Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 200 posts

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#61

Post by Finnucane »

phpisthebest wrote: post #51
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?…

>> Cooling is more energy efficient than heating. How is that? First thing ofcourse is everything we do as human, including our body is generating heat, for my cooling my home is FAR FAR FAR more expensive (thus i would assume more energy intensive) than heating my home. >>Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc). This is largely government zoning or HOA's here, people o…

> but my local government prevents that

They mandate you have a grass lawn?

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#62

Post by gnu8 »

dktoao wrote: post #53
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?…

You are going to need to provide a source for your claim that cooling is less efficient than heating. AFAIK from my days as a mechanical engineer, heating from an electric source is ~95% efficient and cooling is ~30% efficient...

It is two different modalities of heating though. Electrical heating is 95% efficient at dumping energy from the grid into your house, but a heat pump is using energy from the grid to concentrate and move heat from outside the house to the inside (which is itself unintuitive to people when it is already much colder outside the house than inside). So how do you develop a fair comparison of the two in total energy expended to keep the building at the desired temperature?

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#63

Post by woodruffw »

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…

> - 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.

At least in my travels, the suburbs I've seen outside the US have only borne a very surface-level similarity to their US counterparts. There are lawns and the houses are detached, but the suburbs themselves tend to be much denser and connected to city centers via rail. These combine to make European suburbs more sustainable than their American counterparts.

(There are other factors as well: most of Continental Europe has much more consistent rainfall than the Continental US, and there's no particular evidence that their suburban constructions are ultimately sustainable either -- they may just be more than our ludicrously unsustainable ones.)

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#64

Post by phpisthebest »

bradfa wrote: post #48
throw8383833jj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

>>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:

In many locations neither of those items are purview of the HOA, those would be City ordinances and City Services.

HOA's in my experience fit 2 molds, with some over lap

The first takes care of common property of the community, like playgrounds, community centers, etc.

Then you have rules enforcement, which are beyond the standard city rules like length of grass, in the realm of the type and style of grass you can have, the plants you can have, the color of the home, the type of (or if you can) have a pool, or structure, or Playground, etc etc etc.

These HOA expanded on what would be normal governmental regulations around safety, and go into the realm of "property value" protection, and other ascetics needs of the community

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#65

Post by D13Fd »

phpisthebest wrote: post #51
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?…

>> Cooling is more energy efficient than heating. How is that? First thing ofcourse is everything we do as human, including our body is generating heat, for my cooling my home is FAR FAR FAR more expensive (thus i would assume more energy intensive) than heating my home. >>Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc). This is largely government zoning or HOA's here, people o…

I think what the other poster meant is that “cooling in a warm client is less energy intensive than heating in a cool climate” which is generally true.

This is partially because the temperature deltas are smaller. If you are aiming for 70 inside and you have 95 outside, you are fighting a 25-degree delta. But if you want 70 inside and have 25 outside, that’s a 45-degree delta the system has to overcome.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#66

Post by throw8383833jj »

bradfa wrote: post #48
throw8383833jj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

what ever money save from garbage pickup will be vastly outdone by the enormous waste an HOA brings. Our HOA costs me 2K per year (that's a whole tesla every 20 years = 40K). And the only thing they do is take care of a couple of benches, blow some leaves off a few bushes, maybe a few sprinklers in a green area and 2 big white fences. Other than that, all the money goes to administration and inspectors that go around citing people for planting trees, etc. Now, our neighborhood does look really great but it's not because of the HOA, it's because we have larger lots and nice housing architecture and people take care of their properties really nicely (HOA doesn't do any of that).

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#67

Post by dmpk2k »

dktoao wrote: post #53
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?…

You are going to need to provide a source for your claim that cooling is less efficient than heating. AFAIK from my days as a mechanical engineer, heating from an electric source is ~95% efficient and cooling is ~30% efficient...

Probably heatpumps, depending on the climate. Heatpump effectiveness drops off rapidly as you head below 0C.

Considering the temperature extremes that southern US versus northern US housing experiences over the entire year, it's probably easier to keep the southern house around 21C than the northern one.

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#68

Post by woodruffw »

legitster wrote: post #57
alistairSH wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but on average less than northern cities. At the end of the day, I don't actually care about moralizing what's wasteful or not if the owner is being charged the proper cost to acquire. If that's $1 a gallon for solar and desalination/recycled water, enjoy that lawn. (Pedantic person side note: pools are not actually that wasteful. If they are properly covered when not in use, evaporative loss is actually pretty…

> Sure, but on average less than northern cities.

This isn't true. Compare NYC's average of 117 GPD[1] to TMWA's 165 GPD[2]. That's 40% more water use, per individual. The last year that NYC's residents came close to using that much water was 1996.

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/history-of-drought-water...

[2]: https://www.nevadatomorrow.org/indicators/index/view?indicat...

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#69

Post by voisin »

I highly recommend anyone interested in solutions to read “Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond” by Brad Lancaster. Link below. Also, he has a great video on YouTube with some of the concepts at a high level (from a TEDx) - don’t let his enthusiasm at the beginning detract from the seriousness of his message!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49338099

Re: The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs

#70

Post by [deleted] »

nerdponx wrote: post #41
pj_mukh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN