My apologies, since wells are hardly "free" to build and maintain I had assumed you were talking about collecting it directly via a harvesting system. I've used wells the majority of my life.

My general point is that wells or direct capture is not viable for dense urban areas, and while you're saying it's a choice, the majority of folks in the USA live in urban areas. Big urban centers aren't going away any time soon, so we should consider how to meet people where they are, when possible. The larger point I wanted to make though is that we (at least in the USA, and all the Latin American nations I've lived in) have good public sanitation and water systems precisely because it's seen as a right. And those systems aren't cheap, but we do it. As I argue we should do more for re: housing.

That's the crux of the biscuit: I just think more should be done to help people afford these basic necessities. I think we should (as a nation/planet) fundamentally rethink the way we approach housing, for the same reasons water and food are subsidized (and they should be further subsidized IMHO, but that's another point entirely). I'm not going to claim I know the answers, or that it would be easy or cheap, but I think it's something we should all try seriously to solve.

[–] thantik@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Wells are essentially free. They used to dig them by hand...you still can, in fact. They're one of the most commonly used pre-technological age way of getting water with the exception of simply living next to a freshwater source.

You don't need metal, you don't need electrical, you don't need pumps, you don't need anything except some rocks, clay, and something to dredge water up with.

It's wonderful how in most places on this earth you can simply...dig...and get water.

I'd call that about as free as something could ever be achieved, gets.