maybe the next generation will be smart enough not to live in a desert
This is misguided. No, I'll go farther than that -- it's self-satisfied smugness without any practical basis in reality, making it essentially a pointless comment. Humans have been adapting their environment to suit their needs for longer than recorded history, and will continue to do so well beyond the point that any of us have left this mortal coil.
But more to the point, your statement implicitly includes the idea that someone is in charge of deciding where people can and can not live, or where cities can or can not be built. In the US, at least, there is no such person, no such board, no such decision-making process. Cities grow organically based on where people want to live, and where people want to live is driven by more variables than I could possibly enumerate in this post.
TL;DR: You're not actually smarter than anyone else. You're just a smug prick who thinks he is.