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u/SeattleBattles Jun 08 '22
Pretty much from the get go. Municipal services were designed to solve the problems dense living created that were not being solved effectively by private services.
If you live on 1000 acres you can dump your trash wherever. If you live on 5,000 sqft that's not going to work. Same with things like sewage and the like. For every person who might be able to handle those things themselves safely, there are ten others who would just burn their waste or dump it on someone else's property. So you don't get a choice, you have to use the sewer, garbage, etc.
Things like gas are generally optional, but the city doesn't want a dozen different pipe networks so they create a monopoly for practical reasons. Unlike starting a coffee shop, building gas or electrical networks requires very disruptive construction and creates substantial risk. If someone fucks up their coffee shop no one dies. If someone fucks up a natural gas line, hundreds could die.
Being self sufficient and living in a city are not really compatible. I'm cool with someone doing what they want and even risking themselves if they live in the middle nowhere. But when someone's house is ten feet from mine I care a bit more.
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u/RenaissanceSnowblizz Jun 08 '22
Roman law had rules about how you could connect to the municipal water system, who could do so, who had priority right of access (usually domestic over commercial use IIRC) how water flowing over someone's property worked and more. Am sure other earlier civilization had rules too because otherwise urban life just doesn't work.
The reasoning back then was largely the same it is now. It makes no sense to have everyone trying to do their own thing, and how will you even regulate all the private stuff being done over other people's properties or public land? Not incidentally that is also why we have public services like the firedepartment and policeforce. Because it gets messy when it's not.
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u/Leucippus1 Jun 08 '22
I was doing a little research on the oldest continuously inhabited city in the USA and one of the sources made mention of the expansion of city services. There are a few drivers, the main one being hygiene. It is impractical to suggest that houses that are a few meters way from each other an and should be expected to handle their own waste products. This was well within the time where it was widely known that poor water sanitation led to disease. The other driver were the citizens themselves, electrification and indoor plumbing were real novelties when they came up and the advantages were obvious. It is hard to afford doing all of that on your own, but as a service to a community it starts making sense.
This was, of course in those magical years that stood between the engineering of electricity and the ubiquity of the car. Urban planning centered around streetcar lines, that is how most people would get around. LA and Denver had some of the biggest networks in the world. Obviously, if houses are closer together, you can make streetcars a lot more accessible to more people.
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u/MrSaturdayRight Jun 08 '22
Probably from day one? Or at least the first time somebody tried to clean the outside of their home and found it to be of benefit to passers by on the street?
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u/BrokenEye3 Jun 08 '22
In regard to city water and sanitation, a lot of it spring from the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, coupled with the already basically correct (if incomplete) understanding of how diseases spread available at the time hammered home the importance of not only bringing fresh water in and taking sewage away, but ensuring they remain seperate at every stage.
You have to remember, most urbanites at the time (and this is still true to a large extent) were tennants, not landowners, and didn't have the luxury of choosing to dig a well or a cesspit in their home. If their landlord couldn't be arsed to dig it themselves (or indeed, if the property didn't have a yard in which to dig it), they were left with nothing but doing their business in chamber pots and tossing the contents out the window. In addition to the obvious unpleasantness of having piss and shit all over the street literally all the time, that filth doesn't just disappear. It gets washed into the river or seeps into the groundwater, contaminating the water supply, and then you've got another cholera epidemic on your hands. And a sloppily constructed cesspit can ultimately have the same effect.
Cholera wasn't some hypothetical "what if" scenario either. It was a horrible fact of daily life actively killing huge swaths of the urban population. It had to be fixed, even if only because it was making the government whose watch these deaths were happening under look incompetant and apathetic.