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by flovec 1292 days ago
I agree with you to some degree, but if your statement were 100% true, you would be able to do both of these things below in my area:

- Store (not live in) an RV on an empty lot you own

- Use composting as a primary means of sewage disposal

Where I live now, you can do neither! This leads me to believe that _some_ building codes - and enforcement of them - is classist in nature.

Heck, even with blackwater tanks...people are capable of emptying them at an RV disposal etc. If this were just about management of cleanliness, we could all find a way to make it work.

1 comments

How many RV disposals are nearby? Do they have the necessary volume? Will anyone pack up their entire permanent home once a week to tow it to the dump station? Composting is not sufficient to destroy human pathogens, and prohibiting storage of an empty RV on an otherwise empty plot of land prevents people from bouncing back and forth between two permanent RVs on two different plots of land (never permanently resident in either).

I agree the laws could be changed to provide more options instead of blanket bans, and choosing not to do so is probably somewhat classist, but as far as I can tell they are going after real problems. (Even if bluntly)

> How many RV disposals are nearby? Do they have the necessary volume? Will anyone pack up their entire permanent home once a week to tow it to the dump station?

Those are great questions! And those are the questions the local government should be asking, and working with those folks to solve waste management issues, not prevent them from living a certain way. House more, not less?

> prohibiting storage of an empty RV on an otherwise empty plot of land prevents people from bouncing back and forth between two permanent RVs on two different plots of land...

It prevents that (which I would argue is problematic because it sounds classist? - again, house more, not less!), but it also prevents someone from just storing an RV on a plot of land they own.

> Composting is not sufficient to destroy human pathogens.

The studies aggregated in the Humanure Handbook suggest otherwise?: https://weblife.org/humanure/references.html

Here is a link to just 1 study outside those references: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288724214_A_pilot_s... (there are better links than this particular one, no time to dig up more ATM)

The thing about composting..it's a system, just like septic, just like centralized waste management. Things can go wrong. And it is legal in some places (which suggests efficacy), but not accepted as a "primary" system where I live (or in the SLV to my knowledge), which I take issue with given that the current legal primary systems are not always sufficient to destroy human pathogens in practice (either because the systems lack capacity, aren't properly maintained, or both). Flush toilet waste management overflows into the local water systems when it rains or is over capacity. Septic systems also do environmental damage since a lot of them are not maintained (need a source, there was a book recently that came out). Septic systems are also not inspected by the government after they are built where I live (they tried to charge residents for inspections at one point and they said no).