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The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

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Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#41

Post by nerdponx »

pj_mukh wrote: post #33
bradfa wrote: post #5

I can feel for the people who have been living there for a long time and now have to deal with the water situation. But I can't understand the attitudes of people who are choosing to move to such a place where access to water is such a risk. I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner's insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it's quite hard to h…

This is a real problem in California and is some how ingrained into the political structure and hard to shake. The Governor last year: "“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m not advocating for no (building).” [1] AFAIK, lawmakers are actually considering subsidizing insurance costs for exurbs i…

This sounds very similar to issues around houses built in known historical flood zones.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#42

Post by xyzzyz »

legitster wrote: post #34
csnover wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably thinking of The Growth Ponzi Scheme[0], which was adapted into a video series by Not Just Bikes[1]. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...

I would take this with a huge grain of salt - Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns. - The ASCE number is a bit of a joke - this is a marketing number for the purposes of pushing investment in engineering firms. In reality, your city doesn't need to p…

All of this is true, but you’ve missed the biggest issue with the above argument, which is implying that we cannot afford to replace what our much poorer ancestors afforded to build.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#43

Post by thescriptkiddie »

nostromo wrote: post #37

I'll voice an unpopular opinion: people should live in these dry areas. Deserts have wildlife, yes, but they have much less biomass than the other places humans live. A person living in Arizona or Nevada is displacing much less natural wildlife than a person like me, living in Seattle. So I say let's embrace people living in water-starved areas like the Southwest. We can enable it by smart water usage, like you see i…

People who live in cities have far smaller environmental footprints than people living in suburbs or rural areas.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#44

Post by legitster »

I'll be a resident contrarian and argue that building more houses in the SW is a good thing.

- The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall)

- Cooling is more energy efficient than heating.

- Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc).

- People like it

But the question is how to get water to these places? Especially knowing now that the Colorado River Compact was designed when rainfall was at historic highs. But I don't think there is any long term solution that doesn't involve California giving up on taking other state's water to grow high-intensity agriculture.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#45

Post by SECProto »

joshuaheard wrote: post #14

On a planet that is 2/3 water, I think we can find a solution. Desalination comes to mind. We built an interstate highway system. We can build an interstate water distribution system for desalinated Pacific Ocean water.

Anyone who recommends desalination and pipelines hasn't looked at how cheap the water on a municipal water bill is, let alone agricultural users: Approx a dollar or two per cubic meter supplied to my doorstep, depending what my consumption rate is. Other cities would be similar range. That's in the range of 0.1 cents per litre

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#46

Post by bombcar »

knappe wrote: post #28
citizenpaul wrote: post #8

I can't find it anymore but I read a long form article like this probably 10 years ago on the problem of suburbs public infrastructure. Basically they ran the numbers and figured out that more than 50% of cities simply cannot afford to maintain the suburb infrastructure no matter what they do with the budget. Even if they did something crazy like tripled taxes tomorrow they still could not afford it. The called them…

I too want to find this article (I'm certain it was linked from HN). It isn't a strong towns article, but it had some great diagrams showing how the city centers are the only economically viable places for utilities because of density. The suburbs were just not cost effective and thus were going to go bankrupt because of the lack of efficiency. I've tried to find this article in the past and it has been long enough t…

I have strong suspicions that the data doesn't hold up if examined closely, because "suburbs" are just low density towns, and small towns continue to exist nearly everywhere.

Sure maintenance comes around, but it always seems to work out, somehow.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#47

Post by aidenn0 »

joshuaheard wrote: post #14

On a planet that is 2/3 water, I think we can find a solution. Desalination comes to mind. We built an interstate highway system. We can build an interstate water distribution system for desalinated Pacific Ocean water.

I don't want to be defeatist, but it seems like we can't build magaprojects in the US anymore.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#48

Post by bradfa »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #30
bradfa wrote: post #5

I can feel for the people who have been living there for a long time and now have to deal with the water situation. But I can't understand the attitudes of people who are choosing to move to such a place where access to water is such a risk. I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner's insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it's quite hard to h…

they said it's because there's no HOA. HOAs really are incredibly awful. And, it's getting harder and harder to find houses that are not in an HOA.

I think the whole concept of having HOAs in many neighborhoods is a very regional thing. I live in upstate NY and pretty much every single-family homes neighborhood around me does not have an HOA. The only neighborhoods which have HOAs are those with large numbers of multi-family homes, like townhomes.

In some ways it's nice to not have an HOA, no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here: there's probably 6 different companies who service my neighborhood on all 5 days of the week, it would be nice if we all just had 1 and probably we could all save some money this way too.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#49

Post by alistairSH »

legitster wrote: post #44

I'll be a resident contrarian and argue that building more houses in the SW is a good thing. - The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall) - Cooling is more energy efficient than heating. - Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc). - People like it But the question is how to get water to these places?…

Point 3 - the article explicitly mentioned lawn sprinklers, a pool for bathing horses, and some other things that most definitely DO waste water. And are they required to be better insulated?

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#50

Post by woodruffw »

legitster wrote: post #44

I'll be a resident contrarian and argue that building more houses in the SW is a good thing. - The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall) - Cooling is more energy efficient than heating. - Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc). - People like it But the question is how to get water to these places?…

> The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall)

Ecological impact includes draining aquifers and diverting rivers.

Human civilizations, particularly dense ones, have preferred oceans and rivers near temperate rainforests (like the entire Northeast) for this reason. The marginal advantages of less heating aren't outweighed by the resource and economic advantages of living near large bodies of water in areas where the geology and ecology actually supports it.

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