[csvance]

I live in Houston and would rather it be 10 degrees warmer than have to deal with 32258 additional mosquito spawning pools. The heat isn’t the worst part of Houston, most long term Houstonians are used to it. You never get used to mosquitos, especially Aedes aegypti.

[ErroneousBosh]

> I live in Houston and would rather it be 10 degrees warmer than have to deal with 32258 additional mosquito spawning pools.

Stock them with carp, which will eat the mosquito larvae, and you can also eat the carp. Win-win.

[doodlebugging]

I think that the post I made, which I should've used a /s tag (sarcasm) on probably needed a /sh tag (shitpost).

Your thoughtful reply made me reconsider what I posted as if I had been serious. Seeing another instance of someone attempting to build a coherent picture in the reader's minds eye about the size of one thing relative to another (10000 acres is roughly 1/4 of a Lichtenstein), dredged up the recurrent memories about the all-too-commonly misused Olympic swimming pool comparison. I felt compelled to to reply and ended up building an implausibly plausible narrative about mitigating some of the issue with the overheated abandoned buildings by repurposing them as community improvements.

I am surprised that you would prefer the temperature there to be 10 degrees warmer. This reminds me of a time when I was out of state, in Mississippi, on a wellsite and I had picked up a copy of USA Today at the hotel before I left. I read the interesting parts and finally got to the weather forecasts on the back page for major cities across the US. As I scanned the forecasts they were all positive - Sunny, Breezy and Nice, etc until I got to Houston. For Houston their forecast header said "Oppressive". I checked all the other headings for all the other cities listed and none had negative connotations, only Houston. That gave me the chuckle I needed to get through that shitty day on muddy the wellsite and it continues to provide a pleasant memory all these years later.

I lived in Houston and the Houston area for 10 years and commuted for work to Houston for another 16 years. I'm pretty familiar with most of the pros and cons including the climate, the traffic, many of the communities, the abundance of delicious food options for any price range, the stormwater drainage issues due to over-development, problems created by lack of zoning, etc. and being a geoscientist, I can see advantages to repurposing these abandoned buildings for community use.

I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. They would all be built as indoor pools where families from the neighborhoods around these abandoned buildings can bring their kids on those hot spring days. In many cases it would probably not be necessary to remove the existing building, only to gut it and add pool facilities. I have my doubts about whether functioning outdoor pools are significant sites for mosquitoes to breed due to the agitation of the water surface from the pumps and the chlorination so I don't think your concerns about Aedes aegypti and the pathogens they spread are worth worrying about. For control of that problem you have to look at how Houston and other municipalities handle their stormwater retention ponds, their channelized creeks and bayous, and storm drains across neighborhoods in the city. Storm drains that are not regularly graded tend to have water pooling due to debris traps and that water becomes the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It is also a huge hill to climb to get people to manage standing water on their property by dumping accumulations after rain events.

We looked at buying homes when we lived there and frankly, Houston will always have issues with water because of the gulf coastal plain geology which left them with wide areas of very clay-rich soils which have low permeabilities and thus it is imperative for runoff to be a critical part of every infrastructure project in the region. Even knowing all this they still sold off all the Katy Prairie land where rice and sugarcane was grown and which regularly flooded for generations. That land was a winter ground for migratory birds from all over North America until they turned it into poorly-drained subdivisions with homes on concrete slabs that crack and buckle and keep foundation repair contractors busy.

I think it would be a useful project for a GIS pro to map these abandoned properties and short-list some of them for repurposing as described in communities where kids have few options for recreation. It would provide facilities for people of all ages to learn to swim, practice diving board skills, remain physically fit, and some of them could be fitted with wave pools to simulate beach conditions and make it more fun. Jobs for young teens in the neighborhood, community building, physical activity that one can do on a hot Houston day, etc. I see nothing but positives here. Maybe my whole post needs a /sh though.

[csvance]

A more generous interpretation of your grandiose vision would obviously include some way to make the water not into a breeding ground, like what you mentioned here. But seeing as this is hacker news, I felt like playing into the respective stereotypes of an interaction between someone living in the Bay Area and Houston completely talking past eachother.

And yes, the lack of planning does cause problems. It also has obviously has some benefits, like affordable housing. I live in a suburb (Sugarland) and while it’s not particularly exciting, it has everything I need for my family… and yes, it absolutely would be better 10 degrees cooler ;)

Re: one swimming pool per child project: when can you start?

[selimthegrim]

I am sure Houston has a mosquito control board.

[doodlebugging]

Fortunately I'm not in SanFran. I'm up in N Texas. I worked out of Sugarland for a long time commuting to the Hwy6/IH59 area daily from Mission Bend area (west of Hwy6) and later to that area from Hempstead via Hwy290 to HWY6. I never lived in Sugarland because everything I looked at down there had issues that I couldn't ignore - poor quality lumber and materials used in construction, shoddy construction practices, access issues during high rainfall events, proximity to major freeways, etc. That's why I ended up in Hempstead. Sandy, well-drained soil on a hill. Older home constructed from old growth timber. A full city block with no neighbors. Easy highway access to the rest of Texas. To top it off, the commute from Hempstead, though it was a longer distance, could be managed in the same time period as the old commute from Mission Bend due to the new path using a relatively lower traffic path on 290 versus traversing neighborhoods and stop signs to get from Mission Bend to downtown (59 at Kirby) and then down 59 to Sugarland near Wilcrest.

I hope you work near Sugarland. The commute was pretty brutal some days.

As for the one swimming pool per child part, I have to defer to someone who knows something about constructing a swimming pool that people can use for fun stuff like swimming. The only large body of water that I constructed was a small, shallow pond where my childhood friends, my brother, and I would keep bait for our fishing trips. We dug a pit that was about 20' x 20' (~6m x 6m) and a foot or so deep (0.3m deep). We stocked it with crawdads, minnows we caught in the nearby creeks, and small perch we caught in creeks and stock tanks. It was a viable habitat for bait until the landowner destroyed our hand-built fort next to it and leveled the land while laying out lots for a new subdivision. Good times.

They also cut the tank dam on the best, most accessible stock tank near our homes and all the fish, turtles, frogs, etc spilled out across the landscape to an uncertain future. I'm sure most of the turtle and frogs found new spots to hang out but the fish were kinda cooked since they don't operate well in air. All of that to build cheap housing. My best friend and his Mom bought one of the houses and one day while I was visiting they showed me how you could open a cabinet door and see daylight through a crack in the corner where the cabinet had pulled apart as the house settled on a lot where we used to have a nice, well-stocked pond. Other corners in the house had similar issues where you could see daylight through cracks. My family built custom homes for decades. Those homes in that subdivision were some of the worst I had ever seen as far as quality of finish and attention to detail. Years later though I found worse places around Houston and up here in the DFW area.

To summarize what turned out to be another long-winded post, unless you want an ideal spot where your kids can get down and dirty and really enjoy all the muddy fun that kids should have, you should probably find someone else to construct swimming pools. I'm probably not the guy.

[readthenotes1]

"I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. "

Like https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/houston-underground-th...

[doodlebugging]

Wow. That's nice. The next time I go to Houston that could be on my short list of things to do. Thanks for that link!

[readthenotes1]

It was neat (I was going to say "cool" but didn't want to fall into a double entendre trap).

Smaller than Istanbul's, but definitely something nice to do