It doesn't matter what technology you use to bring in water. When the cost gets high enough, people are going to leave the city, and the poorest will have to leave first.
I would've thought that the poorest would be in the weakest position to move - no means to pay, fewer opportunities to hear of alternatives, little contact with family who might be elsewhere, etc.
You might be right that the whole thing will fall apart.
But if this place is indeed the equivalent to Manhattan I can understand the disbelief. Compared to the trillions tied up in real estate the cost of a pipeline to NYC would be trivial. Yeah it might cost $50b (probably much, much less but lets go crazy) but with at least 10mm people around to receive the water it's $5k per person amortized over a decade it comes out to $50/mo/person
I realize that the economics in Sana'a are probably hugely different than here in the US. But if people earn less, labor is cheaper too, etc.
The difficulty here isn't that given the facts it could happen. It's that getting to the point where you have all the facts has turned all the assumptions that you normally take for granted completely upside down. Speaking as an engineer I can understand the difficulty.
The old town is the equivalent of Manhattan, moved to the Middle Ages (or earlier). I don't know the new part of the city, but it probably is concrete and tents/shanty towns, like all large cities in poorer countries.
I don't find it strange that they will not be able to pay for the infrastructure and the additional costs of desalination and of pumping the water to the city (over 2 km up)
One of the big problems right now is that they have a very long oil pipeline, and people keep blowing it up. It's hard to get political stability when the resources are so constrained, and hard to deal with the resource problems when there's so much political instability.
50 years and $6 billion for a tunnel 60 miles long. The city owns lots of land around the source waters, but I think that is their only expense in acquiring the water, and the tunnel flows downhill to the city.
Also, the 21st President of the United States was Chester A. Arthur.
Sure, manual labour is cheap. But if you want to buy computers, electric equipment or high quality machines then you have to buy the same stuff that us rich westerns buy. I. E. You're paying western prices.
Do you people realize you don't need to have this debate from first principles? There's a LOT of interesting (and depressing) cost analysis on providing Sana'a with water vs. trying to relocate.
Not everything has to be a Fermi thought experiment.
The point I was trying to make is that a civil engineer from the US might take a lot of factors for granted. And given those factors it would completely make sense to build a pipeline. But it sounds like those factors don't apply in Sana'a.
It's not the OPs inability to believe that's the problem. Show him all of his flawed assumption and he'd readily change his mind (I would hope anyhow). But how do you disabuse him of those things which he takes for granted here in the US? That's a difficult process.
http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/30/yeme...
It doesn't matter what technology you use to bring in water. When the cost gets high enough, people are going to leave the city, and the poorest will have to leave first.