In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 15 Mar 2019 13:16:18 -0400,
wrote:

On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 10:49:26 -0400, Tom wrote:

On 3/15/19 9:14 AM, Joyce Harris wrote:
replying to athiker, Joyce Harris wrote:
Our utilities are underground on our land to our home.* That one pole is an
eye sore.


Depends on where you live.

Wealthy areas get buried utilities.* Unimportant poor people get the cheaper aerial stuff.

It really depends on how old your community is and how the people
there feel about having their front yards torn up.
Newer communities got buried utilities as part of the land
development. Done as an afterthought can be quite destructive.

Yes, I haven't done a survey, but I think even low-cost housing is built
most of the time these days with underground wiring. But most poor
people don't live in newly-built housing. They live in houses which
were built decades ago for middle income or poor (and sometimes for very
upper middle income) during the time when all wiring was done from
poles**. It costs a fortune to redo that, just so people won't see
wires (and you have to do t he phone lines at the same time or there
will still be poles and wires) when they actually have working electric
and phone service. So it's pretty low priority.

**Either it hadn't occurred to people to bury the wires or they didnd't
have wires etc. that could handle it????

Also in many places, homeowners are expected to chip in a lot of the
cost for improvements like this (Just play Monopoloy and you'll get an
idea), and a minimum percentage of owners have to agree to it. 50, 80%
I'm guessing Poor people have more important things to spend their
money on than the view and the possibility of fewer outages. So do I.

I have underground wiring for about 170 yards from my house, and then
it's onto poles. We have very few outages, and most are only a second
or two. If the wires were showing now, I wouldn't pay $500 to bury
them, and I have more money than poor people.