341–350 of 562 posts
European here. I can't even put to words my embafflement upon having learnt that you US folks need two staircases.
It's even worse in Canada. You need a 2nd staircase for a multi-unit home that's over 2 storeys. If it weren't for the "multi-unit" part, there would be a lot of houses that would need to be built with a 2nd stair.
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You're looking at it the wrong way. They're not looking at the hypothetical improvements and charging as if you built them. They're saying "this land could reasonably support a skyscraper, therefore it is very valuable land".
On the other hand, I would say, "this land has very high taxes compared to its price; therefore it's not very valuable land." If you implement a land value tax, as I understand it, the parking lot and the skyscraper next to it should be taxed the same if they have the same footprint. All things being equal, that means a very large tax burden for the parking lot owner, and that certainly is an incentive to transfer it…
Lower than what? The price it would have had without a tax? Sure, but the same applies to the lot with the skyscraper. Increased land taxes will push down land prices, whether it's a land value tax or not. That doesn't seem like a fundamental issue with the idea.
> And once I've seen that under a LVT, the parking lot has no or little value, because it can't be sold for much money
Why can't it?
It's always possible to set taxes so high on an item that it's worthless, but I don't think that's inherently part of the LVT proposition.
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> Our current housing emergency happening everywhere is a pretty good indicator that we should be much more aggressive about trimming back the regulatory state which has ossified our cities. That isn't true though. Our housing emergency is limited to places that are growing and thriving. There isn't a housing emergency in Detroit or much of the midwest for example, just not many are thrilled about moving to those pla…
Those places that don't have housing emergencies generally have just as bad regulations, and would have the same problems the instant they became appealing enough to move there. Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.
If American population was equalized across these other cities, there would be less pressure on the few hot places everyone wants to move now, since our population isn't growing so much these days.
> Eventually you run out of built out sprawl.
Manhattan is not a sprawl and a very desirable place to live, with super high rents to boot. Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, and even Tokyo are the same, so I'm not sure what you are trying to claim here. Out of all those, only Tokyo does well, but that wasn't the case in the 80s and is on the basis of a moribund economy and a not growing national population (one wonders when Seoul and SH will follow). IF you want to solve your housing emergency, limit growth in some way (or at least, make sure residents don't have as much money to bid up housing).
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The intention of the double stairwell requirement, is that you are not supposed to have your access point to the stairwell by an obstruction, and there should be a maximum access time to the stairwell. One notable requirement of single-stair buildings where they are legal in the US, is that 1. the height is generally determined by the height of the fire ladders available, providing a second means of egress 2. the sin…
> 1. the height is generally determined by the height of the fire ladders available, providing a second means of egress This is an interesting requirement and makes me wonder if some of the need for two staircases comes from the proximity - or lack thereof - to fire services. I'd be sitting in a burning home for a long time if I had to wait for a fire ladder.
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>Most of those flats have large balconies on the back... with a staircase. It sounds like you're describing an external staircase - loosely speaking a fire escape. I could be wrong though, I'm not sure. The article was discussing the requirement for _fully enclosed_ internal staircases, which is different.
I mean, yes, legally, it's a fire escape. But, there's a full size door leading out to it, it's typically made of treated wood, and the staircase is a normal wood staircase, not some rickety metal thing. These also have the added bonus of being generally a nicer staircase than the one that's actually built into the house. The interior, retrofitted staircases tend to be narrow with lots of awkward, angled steps.
Per the article, the latest IBC codes seem to say each stairwell must be fully protected/enclosed and the old external ones are insufficient. I used to live in a building with something similar and if yours is like mine then I doubt it meets the latest 2nd stairwell requirements.
(Which is a shame since I agree those backyard stairwells are lovely, and landlords will be even less likely to build them if they have to build 2 internal ones already. Of course if those stairwells increase property value/rent revenue, then that could incentivize them anyway)
But why take Barcelona as an example? These superblocks are horrible. Barcelona is noisy, stressful and impersonate (plus there are shitloads of pickpockets and serious issues between independentists and nationalists).
There's a middle ground between one house per family and these fugly superblocks.
You know why people like me suffocate so much in Barcelona? Because Franco (a dictator) allowed the Comarcal plan: cheap housing and allowing buildings to become much higher. And unsurprisingly it all turned to shit.
Superblocks came much later and were an answer to that past SNAFU where these high, gigantic blocks created an unlivable city. Superblocks are at best a band aid which doesn't fix Barcelona's root issue: these blocks (no matter if they're grouped by 9 in superblocks) are simply completely oppressive.
Where I live (another EU country) all the buildings are semi-detached (so it's always two buildings together), four stories / eight apartments per building. So sixteen families for two "attached buildings". And, contrarily to Barcelona, people can breathe here. There's five times two attached buildings, disposed in an "U" shape. So it's open (not closed like these fugly blocks in Barcelona). There's a shared park and below the buildings are the parking spaces (all shared). There are I take it about 80 apartments altogether. Next block: repeat something similar. But there's room. It's not suffocating. It's not alienating.
And all these blocks are facing a "Natura 2000" protected forest: nothing shall ever be constructed there. Nature: I'm sure some city planners have at least heard the word "nature".
You know what I did today? I didn't use the car. I left my single-stair multifamily and went for a walk in that forest, with my family, walking in the snow (there's been a snowstorm last night).
Explain me, when I'm in block 298 in superblock XKY, surrounded by countless superblocks, how do I get to nature?
I mean, yeah: it's nice to try to fix housing. But it's 2024 and by now people have figured out better arrangements than those created under a dictator in Spain.
The Boston triple decker should be the standard home of North America and nobody can tell me otherwise.
There are also double triple-deckers (six units)- the stairs are shared by two triple-deckers sharing a common wall. Most of these are side by side, but in Worcester, there are also front / back ones like this (134 Elm St.):
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2661816,-71.8159232,3a,75y,1...
or with turrets:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2662587,-71.8167573,3a,75y,2...
The stairs are definitely shared in the side-by-side ones, not sure how it works in these.
So I used to rent in a 10-unit five story brick and wood building with front and back stairs, so I question a bit that the two stair requirement is such a big deal. This building had a central open area, and an old (broken) cage style elevator. Something like this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Taboo+Beauty+Salon/@42.264...
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Wood captures carbon within it and has minimal energy cost compared to steel, glass and brick. Lumber can also be regrown. So highly sustainable from a global warming perspective at least.
Steel can be recycled. And we are sitting on a giant ball of matter, so making more bricks or glass is easy. (Glass can be recycled, but it's not really worth it.) You are right that wood captures carbon. But you have to think about the opportunity costs: the same land that you use to slowly grow your wood could be used to eg run wind turbines or solar panels to replace fossil fuels. (You could also stick a nuclear p…
Perhaps this is a perspective thing?
Take one state in the western US that happens to have farmed timber, PV, and turbines: Oregon. Slightly larger than the United Kingdom, 6% of the population. There's not even a tiny amount of opportunity cost being lost by farming timber.
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Side setbacks absolutely have an effect on fire safety (a greater distance gives less propensity to ignite the neighboring building and provides access with which to fight the original structure fire). Front setbacks and lot area coverage ratios have a more minor version of this same effect from fires across the street. It takes a pretty good sized fire to ignite the building across a street, but as density increases…
Ya. My setback is 3 feet, definitely just a margin for fire safety. I wanted to put an awning in but couldn't because it would be too close to the fence of my property boundary (I live in a town home that abuses the 3 foot setback to maximize living space).
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Grenfell is what happens when building regulations are poorly enforced. In principle, each apartment in Grenfell should have been able to burn out completely while the neighbouring units were untouched, so there was no need for a second stair as any evacuation would have been limited to units adjacent rather than the entire population. What actually happened is that years of neglect had seen firebreaks and bulkheads…
Keep in mind that Grenfell was the responsibility of the local council. It was not run by eg a multinational corporation, which usually have better management and a commercial reputation to defend (and deep pockets to go after in a law suit). Big business gets a lot of flak, but they are honestly better on average than small businesses and many local governments institutions.
The crux appears to be adequate resources to enforce standards
> a commercial reputation to defend (and deep pockets to go after in a law suit).
Meanwhile, in "the real world" sufficiently large businesses are routinely silo'd into seperate sub companies and those that are associated with disaster, product liability, deaths, etc are often mysteriously bankrupt or with insufficient funds to meet penalties of pennies on the dollar.