A recent affordable building in SF cost over $1 million per unit. That's completely unsustainable.
And you want and need precisely that in a house with fluctuating occupants of which a high percentage will have some sort of mental health issue.
Cutting corners on boarding houses will lead to fire catastrophes.
Nobody denies this. The question is whether said fire catastrophes really claim more lives than homelessness and wintering on the street. (Obviously fire catastrophes are a bigger PR problem and get more media attention, but is that really the appropriate metric for human suffering?)
https://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism/status/160882533241258393...
The problem is not just zoning. A boarding house simply doesn't generate noticeable income compared to standard residential housing, and with exploding land prices it simply makes no sense financially to cater to poor people.
That's ridiculous. There's a hundred different issues causing a homeless person to die on the street. Building code regulations are way down that fucking list of somewhat barely related causes.
Well, ok, since you started it - how much do you, personally, donate to homeless shelters and food banks? You have a lot of discretionary income to do so since your taxes are lower than you appear that you would like them to be.
Spoiler alert: Unfortunately, no matter how much money or time you give to this organization, or similar, the ills of capitalism inflicted on the poorest residents in the area won't be solved.
I still donate anyway though.
Am I really supposed to believe that we could build an entire cargo ship every 3 days out of 18 shipyards in 1942, but we somehow can't build a million simple and dirt cheap homes?
But even this strategy already reached oversaturation.
People just need to be more responsible, or else have fewer actions encoded as as rights instead of privileges.
[0] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/C99RationaleV5.1...
If the code says no more than two wires under a staple you'll still have the intended effect if you put two small wires and one big one under a staple sized for the big one. But that requires judgement to get right so they just say two wires only.
Or fire codes.
Related off-topic reminder, in the hope it may save one life one day: please use this comment as a reminder to check upon the status of your smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms and fire extinguisher. At the very least every room where people sleep in should have a smoke alarm and every room with a furnace (boiler, oven, kitchen, ...) a smoke and CO alarm. They must not be painted over, and their batteries be regularly replaced.
Each story of a house should have at least one extinguisher rated for classes A and B (solid and liquid combustibles), kitchens additionally a class F extinguisher (DO NOT EVER use a water/foam extinguisher on a fat fire). Fire extinguishers should be inspected by a licensed professional every two years and must not be used again after breaking the seal without a check-over by a licensed professional.
Also, have your building's electrical lines checked at least once a decade and after each major rework if they are up to code, and regularly check appliance cables for damage. Electrical defects account (in Germany) for roughly a third of all fires.
I (in an affluent US east coast suburb) called my fire dept's non-emergency line to ask about this once a few years ago, and they told me this isn't something they do. So who does it?
What I can give you is the next best thing: A way to self-check. Most fire extinguishers have both an expiration date and a pressure gauge. You want the pressure to be in the green and the date to be in the future. They usually last 10-12 years with proper care, but you still want to regularly check these things.
My source for this: An inspector, who checked the extinguishers for the pharmacy I worked at back then (was employed or contracted by the pharmacy chain). It has been over 10 years, but it doesn't look like this information is out of date.
In your case I'd search for a company that is certified by NICET [2].
[1] https://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/publications-and-medi...
[2] https://www.nicet.org/certification-programs/electrical-and-...
It helps a bunch in an emergency when you are not preforming a technical operation for the very first time.
I will concede this may be tricky to pull off in a more urban environment, "Yes officer that's the idiot who lit his garbage can on fire in the middle of the street", in which case do without the fire, or make friends with the local fire department and they will let you do it in their parking lot.
There are small tests recommended each one or two years, but also a more serious test. The bottle will probably need to be tested for an integrity check each five years to see if it can hold the pressure without bursting. Owner can't do this test by the risk of blow and the lack of the machines.
Really? Do you know _anyone_ who does that? What will the professional do that we don't -- take a look at the charge level, take a look at manufacturer date?
For private people it's less common to do that.
Here in Germany, the checklist is as follows - and government as well as insurances can and do audit companies if that is being followed:
- check for accessibility: is the location of the extinguisher properly marked on maps and does the wall have visible indicators that show where the extinguisher is? Can the extinguisher be reached and grabbed in an emergency or has random clutter accumulated next to it? Are the maps and indicator designs outdated? Are the indicator signs autoflourescent to make them visible even in the case of a fire-caused electrical blackout? Are there enough maps publicly visible that everyone can access one in case of emergency?
- for wall mounts: check if the holder is structurally sound or if someone ripped out half the screws by bumping into it?
- check if the tank itself hasn't expired. A tank usually is certified for ten years.
- inspect the extinguisher visually, look for dents etc. that may have led to corrosion of the tank or damage to the hose/nozzle (and subsequently a rupture risk should it be used). That is a very common occurrence in portable extinguishers that have been used as door stops.
- check if the extinguisher has been used / the seal been broken. If yes, that demands a full replacement of consumable parts (pressurizer agent, extinguisher agent, seals).
- check if the interior of the tank has been damaged by corrosion
- check if the pressurizer agent is not expired (most extinguishers here aren't permanently pressurized, instead they contain a CO2 cartridge) and weigh the cartridge to make sure it hasn't leaked
- check all O-rings and replace if necessary
-Vaccinate the population, eliminate the disease in humans
-Eliminate the disease in any of its natural reservoirs
Once you're certain it's gone why continue vaccination? There's cost to that and those resources can then be dedicated to "active" diseases (perhaps with the instructions for that vaccine archived somehow).
I'm all for getting rid of useless things, but the long tail for diseases appears to be extremely long and resilient.
Like, why else are you required to sit around for twenty minutes after you get it?
like, if someone would believe you if you told them a vaccine is 99.9% safe, but would refuse to take that vaccine if you told them it was 100% safe? that person is not a rational actor, I'm not sure that they're anyone worth worrying about
I feel like only fringes of society would refuse the vaccine at that point. But what we do is lie and say it's 100%, losing all trust and making more antivaxxers in the process. The original ones that didn't want it at 5 nines wouldn't get it anyway, you're not winning them over by lying.
https://www.ktnv.com/13-investigates/officials-in-nevada-dem...
You're welcome!
That seems to be about zoning, not building codes.
(and in any case, since the topic was code enforcement, article states "North Las Vegas Code enforcement took action" )
Speculation and landowner greed are the primary drivers of rising housing costs (with restrictive zoning being an consequence of the first two).
No, lower interest rates are the primary driver.
Doesn’t seem like the 20% fed funds rate in 1980 did much.
Obviously low rates didn’t cushion the city -> suburb housing crunch during COVID, but COVID isn’t the only time housing prices have gone up. They seem only to go up.
Land prices track exactly to the productivity of the region. Productivity, as a general rule, goes up due to technology, more people yielding more specialization, more natural resources being discovered etc.
Wherever a tech company puts a new office sees skyrocketing local economic productivity and accordingly sees skyrocketing rent prices. That’s not because Mother Earth is charging more per square foot of space, it’s because landowners are.
I feel the same way developing software - the only thing that ever matters, and has ever mattered (at least since I started developing software in 1992) is "meeting the date". Whatever corners can be cut to make the date are cut, and then the thing breaks in fairly predictable ways because corners were cut. It's maddeningly infuriating and I'm not even dealing with people's lives here. I can't even imagine having to put up with this attitude when people could actually die.
Honestly, I haven’t been working that long (about a decade) but this general attitude from PHBs calling the shots in software makes me count the months until I can retire early and never write code for money again. It’s just soul sucking to fight everyone on this and then fight again when overtime is needed to add more bandaids to the resulting abomination because the date won’t be met.
https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...
"AECL never publicly released the source code, but several experts including [Nancy Leveson] did obtain access for the investigation. What they found was shocking. The software appeared to have been written by a programmer with little experience coding for real-time systems. There were few comments, and no proof that any timing analysis had been performed. According to AECL, a single programmer had written the software based upon the Therac-6 and 20 code. However, this programmer no longer worked for the company, and could not be found.'
This year they decided to skip a bunch. We had one almost disaster that I caught, so of course we’re going to forget why we did this stuff in the first place. Until the next time it blows up.
I soon realized though that they didn't care about that issue and it would have to be fixed after "busy season." Coincidentally, busy season is 365 days a year. The keys are finally gone but they were there for well over 2 years. I went back to check every now and then lol
If it wasn't, we would have a much easier time persecuting people that breaks it, and much more public sympathy for large culprits that actually have much fewer (relatively to their capacity) strings over then than any random person. The same applies to fire codes.
As someone who has been close to almost-tragedies caused by fires, can you give me examples where fire codes are over-zealous? I've had family almost getting killed, even though they did follow the fire codes - the didn't even get a fine or a case against them. If you ask me, the fire codes were not strict enough in that instance.
There's a small movement to eradicate the requirement for midrise buildings to have 2 stairways. Advocates point to European regulations and claim that a single stairway is just as safe as 2.
Double stairways, they say, makes construction more expensive and results in awkward, undesirable apartment layouts.
https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...
'In NY "Fire-Proof" buildings can be built like that', when they're built out of materials that do not burn and in ways where the fire cannot spread. Effectively the safer place in a fire, in theory, would be to shelter in place as it cannot spread.
I'm all for using as many non-burning materials as possible in building construction.
Are you proposing to get rid of the second stairway alone, or are you going to bring all the other regulations too?
(Legal cases, inquests etc continue.)
The regulations existed and were illegally broken.
It may not be as ideal as stairs, but if it's a backup option you'd think that'd be much less costly while still allowing at least a majority of people to escape.
I don't know enough about fire code to know whether it applies here.
Spooked me enough to make me not get permits for the next renos. Too many arbitrary rules that can make projects spiral without any real safety improvement.
Now, when you sell your house, is the next person gonna be a bit miffed that there are no outlets in the kitchen anywhere near the sink? What about when they go to install a smart outlet and there's no neutral, and 1cm of hot wire to work with? That's gonna suck too, but you didn't permit anything and went off your gut so... fuck them I guess?
> Spooked me enough to make me not get permits for the next renos.
I have no idea what you're going to decide is up to your own personal code going forward.
There's no less than three breaker panels in the house itself and it's never immediately clear which panel goes to which outlet/fixture/appliance.
I gave up installing a faucet in the kitchen and called a plumber. He cut the PVC monstrosity out from the cabinet and took it back to the shop to show his buddies.
You know that little drain line that comes from the AC to handle condensation? It is not a good idea to have the other end of it in the crawl space.
I don’t doubt there are great reasons for most of the rules, and the best way to get compliance is to explain why they’re there. And some may be overzealous indeed and then they would hopefully be adjusted.
From a top-level comment: Everyone - everyone - is certain that the codes are all overzealous and their little thing needs an exception.
You built something that wasn't to code and now you're sad that they told you that you did it wrong, but allowed it to stand because in their judgement it wasn't critical enough to have you rework it? The IRC is freely available, just read the code and follow it! It's dead simple. They even have pictures: https://cdn-codes-pdf.iccsafe.org/bundles/document/new_docum...
Things worked out for you when you followed the rules, and because they worked out, you're not going to follow the rules in the future?
I agree that you could argue a garage should get an exemption if it's under X height and surface area. But otherwise, it seems like a sensible request.
Too bad, I was hoping solar garages and solar car ports would take over the world... Maybe if you build the roof out of structural solar panels.
Which means you do nothing and have no sprinklers.
It's only overzealous to people trying to cut corners. It's never overzealous to the people who are killed or hurt.
It's ridiculous to advocate arbitrary, putative, safety enhancing measures without an argument about why that way of spending resources is better than many of the other alternatives.
So you cannot name anyone. This is a completely hypothetical argument.
If 100 people died every week of building code violations in that time people would care more
Here, you’re required to choose at least three expensive improvements from a set of eight (iirc), ranging from relatively cheap (electric vehicle charger) to very expensive (rooftop solar).
My home was built in the 1970s, the bathrooms had mold and had to be gutted, and the place was in desperate need of a remodel just to be livable.
I already have rooftop solar and an electrical vehicle charger, but that’s not enough.
I was expected to spend roughly an extra $40k — on top of a $120k remodel — adding additional features and replacing perfectly good portions of my home to meet Boulder’s climate goals.
I can’t afford that, but my house isn’t livable as-is.
As a result, I’m having a bunch of work done without permitting or inspection.
I hate it, but that’s the Faustian bargain people choose when government tries to leverage safety regulations as a stick to enforce expensive, non-safety related ends.
$20k is "gut and rewire everything in an expensive metro area" kind of money.
Plus, lots of places require these to be buried. So you've got trenching costs and that's a pain too. $20k is definitely within the ballpark of a cost.
But my point is, if someone need to do all of these things, it's for a reason. And these tasks aren't "upgrade a circuit", they're, "upgrade my home's electrical service"
If you need to upgrade your panel it can easily cost $100k.
if you can't afford to meet construction requirements then you can't afford to construct, i guess
Building codes and related permitting regulations were established to ensure safety, and accepted by the public under those auspices.
The addition of novel, non-safety related political requirements exceeds this original remit and undermines the entire telos of residential building codes.
This inescapably leads to reduced compliance with the regulatory process, and thus, less-safe housing.
So, yes, “overly burdensome”.
Can't it be both? A more restrictive code does not solve the problem of construction scams. Enforcing a useful code, might
> Like workplace safety rules, they are written in the blood of the dead.
Some of the rules are, but some of the rules aren't. When code calls for a maximum distance between electrical outlets, that's partially for convenience, and partly because of unsafe practices with extension cords, so there's some blood there, but if you miss the mark by a foot, it's not disasterous.
Uniform application of some rules without considerations for cost or practicality is foolish. For example, where I live, with my size house, any permitted remodeling triggers a requirement to retrofit fire sprinklers, despite the fact that I have a well which likely couldn't supply said fire sprinklers in a reasonable manner --- especially if a fire resulted in electricity being cut off, or was caused by unsafe heating choices when utility electricity was out of service (this is a common cause of house fires as I understand it). You could mitigate that with a high mounted water tank, but that's not actually required, might require substantial engineering to ensure the weight of the water and tank doesn't exceed the structure's weight bearing capacity, and would add significant maintenance to ensure the condition of the tank such that it did not leak and cause major damage to the structure. Oh, and how are you supposed to get such a tank into an attic like that anyway?
Structural requirements tend to be more likely to be written from experience though. And earthquakes and high winds have a way of striking everywhere. TR is known to be seismically active, so cutting corners on earthquake safety is a worse risk/cost tradeoff than in places where earthquakes are rare.
I mean, it could be disastrous, couldn't it? That foot could be the threshold of someone saying "Aw screw it, I'll just use my parent's frayed extension cord from the 70s."
And perhaps this kind of thing should be more explicit in the code - things that are for convenience and things that are actual life/death safety issues.
And as we see, the latter often involves things that only become apparent when disaster strikes.
As long as as you have enough water to use a shower that’s plenty to make a huge difference because they don’t operate like in the movies where everything in the building goes off at once. Instead you only get water when part of the sprinkler head got hot enough to melt.
Disastrous?
For heavy fixtures, like large chandeliers and ceiling fans, appropriate boxes also help with bearing the weight; preventing the fixtures from pulling out of drywall and being suspended only by the wiring.
The thing is, in the absence of someone (like an inspector) specifically checking, you can assume that anything that isn't immediately visible uses the cheapest possible materials and the fastest, shoddiest installation.
In my case, it may have been as simple as, "we didn't order enough junction boxes and we're running late as it is; just skip 'em".
There are building codes that are designed to increase authentic safety, and those that are actually trying to achieve other ends, like decreasing the supply of available housing, via the claim of "safety."
"Safetyism" is everywhere: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/safetyism-is-the-water-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
fire safety engineering is a very respectable field, mandating a particular implementation instead of a required safety level is the opposite to good long-term policy.
You know what's frustrating? Seeing someone who's clearly got enough exposure to building code and similar types of workplace requirements to know they're being misleading do it anyway because they know it's what the audience wants to hear.
A huge fraction of code is not written in blood. A huge fraction of those exception requests are legitimate from a "performance of the thing in question" system.
Much of the specific verbiage and the specific requirements in code come from a desire to free people like your wife from having to make and be responsible for the outcome of judgement calls.
Nobody's house ever burnt down because the wire staples were spaced 1" too far apart. It's just that a line had to be drawn somewhere because inspectors can't be expected to make judgement calls on such minutia at scale.
If clipboard warriors cared to explain this it to the people they'd catch less flak.
My father is a completely self taught and self employed contractor for the exact same area. Code compliance is so clear, simple, and easy that he considers it a rubber stamp process and has never complained about it, while he happily complains about spending $400 a year to keep his business properly licensed in the state, while he refuses to increase his prices to keep up with the gouging local contractors are able to do because of extremely high demand.
In places where money doesn't grow on trees harder decisions have to be made. Situations like "do I hire a real electrician to install my heat pump and get forced to bring my panel up to current code at great expense or do I hire someone to just install the heat pump on a cash basis or do I replace my existing system like for like" become more common.
I agree code is stupid simple if you're building cookie cutter stuff. It can get very, very, annoying when you're dealing with systems that have N generations of changes and/or are trying to be minimally invasive. Would you rather take a hole saw to the main beam of someone's house or have a sink drain that's a hair too flat for a portion of it's run?
That said: there are always "grandfathered" buildings which were built before the latest codes; unreinforced masonry, for example. What politician wants to tell the owner, "hey, sorry, you've got to tear that down" ?
So, aside from builders ignoring codes, I wonder how many of the buildings in Turkey were built before earthquake-proofing was required?
* Building code is constantly updated, and this makes old built homes undesirable - building itself is worth 0 yen after around 7 years;
* Shrinking population means most real estate is actually empty/abandoned on low demand areas;
* Very disaster prone area so most buildings are either new (and build code compliant) or constantly being tested for disaster resistence;
* Few invest on real estate speculation as the return-on-investment is horrible.
I'm no expert, but when I was in Turkey in 2010 I took pictures of soft clay hollow bricks that were being used in new construction for the bulk of the building. You've likely seen pictures of similar bricks as they are used all over the world, but they are as fragile as eggshells.
They built the buildings without adhering to code. They get a project approved, do whatever they want (steal materials, build another floor, decide not to dig a foundation) and sell the projects advertising that the buildings are upto code. As we have a highly corrupt government, they pay their bribes and get the building approved. Also, the building inspectors are private companies, they approve buildings without ever going on site.
Even newly built government buildings such as hospitals, airports collapsed!! Even those buildings were built with bribes :(.
Corruption killed us here :(.
What? Democrats are socialist? Okay I guess we will keep having the same problems then.
What was Turkey's response? The governor of Hatay ordered to demolish the building construction control authority's archive (archive with signed and stamped construction projects, floor studies etc.), with the documents in it (i.e. to bury all evidence). The building is a one-floored archive and did not suffer any earthquake damage. Luckily a group of lawyers found out and stopped the destruction halfway. Now, with the pressure from the press, the heads of the building companies are arrested one by one.
Imagine the level of corruption when the governor orders to demolish the archive holding evidence without telling anyone :).
Here is the video of the lawyer(Bedia Büyükgebiz) live vlogging from the location, which went viral: https://twitter.com/haskologlu/status/1624433879154102275
The official statement is that all these paperwork and test results are already digitised but the lawyers say that the originals still need to be kept around for some time and destroyed under a strict protocol so to ensure that the digitised versions are indeed faithful to the originals(running over the bulldozers over the building with the documents is not part of the protocol).
Also, the city still severely lacks heavy machinery for the rescue efforts and people find it suspicious why would the government would commission these to demolish a one story building, even if the building was damaged. Journalists on the ground say that they haven't heard of any other building being demolished for safety reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Turkey
In the same area of the earthquakes now (the size of the UK) there was an earthquake in 115 AD that killed 260 thousand people:
It's depressing/comforting to know that my town is not unique in this regard.
I have the impression that local power is always more corrupt than central/national power. Less scrutiny and more opportunity for doing dirt without getting caught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/526_Antioch_earthquake
(followed by a fire) that also reportedly killed 250 thousand. The two figures are close.
A lot of historically big numbers turn out to be greatly exaggerated, maybe as a part of the storytelling process. For example, some old books claimed the toll of the 1737 Calcutta (quake or cyclone) was around 300,000 - while there were no more than 10,000 residents at the time. https://rashidfaridi.com/2008/05/13/earthquakes-in-asia/
This is why all the building company CEOs will walk free because their lawyers can produce the paperwork that proves everything was above board. AKP is checkmate.
Quote: In Turkey [..] the government has provided periodic "construction amnesties" - effectively legal exemptions for the payment of a fee, for structures built without the required safety certificates. These have been passed since the 1960s (with the latest in 2018). [..]Up to 75,000 buildings across the affected earthquake zone in southern Turkey have been given construction amnesties[..]
> Construction amnesties, which allow owners to register unlicensed properties or ones that violate building codes in exchange for a fine, have made a bad situation much worse. Mr Erdogan’s government passed several such amnesties, the latest in 2018, ahead of general elections.
However, when it comes to earthquake standars over time it really gets even stranger. I live in a region in Germany that recently got an 'upgrade' on earth quake forces after recent surveys. However, regulators still do not enforce new standards. So my wife has to recommend all her customers to adopt new standards, but tells them in the same sentence that it is not yet required. With rising construction costs nobody choses to. So we are all waiting cynically for the predicted major earthquake so that we are on the same standard again. Some by design, some empirically proven.
That is the problem with how the rules are written. The rules should have a context to reasons why these particular rule was employed. I imagine something like an wiki page with lots of links.
I mean this is highlighting a problem. Could the rules have a heavily annotated and multi-layered version that shows the related precedents?
That's not to strawman, without regulations, the world would be an extremely unsafe place. Just keep rational about how far to push in the name of public safety. We can always do more, but at some point we completely stagnate any development what so ever. Everything is dangerous, the question really is quantifying and analyzing acceptable dangers.
The safest thing is to build absolutely nothing.
Absolutely true I'm guilty of binging a few youtube videos on aviation and engineering failures over the winter, as well as videos on road infrastructure (slowly, as a cyclist, I understand that motorists are not just idiots but idiots on roads built by idiots) and I'm pretty sure there are youtubers that produce content on construction failures that lead to this or that code. For example the Knickerbocker Theater was code compliant but it still failed and the codes updated afterwards, rescue operations were also a bit of a mess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4P7qHjp3nE or the collapse of a parking deck in Canada that also showed how important nearby rescue services are when salt has eaten through your concrete and steel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxLtWiJ8uVg or this building that had extra load added to the roof while the columns underneath were not built as intended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxLtWiJ8uVg
Maybe educating the future building owners with content like this will show then that there are a lot of dangers known and unknown?
Everyone - everyone - is certain that the codes are all overzealous and their little thing needs an exception. Politicians get elected promising to 'get rid of the red tape'. And then an event occurs and we learn why these building codes exist.
Like workplace safety rules, they are written in the blood of the dead.
But given time, the events the preceded their writing gets forgotten. I've never seen any of these buildings fall down, so why do we need so many rules to prevent buildings from falling down? They just make it more expensive! Those greedy bureaucrats and building officials just want to prevent development!