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Comment by bradfa | Hacker News Reader

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 have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this?

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> 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.

Denial is incredibly powerful. Most people can't really comprehend that there isn't enough water in that region (even though it should be obvious). We've lived in a time of plenty for so long the idea that something as fundamental as water could be limited just seems impossible.

You see this everywhere, and only tend to notice the denial when the problems don't impact you. Comments pointing out concerns that impact tech or everyone are frequently downvoted to oblivion here on HN. I saw a comment claiming that democracy in the US has been under threat, something no one who was observing the US from outside would deny, get downvoted to oblivion and decried as pure hyperbole.

We're all living in a constant and escalating state of cognitive dissonance, the world around is collapsing in multiple ways, but locally you aren't allowed to acknowledge this. The "this is fine meme" summarizes our current environment perfectly.

That may all be true. But we've also had chicken littles screaming about the falling sky since the beginning of time.

Y2k comes to mind. I was in high school at the time, and still remember all the breathless articles. The trains would stop, the water treatment plants would fail, the traffic lights would go haywire. Somewhere within each semi truck, grid sub-station and bank mainframe was a tiny ticking time bomb that would rollover in a few short months to 00 and implode into chaos. For the want of a few bits, the implements of modern life would become useless hunks of scrap. The crusty cobol programmers were working round the clock to stop it but there simply weren't enough of them or the source code was missing or nobody had a compiler anymore. We were doomed.

Turns out, the damned lights didn't even flicker at midnight.

And with rise of click-driven journalism, it's even worse.

Do you think Y2K fixed itself?

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 in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round.

[1]: https://apnews.com/article/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe

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

Where this has been found to be a very expensive mistake, you are now seeing communities buy out homeowners, demolish, and leave the areas empty. Other efforts can be very expensive, but worthwhile if they're protecting enough.

For example of the latter, the Winnipeg floodway is a huge ditch around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Built in the late '50s, it diverts the Red River around the city, reconnecting further north. It was seen as a huge boondoggle when being built, but has saved much of the city repeatedly since.

> in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round.

and which places on earth were meant for humans exactly?

> 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.

From the article: "They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”

In their mind: "This is America." Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end.

> Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end.

This was my thought as well. The music is about to stop. Many don't realize it. Some don't believe it. Some actively deny it. But it's happening, and faster than we're ready for.

Many of us do realize it and are just sitting here staring at the screen at work realizing what a horrible mistake it all was, and hoping the fall won't as bad as the movies lead us to believe.

I am frequently reminded these days of a particular New Yorker cartoon [0].

We can still avert most of the predicted catastrophes, but we need to stop letting the people with the money just dictate policy to the rest of us to favor themselves.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

I am sitting here, thinking that it would be an easily solvable problem if people actually cared about the sustainability of their communities.

So much this. Our town is trying. They're trying to educate people about it. They are showing people how much water we're collectively consuming per day, how much lower the water table is than in previous years etc. And it seems that nobody cares. Water consumption numbers are actually going up and I see people running sprinklers. I'm hoping the town will actually soon switch from only allowing sprinklers during the night to disallowing sprinklers altogether and actually enforcing that.

I didn't realize how much water I was using until my bill went way up. Then I started running outside to read my water meter after various activities. Showering is the #1 usage of water: 80-100 gallons per shower!!! I had no idea. Literally, it never crossed my mind because water has always been so cheap.

Many are actively working to bring the disaster into the present! In the book Running Out the author interviews Kansas farmers who are explicitly managing the aquifer so that it runs out within their lifetimes. Not too soon, but not too far into the future, either.

What's the logic here - is it just agribusiness maximizing profit in the short-medium term with the expectation of writing it off and moving production elsewhere once the point of collapse arrives?

“I got mine”

You can't just take the planet with you when you die hence you need to consume it in its entirety to minimize "waste" aka earth left for other humans.

Juxtaposing this with the Flint water crisis -- which occurred in a place with abundant fresh water, albeit no wealthy cities next door -- is really something. They may be right, but this is not a bet I would be comfortable making.

Add in “I’m a nature lover! I’m not the bad guy because I want to live in nature (with air conditioning, easy car access and half hour showers)!”

>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 have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this?

It's pretty normal in rural areas to basically not have a fire department for all practical purposes anyway. Yeah, they often have a volunteer fire department, but when your best case scenario response time is like 30 minutes, you're not gonna save structures anyway. That's not considering the wildfire risk at all.

Right, but even with a volunteer fire department, at least there's normally water that they can use to save the neighbor houses once they arrive on-scene. If there's no water then there's no way to save anything from a fire.

Right: They'll have water delivery trucks on standby contracts. The very trucks that deliver water to homes. They'll come to the scene and deploy an instant-pool for firetrucks to draw from.

You could say that having homes that depend on cisterns actually helps in firefighting efforts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i090t5scQ1o&t=220s

The tenders, as those trucks are known, would be from the fire department themselves. Filling from nearby-as-possible ponds or tanks, a good-sized structure fire will still go through multiple trucks' worth of water.

I volunteer with our rural, island-based fire department. The more populated part has 90% or more of the people, and is part of our coverage area. The larger part is more parks and forest, and sees regional coverage such as chopper- or truck-based crews, helicopters and so on.

Each of the engine trucks carries something like 1000 gallons of water, and is kept full. So are the tenders, which can dump into the "porta-pond" as in that video. The water supply team has a list of available sources of water that they can go to to keep that water flowing, but if there is nothing nearby, the round-trip time will get longer, and firefighters will have to leave the building until there is water available.

Wildfire fighting is very different, and much more focused on containing the edges of the fire by using natural fire breaks or creating new ones. (Think picks and shovels, heli buckets, and heavy equipment where available.) If there is a house or two threatened, maybe some sprinklers can be set up ahead of the fire. If the house is on fire, too bad, efforts are on what's ahead.

Don't US fire trucks carry water?

Only enough for a very short amount of time, basically the water in the truck or fire engine lasts long enough for the firefighters to get connected to a hydrant and not much more.

Ah ok. I think I greatly overestimated how long those tanks last for.

yes but they also usually hook up to fire hydrants to have enough time to put fires out. I don't have figures but from what I remember most fire trucks only have enough water on board for the first 5-10 minutes of spraying.

>Right, but even with a volunteer fire department, at least there's normally water that they can use to save the neighbor houses once they arrive on-scene.

Lol... no. There are so many flawed assumptions here I'm not sure where to start. Basically everything you said was wrong.

First, the "neighbor house" would typically be hundreds of yards away at the absolute closest.

Second, the availability of water for fire fighting purposes in rural areas is commonly dubious normally. It's exceedingly rare that a residence will have any form of pressurized water like "personal hydrant" type of system. At best, they might have a 2,500 gallon polyethylene tank, or a pond they could dip into, IF the volunteer fire department has a pump and hose setup, which is itself kind of rare or slow to arrive.

Third, a lot of the efforts on scene are unlikely to involve water at all. It's more like wild-land fire style where you might try to cut fire lines and stuff to try and prevent igniting surrounding areas, evacuate and render aid to affected people, etc.

That's fair, I don't know how to fight fires. But it sounds like a lot of these newer houses in the article are not the normal spread-out rural type spacing but much more like suburb size lots. The article says: “Not only are they building as dense as they can build, they’re scraping everything to the ground,”

If they really are building on multi-acre lots then you're probably right. But if it's more like a suburban style where houses are on 0.25 acre lots and there's only maybe 15-20 feet between houses then I feel my concerns are legit.

It's the real estate agent's duty to inform house buyers that they property they're buying may not have water in the future and what a huge pain point that would be. The only logical conclusion i can come to is that the buyers real estate agents have not been honest in this regard.

Are they really duty bound to disclose this? What about fire, flood, earthquake and any other risk. My experience is they don't, other than legally mandated things like asbestos or lead.

I bought a house in California, and the docs include a bunch of details on potential disasters, natural and otherwise. Dam inundation maps are engrossing - there's a dam over San Leandro that could put water on the OAK runways.

That said, I see wiggle room on "if nothing changes there eventually won't be enough water", even if we all know that in practice nothing will change in time, so I don't know how that actually plays out.

Other people just don't care. I know a Mojave desert community far to the east of LA where water delivery happens by truck. It's a very harsh and unforgiving environment, but I really liked it when I worked out there some years ago and have considered moving there because I like solitude and am comfortable with a very frugal/minimal lifestyle.

Last year I ran across an LA Times article about how people were making different life choices due to the pandemic, and and other factors - specifically moving from LA to this place. In contrast to locals who tend to build low houses and choose colors that blend with the desert landscape, these people were painting their houses bright white and, I kid you not, installing swimming pools.

Would a white house reflect more height and be cooler inside ?

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.

>>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

My town has no interest in operating garbage service. A few of the area villages do have village-provided garbage service and often the quality and cost is less than the private companies, but it seems garbage service is not a big enough deal for people to try and unite over it.

Pools and structures like decks or sheds are regulated by the building code of the town, but they do not impact your property value for property taxes. Pools specifically also don't seem to impact property value when you sell, a pool is only useful here for 3 months of the year and lots of people don't want to deal with maintaining them. I would happily pay an HOA to take care of a nice neighborhood pool instead of maintaining my own but I've never seen a local single-family home neighborhood with a community pool here.

Well my city has no interest in operating one either, instead they force me to pay a high monthly fee, then find the lowest bid contractor they can to do a shitty job of collecting my trash sometimes... (paying the contractor about 1/4 of the amount the city charges me for the service) while preventing any competing company from offering residential pickup anywhere in the city limits.

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).

Two unrelated comments:

1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations.

2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.

Do HOAs even exist outside the US? I don't know of anything similar in Australia other than body corporate organizations for blocks of units but their scope (and cost) is far more limited. All the other services seemingly provided by HOAs in the US would all be local government provided here. I assumed it was much the same elsewhere in the (developed) world...

I'm dubious. HOAs were created to do an end run around Shelley vs Kraemer.

HOA's generally exist in places that followed the US's 20th century 'white/wealthy flight' model. Prominent examples include Argentina, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.

This is representative of the core conflict of American politics that makes it so confusing to outsiders - ideologically, the people in power (often delusionally) identify with Europe, but in practice, they desire power dynamics similar to oligopolies seen in the developing world.

Not to go too far with the metaphor, but if America never established race-based slavery (and instead, racial minorities were primarily the small number of remaining Native Americans), I bet we'd have a similar political system to Australia (where overtly exclusionary practices are more frowned upon).

We had something pretty close on the sugar plantations in the 19th century. But interestingly it was very much an exclusionary government policy to relocate most of them back to the south sea islands. Australia has plenty to be ashamed of in our treatment of anyone non-white historically.

That is probably because upstate NY does not have new housing developments. All housing developments built from scratch since the 2000s that I have seen have HOAs. Many from 1980s and 1990s. Once the HOA is in place by the original developer, it is rare to get the votes needed to remove the HOA.

My neighborhood was built starting around 2005-2006. Then during 2008-ish building paused for a bit, then resumed around 2012, then paused again around 2014, then resumed around 2018. It's now complete. There's lots of new single-family home neighborhoods being built in my town, afaict none of them have HOAs.

Where is this? I am familiar with developments in CA/WA/OR/TX/TN/FL.

All the FL/TX ones even come with gates.

I live in Webster, NY. It's a suburb of Rochester, NY. There's not a TON of new developments but there's a steady stream of new builds around the various suburbs of Rochester, Buffalo, and Syracuse. Mostly it seems like younger families buying these new builds.

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