[HN Gopher] Researchers Find 'Significant Rates' of Sinking Grou...
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Researchers Find 'Significant Rates' of Sinking Ground in Houston
Suburbs
Author : geox
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-10-11 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (uh.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (uh.edu)
| Victerius wrote:
| "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time
| here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I
| realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this
| planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
| surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an
| area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource
| is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to
| another area. There is another organism on this planet that
| follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human
| beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague
| and we are the cure."
|
| - Agent Smith, _The Matrix_
| carabiner wrote:
| > Agent Smith, The Matrix
|
| Ah I thought this was from Shrek 2.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| They achieve that "natural equilibrium" by starving en masse.
|
| It's why I started hunting deer in my country - no natural
| predators, so they'll breed until they outbreed the carrying
| capacity of the forests they browse, and then they'll suffer
| long and agonising deaths, and in their desperation will
| devastate the forest, eating anything that's remotely edible,
| seedlings gone, bark stripped from adult trees.
| Kye wrote:
| Weird how the guy who becomes a virus thinks everyone else is a
| virus. Almost like he's projecting.
| ffhhj wrote:
| > like he's projecting.
|
| Neo is the one, and Smith is the zero. Zero times anyone else
| becomes zero.
| vkou wrote:
| Or, perhaps, it's an observation that humans created the
| malicious machine intelligence in their image.
| collegeburner wrote:
| the funny thing is no, this is how basically every organism
| works. take an invasive species and introduce it somewhere, if
| there are no natural predators and the environment is good for
| it the species will multiply and thrive and explode in
| population. it will suck up resources until it runs out and
| then there will be a die off.
|
| man is just better at avoiding this last die off part.
| FiniteField wrote:
| Sounds like Agent Smith needs a trip to Australia and New
| Zealand.
| [deleted]
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| He's from Australia ;)
| vlunkr wrote:
| What I hate about these edgelord philosophies (see antinatalism
| also) is that they present a difficult problem but
| intentionally provide no solution. Like what do you suggest?
| The human race collectively ends itself? A global authoritarian
| state controls the birth rate? It's better to now dwell on the
| this train of thought and deal with individual problems.
| capableweb wrote:
| Is it absolutely required to provide a solution when you
| highlight a problem? Is it possible some people are better at
| seeing problems than coming up with solutions to said
| problems, and vice-versa?
| msandford wrote:
| It's a city built on what I can only assume is swamp. It doesn't
| surprise me at all.
|
| I moved 1000mi from Florida to here and very little changed at
| least as far as the climate is concerned.
| goblinux wrote:
| It's built on a bayou. New Orleans was built on a swamp
|
| https://www.bayouswamptours.com/bayou-vs-swamp-whats-the-dif...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| For most people bayou and swamp are basically the same thing,
| so it seemed like a reasonable comment to me.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Water rights are going to be a hot topic. There just isn't enough
| for everyone, and sharing a commons is not something that America
| (and other western societies) has been good at.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > There just isn't enough for everyone
|
| There's enough for everyone, but some large actors are taking
| most of the water and wasting it or exporting the productive
| value of that water due to a lack of real market forces on the
| price of water.
|
| You're absolutely correct there will be water rights issues, I
| would argue they will become wars in certain places and in
| others it will result in certain massive cities becoming dead
| over several decades.
| collegeburner wrote:
| ^^^ we have large parts of the country that effectively
| export water via ag. America has plenty of water, plenty of
| land, plenty of resources to maintain our current diet and
| way of life, it is exporting to the rest of the world that we
| can't do.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Considering it's the US we're talking about, water will be
| completely privatized.
| chomp wrote:
| Worth adding some context to this study. We've known about
| subsidence in our area for many many years. The Houston-Galveston
| subsidence district was created almost 50 years ago by the Texas
| legislature to regulate groundwater withdrawal and manage
| subsidence. https://hgsubsidence.org/ It's worth noting that this
| regulation has drastically slowed subsidence, but not completely
| halted due to the groundwater problem, and an exploding
| population.
|
| One of the top priorities of the subsidence district is getting
| the area onto surface water. That is, 60% reduction of
| groundwater usage by 2025, and 80% reduction by 2035. There's
| quite a few huge projects underway at the moment, including a
| multi-billion dollar expansion of our surface water treatment:
| https://www.nhcrwa.com/projects/northeast-water-purification...
|
| USGS has a network of sensors that you use to see subsidence
| here:
| https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e5c75a...
|
| Of note is Katy's subsidence, which I believe is from hydrocarbon
| withdrawals.
|
| I believe what this study does that's new is analyze Sentinel-1A
| data and correlate it to hotspots in the Houston area, which is
| actually super cool.
| mc32 wrote:
| San Jose CA also suffers from subsidence as a result of water
| withdrawal[1]. There is also a seasonal aspect to it.
|
| [1]http://explore.museumca.org/creeks/z-subsidence.html
| airstrike wrote:
| _> hydrocarbon withdrawals_
| collegeburner wrote:
| i don't understand what you're trying to say?
| irrational wrote:
| It's a blatant euphemism that anyone not invested in the
| oil industry wouldn't use.
| arcbyte wrote:
| nah, its just thay saying "oil" is too narrow because a
| huge amount of the extraction is also natural gas.
| Hydrocarbon is both very clear and accurately specific.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's Texas, where oil industry runs everything.
| collegeburner wrote:
| meh only sorta. like, yeah oil is obviously a big deal
| because it's a valuable resource. but like if something
| is a huge part of the state's economy and a ton of jobs
| is working to keep that industry healthy/growing really
| "being run by it" or is it just good policy?
|
| the good thing is we're stealing all those nice cali tech
| jobs so it won't be true forever ;)
| Bud wrote:
| Correction: you _were_ stealing all those "nice cali
| tech jobs".
|
| But that was back when Austin looked like a liberal,
| urbane, pleasant, safe place to live. And that was back
| when California was on fire for half the year, every
| year, and Texas seemed to be not as affected by things
| like that.
|
| But now, of course, it has once again become clear that
| Austin can't be Austin while it's based inside of the
| petro-Christofascist-kleptocracy that is modern Texas
| under Greg Abbott. And climate change is coming for
| Texas, writ large, just as it has come for California.
| Texas already has, or is about to have, major water
| issues, major temperature issues, major power grid
| issues, and now these subsidence issues as well.
|
| So, enjoy that status while you have it. Maintaining it
| will not be easy.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Vouching for this, because while the wording was
| confrontational, the points being expressed are valid.
| Apart from the water kinda. West Texas where they depend
| on groundwater for irrigation is screwed, but the rest is
| really well planned and run reservoir systems that catch
| several states worth of watershed.
|
| Agree with the politics or not. TX isn't going to grab
| talent from states with strongly pro-choice workforces at
| nearly the rate it used to.
|
| And the climatic extremes are bad and seemingly getting
| worse, anthropogenic or not. This summer was brutal, the
| last was as well, and both winters were fairly horrific
| as well. Partially because, as pointed out, the power
| grid isn't up to the current load.
|
| I love TX, but it is because of the friendly people, the
| power infrastructure and climate situations are
| atrocious, and TX abortion laws are absolutely going to
| affect the influx of knowledge workers.
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| > Austin can't be Austin while it's based inside [some
| insults] modern Texas under Greg Abbott
|
| No doubt this is true for many. But Texas as it is is
| also appealing to many who are moving there for precisely
| the things you don't like. Choice is a good thing, time
| will tell which direction gets more migration
| quarterdime wrote:
| Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the
| Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one
| existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu
| (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data
| appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by
| eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.
|
| The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down
| displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.
|
| It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded
| image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of
| this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu),
| displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and
| 2020 (see figure 3b).
|
| The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better
| compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every
| year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year.
| The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3
| describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC)
| images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact
| dates.
|
| [0] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/15/3831# [1]
| https://hgsubsidence.org/GPS/2021/P050_HRF20_neu_cm.col
| nocoiner wrote:
| There's a Houston suburb that sank due to subsistence and had to
| be abandoned several decades ago. As I understand it, that was a
| big wake-up call, and things here have improved quite a bit since
| then. Though not everywhere, apparently.
|
| https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
| jandrese wrote:
| Houston is an experiment in what you get when you YOLO building
| regulations. One should expect them to re-learn all of the
| lessons of the past that caused those regulations to be written.
| It's basically a case study in technical debt from an urban
| planning angle. The lack of regulation made it cheap to build and
| allowed the city to rapidly expand, but also allowed it to sprawl
| almost beyond reason and caused it to become the poster child for
| poor city planning and a costly reminder of how hard it is to go
| back and try to fix problems after the fact.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| I thought Houston's sprawl was mandated by minimum parking
| regulations.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Well, they're doing something right when a median home costs
| $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the Bay Area
| growing up here.
| shagie wrote:
| The greater Huston area is approximately 10,000 square miles.
| The city of Huston itself is 670 square miles.
|
| The 9 county area of the Bay Area is 7000 square miles... and
| that includes a lot of land that you can't reasonably build a
| city on.
|
| If you take the land area of the cities in the Bay Area ( htt
| ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_th...
| ) and sum them all up, you've got something on the order of
| 1,600 square miles.
|
| The land constraints within the Bay Area contribute
| significantly to the price of a house.
| dan_quixote wrote:
| And general desirability - diverse and well-paying economy,
| weather, water, mountains.
| shagie wrote:
| Absolutely... though that's harder to point a number to.
| The "this is how much land is there" is a metric that
| can't be argued. If you then try to look at the
| population densities of those areas, it becomes even more
| clear about why a single family detached house would be
| that much more expensive.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I don't think you're making the argument you think you are.
| andybak wrote:
| Doesn't "technical debt" imply something on the balance sheet
| that hasn't yet become due?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Well, they're doing something right when a median home
| costs $272k compared to the $1.5m one needs to live in the
| Bay Area growing up here.
|
| You can get a house for $75k (median) if you want in Gary
| Indiana. I'm not sure how lower housing prices can be
| directly correlated with "doing things more right".
| crawl_soever wrote:
| I live in Gary and there are many factors that can factor
| into the economics here, mainly a single employer planning
| the entire city and that employer collapse. A house is only
| worth what someone is willing to pay for it
| api wrote:
| The difference is that Houston has more diverse and better
| job opportunities yet still has reasonably affordable
| housing.
|
| There are tons of places with very cheap housing and no
| jobs. Nobody moves there except maybe a few teleworkers
| looking to optimize hard for surplus or people with other
| reasons to go there like family ties.
| nilkn wrote:
| Houston is the home of the US oil & gas industry and has
| one of the largest and most advanced medical centers in the
| world. There's a _lot_ of money in Houston, and the city
| has incredibly ritzy neighborhoods like River Oaks and
| Piney Point Village, among many others; keeping overall
| housing relatively affordable with so many affluent people
| competing for it actually is an accomplishment.
| volkk wrote:
| isn't Gary Indiana a failed city? I would imagine Houston
| as relatively thriving given work, safety and industry
| levels?
| Entinel wrote:
| You're missing the point. They are saying Houston having
| lower housing prices is not an indicator that Houston is
| "doing something right."
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It's barely under median for the US, that is the real
| comparison. There are many places across the US with
| significantly less expensive homes.
| hilbertseries wrote:
| Homes in large cities are almost always more expensive than
| rural areas. I don't think median is the right comparison,
| comparing to other large cities and metro areas makes much
| more sense.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This is not a completely mismatched urban-vs-rural
| comparison, it is looking just at metro statistical areas
| across the U.S.
|
| https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/met
| ro-...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Hamburger is cheaper than ribeye, but I'm not sure that makes
| it _better_.
| taeric wrote:
| The assertion seems to be that it is not going to end well.
| If it really is unsustainable sprawl with poorly put together
| civic functions, why do we expect it to go on forever?
|
| That is, sure, houses are cheap for now. But that doesn't
| mean you will have a place worth living in, given time.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > unsustainable sprawl
|
| 13 million people living in the Los Angeles basin seem to
| disagree.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'm not one of them, but Los Angeles doesn't really
| scream "sustainable" to me. Is it really a counterexample
| to what the GP is saying?
| gpm wrote:
| $1.5m houses is a signal that _a ton_ of people want to live
| there, and are willing to pay a premium for doing it. That 's
| not a signal that you're doing something wrong.
|
| Of course, it would be nice if you could keep everything
| you're doing right _and_ bring housing prices down (largely
| by building more of it). But on the whole real-estate being
| valuable is generally a positive sign.
|
| On the flip side, the cheapest houses you could find for
| awhile (maybe still?) were in detroit, that's not a sign that
| Detroit was doing well - but that demand had plummeted to
| literally 0 because it was doing so poorly.
| kube-system wrote:
| High prices aren't necessarily an indicator of the quantity
| of demand but more so that >= 2 people with that amount of
| money want that home.
|
| For instance: nice homes in very low demand areas may sell
| for large amounts of money and only have a single offer.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| With such little regulation, I would have guessed housing
| supply would be really great and prices quite affordable. But
| the Houston metro area is barely below the national median for
| house prices.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > But the Houston metro area is barely below the national
| median for house prices.
|
| That seems unsurprising, and not sure it's a good metric.
| Houston is certainly _much_ cheaper than, for example,
| Austin, and my guess is that it is considerably cheaper than
| similar sized metros.
|
| I can't find it right now, but I remember reading an article
| from a few years back that basically called Houston the best
| city to live if you are poor. That is, don't just look at
| median prices, but Houston actually has a ton of affordable
| housing that is simply non-existent (or highly restricted in
| stupid lottery games) in other cities.
| chomp wrote:
| They were affordable-ish... I don't have insight into the
| market, other than we're building like crazy and it's still
| not enough: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/housi
| ng/2022/10/...
|
| I suspect some of this is market moves (e.g. people moving
| into apartments during COVID, and business relocations: https
| ://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/business/20...).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I would expect the YOLO housing and environment approach to
| never be about equality and affordability. I would expect it
| to be a signal that NIMBYism is through the roof and that
| they have the regulatory power to inflate prices.
| lettergram wrote:
| I'm always shocked that people think supply is the issue...
|
| People will live in the best place they can afford. This
| means prices will always be driven by the income level of
| people in the area.
|
| If you suddenly built more housing in SF. You'll actually
| just get more people who can afford to live in SF moving
| there. That'll drive the prices right back to where they
| were.
|
| Demand would have to drop, while you expand supply. Remove
| tech jobs from SF and demand will drop, lowering prices. If
| enough external people don't wish to move there and you're
| building, then prices drop.
|
| Effectively, demand always massively outstrips supply for
| living accommodations
|
| As a thought exercise: imagine it was $100/month to live in a
| 3Bed, 2Br house in Houston. You'd have 100m people want to
| move there.
|
| Keep moving that number up, at some point you'll get supply
| and demand meeting. If you add 1000 new houses, it'll barely
| impact demand because you'll have 1000 people willing to move
| for a $50/month reduction in cost. Then prices will be right
| back where they started.
|
| Unless you can build 10k units or 100k units prices won't
| meaningfully change from supply side factors alone.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > People will live in the best place they can afford.
|
| This is an overly simplified view of demand. People with
| live in the best place among the places they _want_ to
| live. That's why we see strong selection along political
| and cultural dimensions, even when they correlate weakly
| (or even negatively) with purchasing power.
| aclatuts wrote:
| If it's not a supply-side issue, it should be fine to
| bulldoze 100k units while everything remains the same, and
| the prices shouldn't change at all.
| [deleted]
| lettergram wrote:
| My point was you can't build enough units to have the
| desired impact.
|
| If you bulldozed 100k units in SF there would be no where
| you live. Likely it would drop property values lol
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| aclatuts cannot build enough units, but the country of
| the USA can, because it has a finite number of people in
| it, and immigration controls.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with your final conclusion while
| cities like Flint and Detroit exist.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| That's simply running the thought experiment the other
| direction: There are places where you could lower the
| cost of living to zero and people still wouldn't move
| there.
|
| Alaska _effectively_ goes further by paying people to
| live there with their Permanent Fund -
| https://pfd.alaska.gov/ - where they give residents an
| annual dividend based on oil proceeds. But Kansas and
| other places have done the same offering to pay remote
| people $10k to move there.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Or European cities with reasonable rent.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is so massively wrong I don't even know where to
| begin.
| mturmon wrote:
| Can't comment on the specific contents of the linked research
| paper, but just a note that space-based measurements of
| subsidence have become a lot more routine with the development of
| Interferometric SAR (InSAR). You can get spatial maps of
| subsidence using the ~monthly/weekly overpasses of the radar, to
| ~several cm accuracy. It works better over some terrains than
| others.
|
| People aren't wired to notice subsidence, which has meant that
| large changes due to groundwater pumping and oil/gas extraction
| have gone "under the radar", and that's changing ;-).
|
| Large subsidence can cause problems including seawater
| infiltration into the water table, permanent loss of groundwater
| storage capacity, and disturbance to infrastructure like roads
| and pipelines.
|
| Subsidence is also one of the few ways we have to get insight
| into large-scale groundwater withdrawals (land goes down -> water
| being taken out and not replaced).
|
| Here's a summary with a nice motivational picture showing
| _meters_ of subsidence over multiple years in the California
| central valley: https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/land-
| subsidence
| jeffbee wrote:
| That area is now subsiding at over a meter every year. Luckily
| the state will bail out the guy responsible for the subsidence
| by spending billions to fix the aqueducts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| But what is Houston thinking about?
| aaron695 wrote:
| pGuitar wrote:
| There's are using too much water?
| bdcravens wrote:
| > His team found substantial subsidence in Katy, Spring, The
| Woodlands, Fresno and Mont Belvieu with groundwater and oil and
| gas withdrawal identified as the primary cause.
|
| I lived in Spring for 13 years. In the last 2-3 years in the
| house, the foundation issues seemed to be accelerating. I assumed
| it was just old house issues (house was built in the last 1970s)
| but perhaps subsidence plays a role.
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