My water main broke a couple weeks ago.
To get water back into my house, they needed to dig a huge hole (frost line up north is like 6 feet deep) from the city's water valve to the front of my house, then they had to drill under the basement all the way to the utility room. They had to jackhammer out the basement floor, and run this huge copper line.
Every step of the way, they had to go "Oh, this job isn't as easy as we'd hoped, it's going to be a lot harder", and that means more time, more equipment more money.
It was a nightmare. Absolute nightmare. I'm waiting for the final invoice, and my insurance with a big 5 bank was never going to cover it because in spite of costing a lot of money it doesn't cover anything.
There isn't an inch of my front lawn that survived. It's a giant field of mud.
Here's the thing though: throughout the whole process, I kept hearing the people who go "Housing is a human right" in my head, and I thought about everything I actually needed to maintain that so-called "right". It was a crew of guys and an excavator and a drill and a vac truck, and by the time everything was back to some semblance of normal, it was two full days for a crew, and on the third day someone needed to come in and cement the hole in the basement back in.
And that's where the whole concept becomes insane to me. I don't have a right to a crew of people coming in and spending days doing dirty, dangerous, uncomfortable work. That's a privilege, and a privilege I was happy to pay for.
Housing is a responsibility, and one you have to fight entropy to maintain. House was built in 1946, the water line is probably 80 years old. Just like the replacement ceiling tiles, replacement flooring, replacement shower parts, replacement sink traps, replacement plumbing under the sink, repairs to the driveway, growing the lawn back after all this.
Entire villages are being abandoned in Japan, and nature quickly reclaims the buildings. The images are of places humans can no longer live. Entropy is a harsh mistress.
I'm not saying the state shouldn't help the needy here. That's a different discussion. My concern here is the language of "rights" and what that implies.
When the word "rights" are invoked, it's trying to invoke the unalienable rights endowed by our creator, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are things that are not given by the state, but only infringed upon by the state. The problem is, for something like housing, that's simply not true. In order to get an unalienable "right" of housing, you need the time, labour, materials, equipment, land that presumably was someone else's first.
Skilled labour is at a premium, what happens when there isn't enough to build or maintain house houses? If the right is truly unalienable, then the state simply has no choice, and must enlist people. At first they can do so by increasing the amount of money paid and funding available to do the thing, but eventually you reach the point on the supply/demand curve where nobody else is willing to sell labour at any price. What then? At that point, if you are the state, and you are faced with an unalienable right to housing, then as always happens with rights, you start having to balance them. Perhaps the state then decides or has it decided for it that the right to housing is more important than the right to the liberty that comes from owning your own person. Coercive means such as threats of violence then can be applied to force people to work on a certain thing "or else".
I very nearly was without water for most of the summer. The first company I called didn't do this kind of work. The second had a 6-8 week backlog. The third was barely able to move around its schedule for us. There just aren't that many people willing to crawl around in 6 feet of clay and boulder filled mud for 8 hours a day. Even the city itself had to make a demarcation of responsibility point, and that's why it was my problem and not their problem.
Which, by the way, is something that always happens when the state gets involved with so-called "Rights" of this nature. Communist China has virtually no welfare system unless you're one of a chosen few. Healthcare in Canada famously has absurdly long wait times, sometimes in the years for certain procedures. And even my fairly liberal area (it's been a liberal stronghold for decades), the taxes keep going up but the state will reduce the amount they're willing to take responsibility for.
Which goes to my final point -- Housing isn't a right, it's a responsibility. And the government can choose to take on that responsibility, just like it can choose to take on many responsibilities, but that doesn't mean you have an unalienable right to the thing. They can fail to provide it due to lack of will, lack of resources, lack of competence. You still need the thing, but you can be facing a summer without water. In the Soviet Union, situations like these were famously common. In the Nordic countries, they realized that if the state is to take on that responsibility, they require a strong private economy to power the public responsibility.
To get water back into my house, they needed to dig a huge hole (frost line up north is like 6 feet deep) from the city's water valve to the front of my house, then they had to drill under the basement all the way to the utility room. They had to jackhammer out the basement floor, and run this huge copper line.
Every step of the way, they had to go "Oh, this job isn't as easy as we'd hoped, it's going to be a lot harder", and that means more time, more equipment more money.
It was a nightmare. Absolute nightmare. I'm waiting for the final invoice, and my insurance with a big 5 bank was never going to cover it because in spite of costing a lot of money it doesn't cover anything.
There isn't an inch of my front lawn that survived. It's a giant field of mud.
Here's the thing though: throughout the whole process, I kept hearing the people who go "Housing is a human right" in my head, and I thought about everything I actually needed to maintain that so-called "right". It was a crew of guys and an excavator and a drill and a vac truck, and by the time everything was back to some semblance of normal, it was two full days for a crew, and on the third day someone needed to come in and cement the hole in the basement back in.
And that's where the whole concept becomes insane to me. I don't have a right to a crew of people coming in and spending days doing dirty, dangerous, uncomfortable work. That's a privilege, and a privilege I was happy to pay for.
Housing is a responsibility, and one you have to fight entropy to maintain. House was built in 1946, the water line is probably 80 years old. Just like the replacement ceiling tiles, replacement flooring, replacement shower parts, replacement sink traps, replacement plumbing under the sink, repairs to the driveway, growing the lawn back after all this.
Entire villages are being abandoned in Japan, and nature quickly reclaims the buildings. The images are of places humans can no longer live. Entropy is a harsh mistress.
I'm not saying the state shouldn't help the needy here. That's a different discussion. My concern here is the language of "rights" and what that implies.
When the word "rights" are invoked, it's trying to invoke the unalienable rights endowed by our creator, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These are things that are not given by the state, but only infringed upon by the state. The problem is, for something like housing, that's simply not true. In order to get an unalienable "right" of housing, you need the time, labour, materials, equipment, land that presumably was someone else's first.
Skilled labour is at a premium, what happens when there isn't enough to build or maintain house houses? If the right is truly unalienable, then the state simply has no choice, and must enlist people. At first they can do so by increasing the amount of money paid and funding available to do the thing, but eventually you reach the point on the supply/demand curve where nobody else is willing to sell labour at any price. What then? At that point, if you are the state, and you are faced with an unalienable right to housing, then as always happens with rights, you start having to balance them. Perhaps the state then decides or has it decided for it that the right to housing is more important than the right to the liberty that comes from owning your own person. Coercive means such as threats of violence then can be applied to force people to work on a certain thing "or else".
I very nearly was without water for most of the summer. The first company I called didn't do this kind of work. The second had a 6-8 week backlog. The third was barely able to move around its schedule for us. There just aren't that many people willing to crawl around in 6 feet of clay and boulder filled mud for 8 hours a day. Even the city itself had to make a demarcation of responsibility point, and that's why it was my problem and not their problem.
Which, by the way, is something that always happens when the state gets involved with so-called "Rights" of this nature. Communist China has virtually no welfare system unless you're one of a chosen few. Healthcare in Canada famously has absurdly long wait times, sometimes in the years for certain procedures. And even my fairly liberal area (it's been a liberal stronghold for decades), the taxes keep going up but the state will reduce the amount they're willing to take responsibility for.
Which goes to my final point -- Housing isn't a right, it's a responsibility. And the government can choose to take on that responsibility, just like it can choose to take on many responsibilities, but that doesn't mean you have an unalienable right to the thing. They can fail to provide it due to lack of will, lack of resources, lack of competence. You still need the thing, but you can be facing a summer without water. In the Soviet Union, situations like these were famously common. In the Nordic countries, they realized that if the state is to take on that responsibility, they require a strong private economy to power the public responsibility.
Just a thought, couldn't just cut out the old one and bypass around the house?
And if somebody lives in state-funded housing they have less incentive to take care of it, so the five-figure repairs will be more frequent. I.E. when homeless people got to live in Holiday Inns for months during covid and the hotels tried to charge the governments $1M afterwards to cover all the damage caused.
It wasn't really practical, would have been way more work. The driveway is directly attached to the house right to the property line, so to bypass the house, you'd need to jackhammer up most of the cement driveway to dig a 6 foot deep trench. It actually was far more practical and efficient to drill under the house.
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