“I was always drawn to the mountains when I was traveling around the country and, to be honest, it was affordable,” she said. “It was off grid. It had a structure. It was away from people. The view is incredible. There’s climbing, hiking. It was somewhere I could afford and have land in Colorado.”
I wanted to live off the grid, but not that off the grid.
Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.
The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
They are residents of some governance unit and, therefore, vote somewhere. Is that possible to have no right to vote because you live in the wrong place?
You don't have the right to vote in a city that you do not live in, and the water system is controlled by the city in this case. I assume they can vote for county offices, and the county is now determining how best they can serve their residents now that the city is unable to.
Sometimes the lines about what affects you are blurry, but the question of whether you get a vote isn't: you do or you don't. Maybe rural people should get a partial vote in town affairs, 3/5 or something like that.
As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.
Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
I'm asking for a couple billionaires.
Their companies pay taxes, so no that argument doesn't work. Every company pays some form of employee taxes and so on, there is no way to get around that.
Employees pay those. And companies don't vote (they need to bribe politicians through donations).
In fact, I'm not sure the degree to which just bowing out of public schooling is even allowed given that I think that's over half of my town's budget.
Also because it’s highest cost due to less populated area
Why is well sharing illegal?
Besides that, human psychology is such that these people probably couldn't afford anything else and then back-justified their constraints as "drawn to the mountains for hiking and the views".