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To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Perhaps what should be more com

To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature. What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case. New Orleans is a future Atlantis. San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down, so I built it again...

simianparrot 2y ago
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this. > Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case. Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
- niemandhier 2y ago
  Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably much more important as an example for the US. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disaster-taught-mexico-prepare-earthquakes https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...
  - galangalalgol 2y ago
    Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
  - forgotmysn 2y ago
    Mexico is in the middle of a crippling drought
    - umeshunni 2y ago
      what does that have to do earthquakes?
- contravariant 2y ago
  I would be interested to know how Japan combats wildfires. Historically at least it was quite a big problem, if I recall correctly.
leguminous 2y ago
> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C). The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C). I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
- meetingthrower 2y ago
  100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
- phaedrus441 2y ago
  This is such an interesting perspective that I've never thought about. Thanks!
- avianlyric 2y ago
  You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive. So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed. Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc. So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space. All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
diogocp 2y ago
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands. When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance. Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete. I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.
- aquaticsunset 2y ago
  Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct. The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem. The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country. We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap. You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.
    - erikerikson 2y ago
      This was surprising because here in the US, concrete is expensive to build with. I'm considering a build and by far log homes seem my cheapest option.
      - 2y ago
njovin 2y ago
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River. The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations. Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change. When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading. So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense. How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
- talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
  Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
harimau777 2y ago
What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city. Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.

simianparrot 2y ago

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this. > Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case. Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flames-raged-in-palisades-a-key-reservoir-nearby-was-offline https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...

niemandhier 2y ago
Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably much more important as an example for the US. https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disaster-taught-mexico-prepare-earthquakes https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
- forgotmysn 2y ago
  Mexico is in the middle of a crippling drought
  - umeshunni 2y ago
    what does that have to do earthquakes?
contravariant 2y ago
I would be interested to know how Japan combats wildfires. Historically at least it was quite a big problem, if I recall correctly.

leguminous 2y ago

> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C). The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C). I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.

meetingthrower 2y ago
100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
phaedrus441 2y ago
This is such an interesting perspective that I've never thought about. Thanks!
avianlyric 2y ago
You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive. So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed. Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc. So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space. All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.

diogocp 2y ago

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands. When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance. Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete. I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.

aquaticsunset 2y ago
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct. The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem. The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country. We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap. You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    This was surprising because here in the US, concrete is expensive to build with. I'm considering a build and by far log homes seem my cheapest option.
    - 2y ago

njovin 2y ago

There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River. The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations. Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change. When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading. So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense. How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.

harimau777 2y ago

What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city. Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.