Palm Springs, that jewel of a jetset getaway, is studded with golf courses and swimming pools. It’s also a desert, which is why choosing to locate 120 water-guzzling world-class golf courses there looks like a world-class miscalculation now that the west’s drying up.

Parts of the legendary resort’s Coachella Valley “have sunk more than a foot in a decade as groundwater was sucked up to feed a thirsty economy,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which adds that even as the ground is literally sinking, Palm Spring’s population
“has ballooned by 25 percent in just five years.”

Steven Robbins, the Coachella Valley Water District’s chief engineer, told the Inquirer:

“We have a problem, and we have to deal with it. But our goal is to not have water be a constraint to growth. We don’t want to be the ones to say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to growth.”

I guess they’re not really about to run out of water after all; looks like that river we call “de-Nile” runs right through Palm Springs.