Comment by ryandrake
3 days ago
> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets.
Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family homes and want to build a multi-story apartment building on it, you need bigger, stronger water supply infrastructure to support all those new sinks. You need bigger, stronger sewage infrastructure to support all the new drains and toilets. Not to mention better electrical infra, different garbage disposal infra, and so on. While I'm generally supportive of "moar housing" you can't just plop the housing down and say job done. You need more of everything else peripheral to and supporting that housing.
Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them.
The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...
And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.
You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.
In the case of LA they are underutilized compared to the past because of laws mainly. Hollywood reservoir was lowered in capacity due to the perceived risk of the dam design. Silverlake reservoir was disconnected from the drinking water system due to bromate buildup. LA aqueduct pulls less water than it did in the 1970s in effort to protect Mono lake and mitigate dust in the Owens valley.
Recent advances have been in using spill basins and other infrastructure to recharge groundwater after seasonal storms. During the last storm season, LA county captured 117 billion gallons of stormwater which they claim is enough for the yearly need of almost 3 million homes. Many projects are ongoing to improve this rate of catchment as the state is pushing for LA to meet most of its water needs locally over the next century.
This is why cities extract hookup fees they are designed to pay for this expansion.
Where i live the entire capital budget is paid by developer impact fees. The existing residents get a free ride.