• claxax [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Because it will be a wasteland in a matter of decades due to droughts and wildfires

        • Dolores [love/loves]
          ·
          2 years ago

          maybe if they quit growing saudi cowfeed they could accommodate people needing water to drink

          • AllCatsAreBeautiful [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            Even if southern California's whole agricultural sector was shut down annual water supplies are still decreasing and snowpack in the rockies is getting lower every year. Also, the people who work in agriculture are typically poorer and live in less expensive, marginal places, so by cutting the agriculture industry you'd be forcing more people to move into the city where there's already not enough housing. Quite frankly if you wanted to "fix" homelessness in SF and LA at this point you'd either have to expel homeless people or eminent domain some rich peoples' houses to build state owned highrises and hope they don't end up like every state operated highrise in American history. I'm in favor of the latter but it would require making the highrises into state operated condos and forcing rich people to live in them Singapore style.

            Addendum: I don't think anyone should live in the deserts of the southwestern US. Especially not Arizona.

            • Dolores [love/loves]
              ·
              2 years ago

              urban water use has literally gone down even as population rose, with more improvements to be had in cutting lawns & recreational water use. y'all don't seem to grasp how many orders of magnitude agriculture & industry outstrip the plebs drinking our little liters of water & taking our little showers.

              whether California could sustainably grow enough food for itself is not a question capitalism is prepared to answer but being a major (unsustainable, granted) exporter i dont think its automatically a closed case.

              and do not speak to me of californian urban planning. there is plenty of space if the car is killed and public sector invested in :very-smart:

              • AllCatsAreBeautiful [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                Ok, but the "plenty of space" is also an issue in and of itself. Our current low density private housing system makes everything so spread out that people get pushed to the periphery because there's "plenty of space" all the way outside the city proper while inside the city land is controlled by a small cohort of capitalists. Many people need to be near the city because it is where jobs are, capitalist or communist society. Stalin couldn't make the villages around Khabarovsk as economically valuable to the USSR as Moscow even if he tried.

                Building high density housing in the city is the only thing that makes sense practically or else we will gradually engulf all habitable land in the area for the sake of everyone having a private 2 bedroom home and living further from each other. However, highrises without proper care have failed spectacularly just about everywhere in the US, largely because they were used as segregation measures. That's why I'm saying we need Singapore style highrises where celebrities and formerly homeless people are neighbors.

                Also yeah 100% about killing cars that's a given. :train-shining:

                • Dolores [love/loves]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  i prefer khrushchyovka scale shit when its not immediately geographically necessary. singapore and the like are extremely constrained physical spaces, but you could stuff LA into fractions of the size without complicated engineering

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            if the US simply spent as much as Saudi Arabia the issue wouldn't even exist lol

            the %GDP Saudis use for desalination, if applied to US, would recreate the entire Colorado River