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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

You're acting like when you prevent people from coming here, they vanish into thin air, rather than go live somewhere else that's worse for the planet.

For instance, city families use far less water per capita than rural and suburban families, and they produce fewer "capitas".

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-residents-praised...

And compare "water used in California to produce almonds exported to other countries" versus "water used for all SF/LA homes and businesses" below:

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/LA-vs-Exports...

Similarly, when you take people from elsewhere in the country and move them to places like San Francisco, their consumption of fuel and electricity go down, as does their production of garbage.

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The majority of water problems come not from a few entities consuming massive amounts of water. Why we allow growing almond trees in an arid climate is beyond me.

After that, you have smaller but water intensive businesses.

Being suburban doesn’t mean you waste water. I live in the suburbs and our water use is minimal. I use water saving shower heads, I turn off the water during most of the shower. In fact, the water never runs for more than two minutes. I wash my car extremely rarely. I don’t water a lawn. I only water a couple of small potted plants. I have water saving toilets.

There are always going to be outliers (people in cities who use a lot of water, and people outside who don't), but on average you will always find that city families tend to use less water than non-city families.

In other words, public policies that divert people away from cities tend to increase water consumption (and harm the environment by just about any other metric you can name.)

I personally moved from a city to an RV and stay in rural areas. We (wife and myself) use about 60 gallons of water _per week_ right now. We're planning on getting a well on our property soon and even after that we're probably going to use at most 20-40 gallons a day (with a fairly large garden). I don't exactly understand what city people these days (it's been 7 years for me) do but they tend to wash clothes and shower... a LOT.

I’m not sure either, but data outweighs anecdotes, and the data is clear.

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