California does have earthquakes, yet there are centuries old buildings made of adobe and stone with big timbers to hold up a roof of Spanish tile. A building style wholly appropriate for long durable housing which lasts decades or centuries between renovations. A style which is also rare because in California, most of the state is built fast, cheap, and light, little better than tents of steel, glass, thin wood, and it all burns very nicely in our frequent wild fires. Work is being done to limit those, but it is slow going.
Some music for the article, Spanish chill out.
When I look at pictures of Spain and the South of France, I see places where the presence of Earthquakes is considered less important that the labor savings of building a house to LAST. The sense of age and permanence from all those heavy stone walls feet thick, the silent Spanish tile roofs, the cast and wrought iron railings all over the place, being stripped and repainted every few years to keep the rust down. These are people who are opposite trailer trash, opposite me perhaps.
I run from bad laws, but what if the laws weren't bad, if staying in a place actually meant that you weren't trapped by racists and lawyers chiseling your wealth away to enrich their petty evil? If California had a stable govt, and stable educated voters who didn't throw money at problems, it would be worth it to build for the long haul, to build in stone and tile, with walls rather than wire fences, and gates meant to hold off mobs and a roof that can be pounded by golf ball hail and not notice. A California built to last. That would be amazing. That would change everything. It would change how its citizens think of themselves and others, not as a quick con and a getaway (as most new arrivals treat my state and part of the reason we have such a bad reputation), but as a settled and governable place.
California must build and repair sustainable infrastructure, and move people out of unsustainable places, like the technically below-sea-level "islands" in the San Joaquin Delta. It really should start a silt removal program from the big reservoirs to stop them turning into meadows, and haul that silt and stone down to these islands, scraping their topsoil aside to cover it later, and fill them in, bringing them up above the river level so a levee is no longer needed. That's a LOT of work, and energy and human labor, and a century project so won't happen soon. What is more likely is to declare those islands disaster areas and refuse to back any insurance company that covers them. With no insurance, those places are merely risks not worth taking. Bad for the people who live there, but stupid is as stupid does. When the levees inevitably fail, their homes are going to get destroyed in the flooding anyway. Shouldn't have built there.
I would like for my state, with its very nice weather and very infrequent earthquakes to build for the long haul so the people who live here know it has moved on past the Boomtown mentality and start thinking long term instead of Exploit and Run like its been since the Gold Rush. California is a bit too forgiving of that. And because we're kind, the foreigners keep doing it, over and over again. That has to stop. Start putting them in jail, start being unforgiving of the con men, and hunt them down? More than the half the people moving here won't risk it. The few that do will either be on the up and up or get caught and jailed.
If we do what I suggest, and build for the long haul, build for a Thousand Years instead of decades, and start living with that in mind, we'll have to think really hard about our needs. About Transportation and how important it might be. I think trains are the easiest answer, electric ones, since the power can come from wherever. I also believe in larger wheel scooters and motorcycles, assuming that roads will end up covered in stone and stones shift and get slippery in the rain. And weeds grow and that road can vanish quickly. Nature is very aggressive here.
California is like Spain and Southern France and Portugal, only mostly empty. There are hillsides the size and shape of Monaco, yet hold only a barn and a simple farmhouse and grazing dairy cattle. This is huge potential for real estate. Most of the state itself is largely empty, a fact that foreigners, non-native California visitors, don't realize until they leave a city behind and get into the countryside, maybe on the way to some natural wonder like Yosemite or Lake Tahoe. Even with the San Andreas and other faults very close by, we could still build there. And if a quake knocks them down and kills a bunch of people? Well, so what? Life is temporary. Rebuilding with the fallen stone is just more work, and the next big quake could be decades or centuries off. At least the stone won't burn. If we start getting hurricanes and longer summer heat, then these are the houses to have anyway.
I've lived through several of those Atmospheric Rivers, those Pineapple Express events. It rains and rains, day and night, for weeks. Its like living in Portland in the Springtime, only the raindrops are bigger so an umbrella works. They're neat, assuming people don't freak just because their neighborhood drain is plugged. You drive around the pools, wait for the maintenance crew to clean the leaves out of the drain, for the creek to fall, and its fine. Younger people here don't remember those, and older people don't necessarily remember much at all that wasn't in the 1950's or 60's. The weeks of endless rain makes the ground saturate and causes some slumps and landslides, but it also makes the redwood trees green, the Spanish moss on the oak trees turns light green and the whole world drips endlessly. Its good for the plants, good for the groundwater. We could do with more of those events. I would be fine with that. You can engineer drainage to deal with that. Another bit of infrastructure to account for. Lots of earth-moving equipment required.
I don't know if a properly built Spanish tile roof is perfectly happy with that kind of rain but it should be fine. Its not like its snowing, just rain. There are plenty of homes with those roofs where I grew up, in buildings either very old or by the Old Money, who knew to mimic the old buildings because they're still around. I keep running into folk who ignore obvious things. Like they only make decisions when they're either high or angry or just massively stupid. And they spend the rest of their lives paying for that. Sometimes those decisions are to buy the cheap house which won't survive a good gale force storm with a really good view of the Pacific through the big picture window. The window that breaks when the wind blows hard. Which it does often. The stingy man pays the most. Sigh.
It's really weird living in this transitional period, post Oil plenty fading into a scarcity economy filled with short term viciousness and long term mistrust and retaliation. Even with the potential oil wealth in the Monterey Shale south of me in the San Joaquin desert (1-3 inches of annual rain is desert, folks), we still can't expect the price to fall. Its going to take 1 million gallons of water per well to frack that shale, and there will need to be around a million wells to get it all. Water we won't have for agriculture or LA's lawns. This oil, once out, is going to ship to the rest of the world, China especially. Having oil is usually the doom of a place that has it. California has weathered this storm before, and hopefully will gain some profits from it. Maybe keep our roads paved a little longer than other states. Maybe build those electric railroads. Fix the levees a little longer.
Cost of living in California will go up, even with oil money. People, families, which want to survive this difficult period must be exceptionally cautious of damaging their reputations. If you do that, people will remember a very long time, and in this clan environment, the acts of one member of a family reflect on the whole family and how ALL will be treated. So mind your manners of yourself and your family, folks. It is no small thing to be turned away in your time of need because one of you was mean to the wrong person at the wrong time. As I'm aware of this, I already live this creed. That's why my work quality is consistently high, why I don't forgive bastards who do me a bad turn, and why I have a long memory for slights. You must, or those people and their kin will hurt you again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on me. Develop the skill if you don't have it already. Its VERY important in the future.
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