development drives population growth, and population growth drives municipal water demand, which means utilities must secure additional water rights — often by acquiring agricultural rights that previously contributed to the lake's inflow.

Some developers are already demonstrating that this pattern isn't inevitable. Water-wise landscaping, also called xeriscaping, can reduce outdoor water use by 50 to 75 percent compared to traditional turf. High-efficiency drip irrigation, soil moisture sensors, and native plant palettes aren't experimental — they're proven, commercially available, and increasingly cost-competitive when factored over a project's lifetime. The infrastructure investment required is modest. The water savings are substantial.

Strategies for Sustainable Development

The most forward-thinking developers working in water-stressed markets have stopped treating conservation as a constraint and started treating it as a design parameter. That shift in framing changes everything downstream — pun intended.

At the project level, practical interventions include replacing turf with drought-tolerant native plantings, designing grading and drainage systems that maximize on-site water infiltration rather than routing runoff off the property, and specifying WaterSense-certified fixtures as a baseline rather than an upgrade.

At the portfolio level, the opportunity is larger. Developers with multiple projects in the Salt Lake watershed can work proactively with entities like the Utah Division of Water Resources or conservation-focused nonprofits such as The Nature Conservancy — which has been active in the Great Salt Lake recovery effort — to identify where water efficiency investments will have the greatest impact on inflows to the lake. This isn't altruism; it's long-term risk management in a market where water availability will increasingly determine what gets built and where.

Collaboration with environmental organizations also opens doors to funding mechanisms that pure profit-seeking wouldn't surface — conservation easements, water trust participation, and mitigation banking are all tools that sophisticated developers are using to offset their footprint while adding value to their projects.

There's also a reputational dimension that is becoming commercially relevant. ESG considerations are influencing institutional capital at a scale that would have seemed improbable ten years ago. A developer who can document measurable contributions to Great Salt Lake water conservation isn't just doing good — they're building a story that resonates with investors, tenants, and municipal partners who increasingly want to know that the projects they're associated with are aligned with regional sustainability goals.

The Role of Policy and Regulation

Utah's water law operates on the prior appropriation doctrine — first in time, first in right. It's a system designed for a 19th-century West where water was abundant relative to demand, and it creates real structural barriers to conservation. Under prior appropriation, water rights you don't use can be legally forfeited, which historically discouraged efficiency. That's changing slowly, but the legal framework still rewards consumption more than conservation in ways that developers need to understand and, where possible, advocate against.

Recent legislative action in Utah has begun to address the Great Salt Lake crisis with some seriousness. In 2023, the Utah Legislature passed a package of bills directing state agencies to protect minimum lake levels and funding conservation programs with hundreds of millions of dollars over several years. That political momentum is real, and it creates an opening for industry engagement.

Developers who engage proactively with local planning commissions, water conservancy districts, and state agencies aren't just protecting their interests — they're shaping the regulatory environment they'll operate in for the next decade. The alternative is waiting for regulations to arrive fully formed, at which point the only options are compliance or conflict.

Strong building codes that mandate water-efficient landscaping, greywater reuse systems, and stormwater infiltration aren't industry threats. For developers who have already invested in these capabilities, mandatory standards eliminate the competitive disadvantage of doing the right thing before it's required.

The Future of the Great Salt Lake — and Who Shapes It

Scientists estimate that returning the Great Salt Lake to a healthy elevation would require increasing inflows by approximately one million acre-feet per year. That's a staggering number. Agriculture, which accounts for the majority of water diversions in the watershed, will have to be part of any serious solution. But development's contribution to the problem — and its potential contribution to the solution — is growing as Utah's population grows.

The long-term projections are not encouraging if current patterns hold. Climate models suggest the region will get hotter and drier, reducing snowpack in the mountains that feed the lake's tributaries. Development pressure is not going to ease. The water math, in other words, gets harder every year development practices stay the same.

But here's the contrarian read: developers are not an obstacle to saving the Great Salt Lake. They may be among the most structurally positioned actors to move the needle quickly. Unlike agricultural water users who face genuine economic hardship from conservation mandates, developers can incorporate efficiency measures at the design stage without fundamentally disrupting their business model. The cost delta between a conventional landscape design and a water-wise one is measurable and manageable. The impact, aggregated across thousands of acres of new development, is not trivial.

The Great Salt Lake doesn't need developers to become environmentalists. It needs them to become better engineers — to design projects that treat water as the scarce resource it already is, to engage with policy processes that are actively looking for industry partners, and to recognize that the long-term value of their projects depends on the health of the regional ecosystem they're building into.

That's not a sacrifice. That's just good business in a water-constrained world.

Learn more about how you can contribute to the Great Salt Lake's future at InfraSale Marketplace.

[INTERNAL LINK: Great Salt Lake crisis]

[INTERNAL LINK: sustainable development practices]

[INTERNAL LINK: water conservation strategies]