Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blisterpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting points, anti-shill. In this vast country which even today is mostly empty land especially in the great Southwest, the West, and many parts of the interior, surely it's possible to do something about this terrible housing problem we have, where tens of millions can't even dream of owning their own homes.

I would think that investors could make a reasonable profit building a gleaming new city with thousands of affordable homes, not fancy or luxury but stand-alone structures with garage and yard, what used to be considered the American dream of home ownership, with retail and industrial zones to provide employment.

Inexpensive cost of living allows for modest salaries and wages, which allows for lower cost basis for manufacturers and other industries.

If I had the money, heck, I'd do it. Driving across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I saw millions of square miles of vast, untapped potential. A hundred new cities housing 100,000 each and providing ample employment would go a long way to solving these difficult housing problems, not to mention adding millions of net tax payers to the rolls, providing vast new opportunities for construction and trades, box stores, small retailers, manufacturers, service providers, etc.

We need to think a bit outside the box, or in this case outside the fossilized cities that have become poverty traps for so many.

> Driving across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I saw millions of square miles of vast, untapped potential.

Water?

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Human settlements require water more than anything else. No water; no city.

If you want to develop more or larger cities in the southwest, that requires a megaproject--several, actually. You burrow a tunnel canal from the Gulf of California into Laguna Salada. From there, you burrow on to the Salton Trough. And you create a similar tunnel canal from the Pacific into Death Valley. That's part A.

For part B, you build some new nuclear plants whose energy output goes entirely into creating artificial clouds on the shores of those artificial inland seas, along with Mono Lake, Lake Crowley, Lake Tahoe, Goose Lake, Pyramid Lake, Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Sevier Lake--anywhere that has enough volume that the cloud generators won't dry it up between rains. For the rains needed to keep the freshwater lakes filled, you will have also build evaporators on the ocean coast.

The point is to "bounce" that rainwater over the Rocky Mountains, so that the vast rain shadow east of them gets more precipitation. Though it sounds like an insanely expensive project (it would be), by far the cheapest way to move large amounts of water over long distances is to build a cloud upwind of where you want the water to be, and then collect it from the river for that watershed.

The second cheapest way would be to move your water very slowly through an existing aquifer. So for part C, you also pierce the caliche in several places over the Ogallalla aquifer. The rain "bounced" over the mountains can then partially drain into one end of the aquifer.

I'm thinking the energy to boil the amount of water which falls naturally on California is about 500 times what the electrical grid currently delivers (300,000 Gwh). Estimating avg rain fall over the state at 15 in = 38.1 cm, so 1.62 x 10^14 liters.

    http://ponce.sdsu.edu/california_average_annual_precipitation.html
    http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/total_system_power.html

You don't need to boil water to create an artificial cloud. Or at least you don't need to heat it to vapor pressure of one whole atmosphere.

The freshwater sources wouldn't necessarily need to deal with the phase change energy, but the saltwater sources would have to be desalinated. It would still be a huge, huge amount of energy. And it would have to be added to the water multiple times, for each time it rains out before crossing the mountains.

Much easier to just build the cities closer to where the water falls naturally.

The real problem with most of the American southwest, including and especially Colorado, is that the watershed can't support any more people. What we need out here is less people, not more. Just because the land is "empty" doesn't mean we can or should attempt to move people there.

I guess that's a valid point, that I hadn't considered. But surely there's a way to provide water. We're talking about a population shift, not a population increase so the country's net water usage should not increase. Maybe giant water collectors that obtain moisture from the atmosphere?

You could have a lot more people in those places if their water use were more efficient.

This is the kind of thing that markets can actually solve pretty well, as they allow people to adjust their usage to prices. Naturally, prices must be in tune with actual costs.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy, account for half of water usage in California. Texas usage is trending toward oil and gas using a dangerously large amount of water (fracking requires billions of gallons of water at the scale it happens in persistently drought stricken Texas). I am not familiar with New Mexico or Arizona or Nevada, but it would not be surprising to find that one or more industries dominate water usage, and in ways that are not sustainable or responsible.

Water usage by individuals, for cleaning and cooking and drinking, is often miniscule, in comparison to industrial usage.

How are we going to have a city (and food and jobs) without that industrial usage?

Stop fracking. It's the most expensive way to get oil out of the ground, and wouldn't be cost-comparable to renewable energy sources if the industry wasn't empowered to use dangerous amounts of water in drought-stricken areas, use eminent domain to steal land for pipelines, and generally externalize every cost, making everyone who doesn't have lobbyists foot the bill for their reckless behavior. At this point, the only reason fracking is profitable is because government is propping it up. Solar and wind (particularly in places like Texas, California and the southwest) is cost-competitive (or even cheaper, if you calculate long-term, because solar panels and wind farms have a very long productive lifetime and quite low ongoing costs, unlike oil and gas), if you take away the crutches that our government provides oil.

As for food, meat and dairy doesn't need to be produced in water-starved environments (and probably doesn't need to be consumed at the rate that Americans consume meat and dairy). Again, industry gets a pass and gets to socialize environmental costs that they simply shouldn't be able to externalize. But, he who has the money and the lobbyists makes the laws.

> with retail and industrial zones to provide employment.

That's the real trick. Building a new community is a two sided market: you either have to convince companies to go there without a local labor supply or people to go there without jobs.

Historically it's been both simultaneously. People decide to settle somewhere, open up a farm or retail business or perhaps a manufacturing operation to service others who have moved there, and it snowballs.

But as others point out, water may be the limiting factor. I have to believe, though, that there are vast swatches of the country that are close by to rivers or other water supplies, that are economically feasible to settle, and there should be a way to get these going, perhaps by unlocking federal land, selling it cheaply to low income folks (many of whom will turn around and sell it to real estate sharks for a quick buck, but perhaps enough will actually want to live there).

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