The plumbing systems in commercial buildings are not big enough to handle residents usage. Residents use more water and the outbound sewage systems need to be larger.
There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office.
History favors the bold, and code inspectors blabbering about "written in blood" don't see all the homeless people they kill via reduced access to housing.
I've seen plenty of artist collectives that manage it; on paper they are office/industrial but actually everyone lives there. Every once in awhile one burns down but the mortality rate isn't as high as living on the streets which is ultimately what happens to those on the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid when the ones higher up push the ones under them down a rung to snag housing.
For a lot of the office buildings I've been in, there aren't that many toilets per floor. Its also different when you've got some toilets that are often unused compared to people running laundry, cooking, bathing, etc. Very different demands on the plumbing system.
You also then had everything pretty much isolated to two rooms for an entire floor meanwhile now every unit is going to have a separate kitchen, a bathroom (or two, or three), a laundry room, etc.
And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
Ok, but some extra plumbing (and whatever sorts of engineering studies referred to) and electrical work surely can't as expensive as demolishing and rebuilding a whole building.
If it was just the plumbing, then maybe. But its not just the plumbing. Its the plumbing, the electrical, the AC/ventilation, fire codes, and so much more.
Not saying it can't ever be done, it really depends on the building. But its not necessarily a good assumption it can be done well in a cost-effective fashion.
But do you really have to cram in as many residents as you could with a purpose-built tenement? There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag. Intersperse flats with windowless storage units (you have a depth problem anyways), low density commercial use like workshops with live-by flats and so on. Large units designed to attract high squarefeet/low headcount tenants, not bunk bed families. Add regulation only as a fallback limiter. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
> There must be ways to keep headcount in the range the infrastructure can support and still provide a lot more housing than just leaving them as empty decaying offices owned by the last one holding the bag.
Demolishing the office building and building a residential building is more profitable often.
I mean, sure, you can just sell it as a unit for each floor. You then need to recoup all the costs of rebuilding against fewer people, so all the main area renovations and what not get more expensive and the monthly cost of building maintenance get spread across fewer and fewer tenants. But you've still got a problem of most of the rooms of your very expensive condo have zero natural light, its all practically ancient built stuff in terms of planned structure life, and you've got a very expensive monthly maintenance bill. Meanwhile your massive and dark unit with odd plumbing and low ceilings is competing in the market against units that were actually built for the purpose of people living in them, so while your unit is big and expensive to maintain they're some of the least desirable spots.
The economics just often work out a lot better to tear down the old structure and rebuild a new one more fit for purpose.
Sorry, I either totally misread your comment or was mentally replying to someone else when I wrote this.
Sure, you could just cram the residences to the edges and try to recoup the cost of the rest of the square footage for places that don't need natural light. But once again you've got issues with original designs and intents for the building. None of the plumbing is designed to be pushed to the edges, so you'll need to make massive changes to the structural integrity by drilling a bunch of new floor cores to do all the new plumbing work. You could rent the interior spaces as storage, but you'll probably quickly flood the market of storage units with the massive amount of square footage you'll be bringing.
Trying to have industrial in there as well is asking for problems. Trying to rent some 15th story small/medium interior unit as some kind of industrial workshop would be quite weird. What kind of industry would want a smaller interior space that probably can't support heavy equipment, has a limit to ceilings of ~10 or so feet, can't require odd ventilation or strange/additional fire suppression/separation requirements, probably has significant power limitations (in terms of industrial capacity, at least), noise limitations, difficulty getting much product in and out, etc? Stuff that the city is going to be OK zoning literally across the hall from people trying to live? And that you're going to find a number of these willing to pay a good bit for such a space to cover the maintenance costs? These buildings weren't built for industrial usages, they were built for office desks and couches. Maybe a few floors have been upgraded to handle additional weight to have datacenter kind of spaces, but definitely not most of the floors.
So then you're trying to spread the maintenance costs of this massive and old building across higher value residences and a lot of very low value storage/weird industrial tenants.
You can run drains out the side of the structure without drilling holes in the floor, same with electric, and even if by some insanity we say "whutabout the holes in the side" then you could even use a damn lift pump/macerator pump to pump it up and out through where a window was. For vents you can also use AAV instead of a traditional vent. If the residences are at the edges they should be able to pop right out and worse case you elevate the floor in the bathroom/kitchen under the plumbing appliances for the slope on the pipe as it exits. A vertical drain pipe isn't going to freeze (and even if it were, could be insulated and heated), and supply lines are such small holes as to not threaten structural integrity.
> And you're going to need a good bit of engineering studies done before you start cutting that many holes in the floor.
You can Swiss-cheese a pan and deck concrete floor with core-drilled holes, the important thing is GPDR scanning before coring to avoid the pre- or post-tension cables embedded in the concrete.
Artists are a shrinking population, I wonder if having most of the top floors (20 out of 30) converted to extremely large luxury apartments (5000sqft+) and only 'adding capacity'to plumbing and what not for the lower 10 floors, which would house smaller units, would be economically viable. Although actual luxury market requires high ceiling so probably wouldn't work out.
I'm sure many many people have thought of all sort of solutions as the value for finding some sort of solution is extremely high.
> There's already enough plumbing in there for a whole office to shit when they get to the office.
A 20,000 sq ft office tower floor will usually have a single set of restrooms and a couple of kitchen sinks, maybe a dishwasher, plus a couple 6-gallon or instahot water heaters. If you subdivide that floor into a dozen units, that’s 12 showers, 12 washers, 12 dishwashers, 12 toilets, 24 sinks, and 12 water heaters.
The riser and drain pipes aren’t big enough to handle residential needs.
That's not how the 'black market' ones I've seen operate. And I've seen a lot from when I visited the circuit of underground artist-related events when I lived in chicago. They are shockingly common in areas with extremely high rents and an oversupply of unused commercial space.
They might subdivide it 12 ways, but there is one shared kitchen for a whole floor and maybe 2 toilets, 2 sinks and the residents are going to the laundromats. They tend to put the shared amenities on the ground floor as much as possible because it is easiest to expand them there. It beats being homeless by a long shot.
For reference, when I hauled water, we used about 60 gallons a week for a family, or about 0.05% utilization of a 3" drain pipe for a single family. You do not need much water in order to be way way better off than being homeless; 5/gal a day of non-potable water and you're pretty much in luxury comparatively and a shit-ton of people can be putting that down a 3" or even 2" drain pipe before it causes problems. A 3" pipe is the minimum that would be serving a typical floor of a warehouse, so plenty enough for a constantly used couple of shared bathrooms with a shared kitchen. Honestly even splitting it 12 ways could be overcome with some technical ingenuity (electric lock-outs to prevent more than a few in use at once, and AAVs to prevent needing a bunch of new vents).
These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).
> These are all easily overcome problems for people utilizing an ounce of civil disobedience with regards to the code. And yes I have personally done all the design and plumbing and electric for multi-structure properties (though not the black market ones).
It didn’t work out so great in Oakland at the Ghost Ship, 36 people died in a similar arrangement.
Building code is written in blood, things are done a certain way for a reason. You may be morally or ethically against them but following code saves lives.
36 people dead is a rounding error compared to mortality from people on the streets due to lack of access to housing. Every time I bring up this topic, someone trots out the Ghost Ship like a broken record, ignoring what I said about the mortality rate of people on the streets because shit rolls downhill when people higher up the socio-economic pyramid go the next rung down in available housing. Bastiat has an excellent writing on this fallacious logic you use, titled "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen."
Not having housing didn't work out great for 700+ dead homeless people per year that are estimated to die of hypothermia.
The code inspectors have blood in their hands. You may be morally or ethically against bypassing the codes, but bypassing it can save lives.
Black market housing is done for a reason, a very good one, and one that saves lives. Fortunately where I live, I built a house without any inspections whatsoever, so none of the code psychopaths were even around to make their absurd case about the ghost ship, and that is the only reason why I was even able to afford to own a house.
An RV is just a nicer tent, it is not a house. If people won't transition to housing, then they need to leave SF. If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.
When properly accommodated, it's a nicer tent with electricity, AC, and an actual bed, kitchen, and bathroom. With tents you get dangerous hotplates/camping stoves and people pissing and shitting in streets instead of toilets. Some people really prefer the mobility, but most would happily transition to housing as soon it is made affordable/available. There are more vacant homes in SF than homeless people, and foreign investors buy up huge amounts of residential property and leave them empty.
I think most people wouldn't mind (as much) clean, functioning RVs. The people living like that are likely getting swept up in the backlash against the broken/unsafe RVs that cause a lot of problems for neighbors. This is anecdotal for sure, but the RVs near my neighborhood in San Jose are really rough. Missing windows, full of trash/vermin, and don't seem to have working facilities.
I don't have any idea what percentage of RVs fall into which camp, I just know that the bad ones are very visible.
Tents are safer and better in a bunch of different ways. Imagine if the tents had electrical systems like motorhomes do. Fire, environmental damage, crime, public costs, all favor cheap, safe disposable tents over motorhomes.
The answer isn’t motorhomes or tents, it’s better political leadership and a healthier less likely to fall into homelessness middle class.
> If they can not afford SF, then they need to leave SF and live somewhere else where they can.
To clarify: you believe that the cheapest available housing today should be used to determine if someone is allowed to live in SF? If not, how are you quantifying “can afford SF”?
If you won’t quantify your expectations, would you mind elaborating on what the minimum qualified definition is for you? In terms of what must be met, not what must not be met? I can agree it’s nice to not have folks living in tents and RVs.
We seem to be talking past one another for some reason. The bar is "is not living in a tent". It means living in a place that isn't a tent. We can rathole into how that wants to be defined exactly, and pick that apart, but that doesn't seems all that interesting to me but if you'd like to propose something we can iterate on specific wording as to what constitutes "living in a tent".
Still, the California building code 709b discusses sleeping and alludeds so a definition for bedroom, so going in that direction, in order to be not living in a tent, a person would need to have their own access to a legal bedroom, as defined by the building code. There is a $20k fine if people are sleeping in, eg, the twitter offices, which was not zoned for that.
No worries. I’m just wondering what you are expecting to constitute the minimum since the next logical step is to ask where the government should then draw the line on helping folks or essentially kicking them out of the city. Right now your definition lets folks lucky enough to have relatives with an extra couch stay while orphans would be gone at 18 just by dumb luck.
Oh. I wasn't the one saying we should kick people out who can't afford SF, I was just taking issue with "can afford to live in SF" as some undefinable standard. If I had my druthers, we'd subsidize and encourage building housing until the city looked like Hong Kong and everybody had places to live, but I'm not in charge of things.
No way. You need an immigration system that has a "try before you buy" aspect to it. Not all educated immigrates are going to like the US and are not going to be a fit for the US. It's not just about keeping out bad education, it's making sure that those who think they want to want to immigrate to the US want to be part of the US.
> Is a big problem for passenger trains in the US, freight has priority.
This simply not true. Federal Laws says that Passenger trains have priority but the law is never enforced. Freight traffic is suppose to take by-passes to let passenger traffic through and freight traffic is never suppose to block the line. However, again, the laws and rail rules are never enforced. Think about it, why would cargo have a higher priority than human traffic? Is cargo getting there an few hours later or earlier going to impact anything? With humans, it will totally impact their schedule and how often trains are used.
If the Department of Transportation wanted people to start taking trains again, they would come down hard of rail companies that slow down passenger traffic.
Freight doesn't generally use bypasses or sidings anymore. It's part of the "Precision Scheduled Railroading" movement to optimize operating ratio above all other concerns - mostly because freight train executives and investors believe that railroads are in long-term terminal decline and thus capex spending or going after new customers is a waste of time. (This is a bit glib but not that far from the truth).
Freight in the US optimizes for minimal crew hours. That means longer consists that no longer fit in sidings. Expanding sidings costs money and is thus verboten.
Even if the freight takes 3x as long to get somewhere they can have each crew take a leg then leave the train unattended. The railroad doesn't need to pay for overnight stays or overtime and only one or two crews are "active" in a given segment ever. Or to put it another way the limit is "we are paying for one crew on this segment of the line". Freight lines up on either side as that limit of 1xCrew shuttles whatever they can back and forth within that segment. Then you make the consists longer and longer to "buffer" the bottleneck.
I assume part of the "enforcement" issue is US DOT would need to order the railroad to back trains up or do other nonsensical things that would only create more chaos and delays because as I mentioned most consists can't fit on existing sidings anymore and AFAIK the law has no provision to order the railroads to extend the sidings nor order them to do the physically impossible.
> Think about it, why would cargo have a higher priority than human traffic?
My understanding was essentially it came down to who owned the tracks. More money in freight, more of it, hence priority given by private enterprise. The speculation is moot though.
My understanding is that most rail lines are privately owned. Is that incorrect as well?
> But a Bao-feng handheld that costs around $40 or so can work the local repeaters on 2m or 70cm and is a fine way to get started, learn the lingo, etc.
Baofeng makes a $25 radio that works on 2m/70cm and with repeaters. If you live in a place where there are hurricanes/earthquakes, there is no excuse to not have one charged up and ready to go. Getting the basic ham radio license is easy.
How does ham compare to meshtastic in a real emergency? Meshtastic has the advantage that it's license free and you don't have to try to convince people to spend days studying for it.
I have a license and a baofeng, but I don't know much of anything practical about emergency communications.
In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license. But it’s easier to use when you’ve had the practice and aren’t fumbling around learning about offsets and CTCSS tones. Or even better, when you have the repeaters preprogrammed into your radio.
Meshtastic is awesome, I have two T-echos. But it doesn’t compare to being able to whip out a handheld radio, tune into a nearby repeater and dial out with EchoLink to check in with my partner when I’m hiking.
Pre-COVID, our office building in Tokyo organized a disaster-preparation day every year. This was run by the building management team, which politely informed every corporate tenant in the office section that, yes, they would be participating.
Sure, we all knew when the drill would be so we could adjust our schedules, but
the actual alarms did sound, and the entire building evacuated, which included climbing down something like fifty flights of stairs with your emergency bag -- mandated by law in Japan -- in-hand, plus (optionally) using a fire extinguisher on a pretend fire after you got outside.
Sure, the extinguishers were just pressurized water, and you were spraying at a metal target, but you still had to pull the pin, squeeze, and aim, and they were at full pressure.
Was a good reminder that it's way better to have your first experience with stuff like a fire extinguisher happen under controlled conditions, as opposed to having to figure things out before your kitchen fire gets out-of-hand and burns down the house.
Same goes for radio, changing tires on a car with the provided jack, and so on.
Preparedness is 90% "knowing what to do" and 10% "having the right tools for the job".
“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” Reading about it generates expectations, and they can be deadly.
On average we fall to the level of our training, but then there's moment to moment variation because of "human error" which has little to do with lack of skill or training, and more to do with individual and situational factors.
Training is critical, but even then you can still fail, which is why layers of backups are great.
For a lot of us, skill might never be as reliable as other layers, but it's generally different from other layers making it less likely to fail at the same time because of the same cause.
Crew Resource Management has a lot of great insights.
> In an emergency you can make use of anything, including a radio without an amateur radio license.
Just to clarify: the law in the US (47 CFR § 97.403) says that you can use amateur radio frequencies without a license, or unlicensed frequencies, for: "essential communication needs in connection with the immediate safety of human life and immediate protection of property when normal communication systems are not available". That's much narrower than just "in an emergency".
And if you try to use ham radio equipment without knowing what you're doing, there's a risk that you'll interfere with other amateur or non-amateur users who are coordinating their own emergency response.
Thank you for the clarification. I wanted my explanation to be generic enough to apply to any jurisdiction. For example, I’m in Canada where the regulations are differently worded but have a similar effect.
It's vastly better, if only because there are more ham radio users geared up, charged, and ready to listen and reply. Meshtastic is super cool and I have nothing bad to say about it. If my life were on the line, I'd much rather have a cheap Baofeng.
This is the correct answer. I have my license and help with Skywarn when I can in my area, also play around with meshtastic. The fact is that meshtastic is pretty cool, but the ham radio community has been around for a century, is far better organized and entrenched with various services, etc. There is far more trust and reliability there.
I look at it this way; meshtastic is for fun, but ham radio is for real work where results carry more weight.
Meshtastic is also still very much "beta" quality. Unless you spend a bit of time working with it, messing with different radios and antennas, you can end up with a setup that can't get much range at all, negating one of the main features of the mesh.
Though just buying a Baofeng can lead to similar results, as it's not that amazing at reception. In my testing I've only been able to get a good signal within a few hundred meters, which might not be enough to hit an area repeater except in ideal conditions.
Either way, having the knowledge and practice going into an emergency is much more helpful than just the equipment!
A lot of these medicines that require patients to inject themselves come in a self administrating auto-injector. There are really simple to use, I mean literally anyone can inject themselves, then throw the one-use auto-injector out.
Two things I took away from visiting Pompeii that I did not know from reading books and watch History Channel videos. Like you said, Pompeii was pretty large and it was covered with a lot of pumice and ash. There are a couple of places where the pumice and ash is 30 - 40 feet above the houses and all of that fell within a couple of days.
