Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree so strongly with this sentiment. There is always such a defeatist attitude on these threads that assumes California is somehow full and unchangeable. Outside of the three metro areas, it's basically empty! Separately, in the metro areas, there's a lot of room for infill density.

Three years back, I made the rational choice to leave because I could barely see a way to home ownership - not to mention having a family and sending children to a good school.

California can solve all of it's problems if it wanted to. I think the problem is the number of people in California who have barely left the state and view the rest of the country as this underdeveloped backwater.

Food for thought, California currently:

- Is tied for the 3rd highest unemployment rate https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

- Has the 5th highest Gini coefficient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_...

- Has the LOWEST high school graduation rate https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/high-school...

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.

California needs to drastically ramp up water availability from new sources. Otherwise there isn't much point to the rest of this conversation.

It won't take much water to support more people, and adding more people might even reduce water demand. Getting rid of old fixtures with née construction drastically reduces water demand. Replacing single family lawns with multi family and shared lawns typically allows far more people to live on the same amount of land and at the same time use less water. Even as my town's population has grown, water use has dropped:

PDF, page 25: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20484267-2020-annual...

The bigger problem is water supply reliability, and that's going to need some serious attention whether or not new people come.

The water rights system in this state are absurd, and we use water in terrible ways because of it. We need to reign in the farmers, who have been abusing aquifers and living without thought for the next generation. And we probably need to start taxing water rights, based on the water rights value.

> It won't take much water to support more people

I don't think this takes into account the ongoing decreases in CA's current water sources. Some of those sources are shared by multiple, growing, states.

> The bigger problem is water supply reliability, and that's going to need some serious attention whether or not new people come.

This seems to undermine any arguments about not requiring much water to support more people.

If our water sources are decreasing, and building new infill housing for more people decreases water use, then more people's helps the water problem by changing our very infrastructure.

But more people will help our water situation in other ways too. Those new people also bring the resources with them to address a changing climate that has more water variability. Because of Prop 13, a static population will starve local governments of funds to deal with their water issues. We require new people to reset tax assessments and bring in funds.

A third way that more people help the water situation is that it wrests more control of water from economically exploitive water usages such as industry and towards more socially supportive uses. The current coalition of residents does not have sufficient political power to reform our awful water rights system. It will take an expanded electorate of residents to overpower the i democratic influence of the industrial uses of water that would be far better suited to other areas of the country.

Stop growing rice and fucknuts in the fucking desert. That solves the water problem.

Also can we talk about lawns for a second? Your pastoral evolutionary roots called: you haven’t owned any livestock for a minute. Your lawn won’t help you eat anymore.

And farm where? The aquifer used by most of the midwest is over half drained and can't be replenished. South of there is dessert. North is cold. East is populous and mountainous.

If we made no change other than to stop growing the almonds that we export overseas, that alone would free up enough water to accommodate about 20 new San Franciscos:

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

While farming that uses even more water gets a pass?

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

I mentioned almonds because California grows so many of them that the total water use of all the state's production outweighs the total for beef, but your point is valid that beef (in terms of water-per-pound-eaten) use even more water. This is another area we could free up the supply for residential use: Let other parts of the country develop stronger cattle industries. Or just let the price of meat go up.

That's very interesting. Today I learned.

That rice and those nuts are mostly exported for profit, not needed for subsistence.

Is _rice_ really grown in California?

Yes.

California has a rich delta, the San Joaquin River Delta, which is a natural rice growing region.

People who are ignorant of geography, and think water is much more fungible than it is, would prefer that some small amount more of this water be expelled into the San Francisco Bay, as the great majority of it is already.

Contrast with alfalfa, which is grown mostly from aquifer water in the Central Valley, constitutes 50% of the entire agricultural water use for the state, and is used as cattle feed. That we can do without.

Also people who are aware of the invention of aqueducts would prefer that agricultural use of water be priced the same as residential use, if water is to be the main argument in opposition to allowing the state's population to grow.

Water is absolutely no practical barrier to population growth in California.

It's a fake issue, made up to disguise a classic NIMBYist fear of changing "the character" of California.

Which, I've been to Yosemite recently, so I get that. But the ship sailed long ago.

California does have unsustainable agricultural practices. Alfalfa growing for feedlot cattle is the big one, eliminate that and Cali can in fact expand on her comparative advantage in growing fruits, nuts, and specialty crops like asparagus and artichoke.

But this is completely unrelated to residential use of water, which is a) a rounding error next to agriculture and b) provisioned through a largely orthogonal system of reservoirs and, yes, aqueducts, which agriculture simply isn't competing with. Expanding that system and stewarding the available water better wouldn't take away from agriculture, which is fed by rivers and aquifers.

Again, the big offender is alfalfa. Rice, irrigated from canals off the Delta, is an irrelevant distraction to agricultural sustainability, let alone residential growth.

California's system of water rights is ancient and corrupt, and isn't serving the state well. But "pricing ag water like residential water" is a nonsensical way of solving that problem, it's just not the same water. Actually auctioning available water, and setting hard limits on aquifer withdrawal, is both necessary and quite sufficient.

Thanks, this was an interesting perspective. Alfalfa does seem to come up as a waste of water occasionally, but almonds seem get most of the hate.

How would limits on aquifer withdrawal be enforced? In general reforming water rights seems politically infeasible due to entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo.

Disagree that the statistics I cited have water availability as a prerequisite to improvement. California can simultaneously have water problems and graduate more seniors. They are not mutually exclusive.

Agree in the need to ramp up water availability. Though certainly simple solutions like reducing the number of water intensive crops would provide enough water for decades of population growth without new sources. The key is to allow people to imagine a slightly different California and not panic that there just aren't as many almond growers as there used to be.

To what extent does the third datapoint drive the other two?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com