At 10:41 AM -0800 12/25/00, Tim May wrote:
At 9:25 AM -0800 12/25/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Another general cause is that most of the current houses are built stupid. In the 1940's and 1950's houses were built that were quite habitable without constant airconditioning. They had basement windows where air could be drawn in and air was cooled in the basement with scads of thermal contact with the cool earth.
California houses have almost _never_ had basements. Check it out. Check the history of houses built throughout the state, going back a century or more.
The main "reason" for basements is to put a foundation below the frost line. Mainly for (I lived for 5 years in San Diego--no A/C. Lived for 4 years in Santa Barbara--no A/C. Lived for 12 years in Santa Clara--A/C in one of my apartments, which I only used half a dozen times. Lived in Santa Cruz for 14 years--no A/C.)
And I should have pointed out that many of these places I lived in during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, HAD BEEN BUILT IN EARLIER DECADES, precisely the decades during which Ray assures us basements were the norm. Nope, no basements. No basement in the house I lived in in San Diego in the 1950s. Built on a slab. No air conditioning, either. No need. And the buildings I lived in during the 1970s had neither basements nor air conditioning. No need for either. Further, more and more Californians live in multi-story apartment buildings and condos. No basements, though underground parking garages are common. (No "natural cooling" effects, natch.) Where Ray gets the idea that houses in California used to commonly have basements--and "thick adobe walls"--is beyond me. They didn't, not counting certain old historical Spanish-era buildings which had thick walls (but almost never basements!). Office buildings typically have air conditioning, but this has to do with having hundreds or even thousands of people working in a sealed enviroment. Basements have nothing to do with this. The "solution" to "shortages" is, as with all things, market pricing. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns