[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.