Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

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This seems extremely premature.

According to the article so far 36 people live there. out of the expected 1.000 people who will reside there when the development is finished in 2025

I think you should wait till everyone has moved in, and then give it a year or two, and then write an article about how people are much happier there.

I have confidence that results probably would not change that much since the development is custom built and hyped as a car-free place to live.

It will attract people who are looking for that and you would think they would be happy.

However, you cannot use this as an argument that people in general would be happier with such changes, since you start out with a highly biased sample.

I have nothing against walkable neighborhoods. It is nice Personally, I have zero desire to live Phoenix Arizona without a car. I have lived there, and it gets insanely hot during the summer.

(a side note: Arizona already has major trouble getting enough water for everyone who lives there already. I dont think expanding the population is sustainable idea)

The population of Arizona is expanding one way or another. But you can see houses with lawns less than a mile from Culdesac, so development like this would bring the per capita water usage down.

The expansion has to stop and people need to be encouraged to live somewhere more sustainable both as far as water and energy are concerned.

The amount of electricity people need to run AC is enormous. Which might at times be a matter of life or death. When I was there I believe a law was passed that it was illegal to shut off electricity if the temperature was above a certain threshold since some people were not able to handle the heat.

Heating cold areas takes a lot of power too, and often it can't be made "green" as easily as electric AC. Also, AZ and most of the mountain west use the vast majority of their water for agriculture that would not be financially sustainable without water made artificially cheap by government subsidies in the form of overbuilt dams/reservoirs. (AZ infamously gave a sweetheart water deal to a company that grew alfalfa exported to Saudi Arabia.)

That is a bit of strawman.

Arizona is insanely hot.

Then you argue that places are really cold that need to be heated which may be expensive.

How about you chose a more hospital area that is not really cold and not really hot.

You know where people live without big bills for heating or cooling.

Using energy is fine, it's burning hydrocarbons to produce energy that's the problem. We shouldn't be shaming people for running their AC, we should be encouraging them to install solar to power it.

Only the market can help drive where people live. As prices for energy and water go up people are incentivized to use less, augment supply, or move.

Expansion does not need to stop.

of course it does.

Controlling expansion is key in most cities. The city planning office must approve construction. (or some part of the government has to approve it)

With that it would be natural for the party wishing to construct to detail how they will ensure the water they need.

Many cities are restrictive as to how much construction they will allow.

There are already recently constructed houses in near PHeonix that presently does not have water. They have been cut off by the city.

This is due to a disagreement on taxes, city zones and a few other things. That community must now pay to have tank trucks come by, and a tank truck can haul a lot of water, but when you must supply it to a whole community a tankers worth does not last that long.

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