Hacker News Reader

Comment by riversflow | Hacker News Reader

In rural California you'll get a notice that you can't live on your own property if you don't have an approved septic system registered with the county. I know multiple people who have had this happen to them in a couple of counties, and have heard about it in several others. I personally find it kinda lame you can't live in an RV on property you own. The septic system approval process involves soil sampling and engineering based on dwelling size (I can't remember if its area or number of bedrooms) in the counties I'm familiar with.

View on HN

I personally find it kinda lame you can't live in an RV on property you own.

You do ask how long it would take for someone to open a trailer park on their property if the sewage regulation didn't exist. Texas has an issue with colonias, it's easy to see why California wouldn't like to see rural shantytowns developed.

California needs to lighten up on regulations.

I like California. I have lived here my entire life, but the regulations/fees/fines are outrageous.

I looked into buying some property years ago near Bolinas. I asked the Realator why it was so cheap. She said you can't build-- can't even set up a tent. You can't even take a nap on the land. He, "So what's it good for?". Her, "Maybe leech lines?".

Want to build your cabin, or home.

In my town, of San anselmo, the town council decides pretty much every aspect of your build down to window placement (Homeowner might see Karen naked if that window isn't higher. They even ok your roof type, wether you use stucco, or shiplap, and even the Petunias in your front yard.

Neusom is trying, but ADU's are being used by rich people to gain more house footage.

And there's a part of me that wants all building stopped until we figure out this water problem.

If there's another major earthquake it'll take the Bay Area seventy years to get the permits to rebuild half of what was already standing.

Don't be silly.

A lot of it is no longer legal to build and will never be rebuilt.

That's the other half.

Maybe they don't rebuild the sprawling car-centric infrastructure they currently have.

But without highway overpasses where will all the homeless and drug addicts go?

Don't be silly. In California the homeless do not live under highways. They live anywhere they damn feel including your front yard

Don't you dare complain about it and when they shit on your path just call up the local poop patrol who will come out in 2-4 weeks to clean that up

You're getting downvoted for telling the uncomfortable truth.

I am used to it. The ability to see the world though an objective non-emotional lens is a skill many do not have unfortunately, that is after all how government retains power by way of emotional manipulation of the population mainly through fear or jealousy

Definitely happens in SF - the behavior of homeless there is rather shocking to outsiders.

But there are parts of California where you don't see that. I live in a conservative county and the worst I see is illegal panhandling next to freeway exits.

That's where some people are apparently going wrong. Some people have already figured out that you don't actually need a septic system, and it's completely legal. Just poop on the ground and call a phone number already set up explicitly for the purpose of having them come clean it up for you, at taxpayer expense. Just say you're homeless in that camper on your own land and you won't be required to put in a septic.

It’s agriculture that is causing the water problem, and desalination is cheap for residential purposes.

But sometimes fiercely resisted. I don’t know if the desalination plant will happen near Monterey.

What are the public arguments against desalination? Are there any interests at risk?

If not done properly it can kill sea life.

Lot of liberals think about development the same way conservatives think about government. AKA starve the beast. Conservatives by trying to cut taxes. Liberals block things that they think enable development.

Two questions: 1. What is the power source? 2. Where does the extra salty brine go after desalination?

These aren't big questions for small operations but become important for larger plants.

I mean, these questions have simple and quick answers. 1) The California Grid. and 2) The nearby ocean.

The briny water can be made as close in salt content to seawater as you want, it just increases costs slightly.

I think what you're saying is that environmental review takes years. But I don't think delays really help the environment. They just slow progress.

Water is fungible. It doesn't make sense to give water for almost free to farmers to grow grass for cows, then turn around and burn energy to desalinate drinking water.

Instead, we should take the desalination plant money, buy out the farms, shut them down and take their water for drinking. Far more environmentally friendly and a lot cheaper too.

I actually agree with this in principle, but isn't California a huge source of food for much of the west coast? Where will the food be grown then?

Pretty much anywhere else with sunlight, soil and water?

In states with a more reasonable water usage?

Yes and no. There are crops which make sense to grow in California due to the climate, which we shouldn't grow elsewhere. Alfalfa isn't one of them. We export alfalfa to other countries, essentially exporting our water. Cow feed can be better grown elsewhere (and cows can be better raised elsewhere)

Another problem crop in California is rice. We simply shouldn't grow rice in this state. Most rice is grown in the southern US where water is plentiful. We could stop growing rice without significant impact. More water is used in California growing rice than all of Los Angeles residential use put together.

We could cut these crops significantly without appreciable impact to our food supply, using a fraction of our existing conservation budgets, and not have to worry about residential conservation for decades or longer.

There's a pretty good intro to the economic breakdown here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...

California is the #1 agriculture state in the US by dollar amount (most is dairy, almonds, and grapes/wine).

If it’s so valuable, then it seems they’d be fine to pay the same amount for water as municipal utilities do.

In the SF bay area, I know there is a desalination plant in Newark. They gave tours of it once a year.

I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC. I remember spending many a summer in the Bay trying to survive by putting ice cubes in front of my desk fan in the day, under my pillow at night, etc. It was especially bad on days where fires meant that opening the window was bad for health.

When I first arrived, I was shocked to realize that AC was considered a luxury feature in the Bay. I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments.

You probably shouldn’t move to Seattle. Quite a bit hotter summertime, and quite a lot of rentals explicitly prohibit AC window units.

True about the AC. But Seattle is slightly cooler year-round, right?

Probably depends where in the Bay Area you're talking about. The microclimates vary a lot. SF or the Santa Cruz mountains is one thing. The middle of Silicon Valley is something else.

I compared average temperatures with a few SV cities and the Seattle average is indeed lower than some. I compared recent years and it’s the opposite. Our all-time record this year (112-116 depending on where measurements were taken) certainly threw some of the averages off. But Seattle summers have been increasingly hot for the better part of a decade and I don’t expect that to trend the opposite way.

In new york a bunch of people use those portable rolling type units that sit inside and vent out the window with a big flexible accordion style tube. Always an option if a window banger isn't and much easier/safer to install/uninstall.

Many houses in San Jose don't have air conditioning.

> I've lived in dwellings in developing countries better capable of managing summer heat than most Bay Area apartments.

Developing recently has its advantages. They’ll install reversible AC mini-split systems primarily for cheaper heating than gas/oil/LP, but with the side-benefit of AC.

Then again, a lot of Western Europe (hello France!) won’t use AC because “air conditioning makes you sick”. I’ve even seen it unused in a car during a heatwave for this reason, and it wasn’t an economic issue.

I see what you mean, but these are countries I visited 10-15 years ago, so not recent by any means.

Here in the UK we don’t generally use A/C not because of health concerns but because there’s only about three or four weeks of the year we’d actually need it so in practice fans and complaining heavily during those three or four weeks does just fine. Our climate is generally damp, grey, and mild; the summers don’t get very hot and the winters don’t get very cold.

This might change with climate change though, I suspect in the future we’ll need better cooling and better heating if the jet stream gets interfered with. We’ll also need better drainage but there’s no shortage of scummy housing developers putting their underbuilt and overpriced shoeboxes on flood plains.

Even mildly uncomfortable heat can effectively waste 10% or more of the time you spend in it. And that number rises pretty fast as the heat increases.

So even if you remove discomfort from the equation, it doesn't take many tens to hundreds of hours of heat to justify a £100 air conditioner that costs £0.05 an hour to run.

We’re finishing the gut renovating a house in the south eastern US were you definitely need both heat and air conditioning over the course of the year.

We tore out our central hvac system, all the equipment, all the ducting and replaced it with mini splits.

They are sooooooo much better. More effective, more flexible, and cheaper. Heating bill cut by 2/3. They let us heat and cool each room independently. No dust,smells, or heat gets moved between rooms. They even have a dehumidify setting.

It is moronic that something similar is not standard practice in homes.

What's your fresh air system? My current home (in a mountain state) has problems with CO2 buildup with its central air system, so I'm curious what people with minisplits do to handle CO2.

Good question...a couple nested systems. Noting that the house was designed to be 'a passive house' (air quotes) in the early 1980s so it has some quirks.

1) we have a large stove so needed a makeup air fan anyways to match the hood. I worked with them to design the makeup system so it is quiet and pressurizes the second floor 'landing' and is larger than necessary...rather than just immediately pumping air into the exhaust.

2) We also have high ceilings because of the shape of the house (it...should help?)

3) the high ceilings also have remote openable skylights (originally they had hand openable crank skylights) that are already really affected at releasing any heat buildup

4) an excess of windows and two multi-panel sliding doors which, because we are only heating and cooling rooms when they are occupied, can be kept open more frequently. All of them are under deep overhangs and 75% of them are south facing so they are great at managing solar heat gain and we can open them often.

I'm curious how it will work and we have some backup plans. We're putting CO2 monitors in the bedrooms and the kitchen when we move back in and if needed a bunch of the systems can be connected to home automation rules if needed. Even the exhaust fans for all the bathrooms are on the home automation system already.

We lived in the house for about a year before rennovating it with 2 mini splits retrofitted (long story). It's 1900 square feet and we both worked from home. At night, we heated the bedroom, during the day we heated the office. During winter the sun heated the rest of the house. Our total power bill was around $70 a month.

Any airtight home will require a heat exchanger to provide the necessary ventilation. The source of heat or cooling doesn't matter. (Wood stoves and furnaces require make-up air, which should be supplied directly, not by infiltration.)

For example:

https://www.venmar.ca/air-exchanger.html

AC is generally optional especially in non-urban New England as well. It's probably pretty standard in new houses. But, in general, people in older homes, will put it in as part of a broader renovation, just stick in a window unit or two in the summer, or just make do with fans and it being overly hot for a few weeks a year.

>I find it amazing that these regulations exist but apartments aren't even required to have AC.

If anything, regulations should discourage having AC -- to reduce the energy consumption...

I rarely experience more than a few hot days a year on the peninsula, even these days. I can’t imagine having AC.

I also have a house in the sierras there the summer temps are unbearable. But where I’ve lived in the bay (SF, Palo Alto) I don’t see the point.

The SF apartments I lived in for a few years would have been unlivable without A/C -- indoor temps would exceed 80F often. Not sure if it's because multi-story buildings don't get shade from trees, or something else.

Ah, 80 degrees seems like a normal living temperature to me and I would not make any effort to reduce that. But even in PA the temp doesn’t get even that high for long.

I lived in SF for 20 years and never once used AC. Heating, on the other hand, I used every winter. But temperature is very subjective.

This may be too blasphemous for some people but Democrats appease lobbyists and donors by adding regulations to law and Republicans appease lobbyists and donors by cutting regulations from law.

Independents, moderates and third parties strike a balance between regulation and deregulation depending on their platform and beliefs.

California usually only elects Democrats. So California has a ton of regulations.

I suspect “can’t even put up a tent” was an exaggeration (but can’t live there indefinitely). But laws like that are why houses don’t collapse in earthquakes, landslides are uncommon, sewage systems are adequate for load and don’t kill people, etc.

I am surprised that a public town can make aesthetic choices, though set of potential roof material can reasonably be regulated to prevent spread of fire. I agree that is absurd.

A lot of regulation (speed limits, electrical outlets every six feet, fireproof and firefighter safe roofing, automobile pollution level…) are ways to think of things ahead of time that you are unlikely to remember to think of properly for yourself. There are dumb or egregious ones (municipal aesthetic codes) but most are for externalities (bread is safe to eat and your home isn’t a firetrap, which would threaten not just me but possibly you too).

Residential water use is a small percentage of California’s water consumption. Growing rice and cotton in a desert with free water is the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com