Joe Cohen

I just pulled my winter coat that I haven't needed since 2021 out of storage, and there were six masks in its pockets.

My other winter coat had a concert ticket from 2014 in the pocket

The head of LADWP has resigned to "lead an effort to modernize Puerto Rico's power grid"

Contacting their US Representative might be a pathway to try.

While, yes, LA should enforce its home-sharing ordinance, this is a ridiculous analysis... If LA started fining illegal hosts, they'd stop operating, not continue to operate and pay the fine month after month.

I feel like it wouldn't be difficult to engineer a system that works for this?

Also: there should be some sort of hook system that can connect to the walls of the stairwell so that the hose doesn't block evacuating residents

Isn't that a huge oversight? Like we talk on and on about ensuring smoke doesn't enter the stairwell, and then the first think FD's do is compromise the stairwell.

Either they should wait until everyone's evacuated to start water operations, or there should be a better way to pass the hose in

One of my big take-aways from this video is that it doesn't make sense that the standpipe is in the stairs.

Do you know why it is in the stairs rather than the hallway?

José Torero (renowned academic fire engineers) argues that the UK’s post-Grenfell two-stair requirement is ill-conceived and necessitates clarification about how to act in fires. But in the US, we’ve had these rules for generations and never clarified! www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/opinion...

Another thing with this video is that it shows incredibly bad firefighter practices:

- they didn’t do anything to prevent the hose from impairing egress and creating a massively-dangerous tripping hazard
-they left the stair door open to the floor with the fire, risking smoke getting into stairs

YouTube video by San José Fire Department Ingress of Firefighters conducting fire operations during the egress of building occupants

San Jose FD, for the CAL FIRE single-stair report, did a simulation of evacuation from a building, both in a stairway segregated from firefighters going up and then shared. It was an interesting Rohrschach test for the group – the FDs thought it looked really bad, the others thought it was fine.

Firefighters are terrible at evaluating risk:

- Requiring all passengers in cars to wear helmets: would save 350 lives a year in California

- Requiring small apartment buildings to have a second staircase: saves zero lives a year in California

Do commercial projects ever use GOV code section 65915.7, which gives them 20% extra height and 20% extra FAR if they pay to build an affordable housing project?

I somehow never knew this provision existed.

Twitter has become useless.

How is it that I had to learn Rick Caruso is rumored to be buying Television City from TIKTOK!

Yep

There’s a lot wrong with this report: their methods of analyzing safety are poor: they don’t attempt to quantify the safety benefits of dual-stair reqs. But the most galling? A 7-12.5% cost savings is cited as meager.

10% decrease in hard costs would build A LOT of of housing in this state!

The report models evacuation times for small floor plate buildings with 1 stair vs 2, finding that evacuating with 2 stairs is faster.

Notably, it does NOT model evacuation times for the much larger floor plate buildings with 2 stairs that are allowed under current law for comparison, which is odd!

The FPEs did it the way I thought it should be done for the MN study, and came to the conclusion that seven stories and 6,000 sq. ft. per floor puts fewer people at risk in case of catastrophic failures than a big double-loaded corridor building www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

We argued a bunch over this in the work group. I said we need to compare small single-stair buildings to large two-stair buildings, since those are the worst-case scenarios under current/proposed codes. FD objection was that I was putting my thumb on the scales, and that’s apples to oranges.

How badly researched is the CA State Fire Marshal's report on single stair buildings?

It says that a 107' ladder that can reach 103' in height can at best reach the roof of a 7-story building, apparently thinking apartment buildings typically have 15' ceilings 🤦

Yes!

A huge gap in CA law:

There's no current mechanism to dismiss clearly-frivolous lawsuits against housing projects. You have to take it all the way through trial, which may take years

Even worse, the NIMBYs don't need to pay the developer's legal fees once they inevitably lose.

(2/2)

I just learned about a galling new approach in the NIMBY toolbox:

File a meritless lawsuit against projects claiming a zoning code violation. It technically doesn't stop the project, but banks won't issue a construction loan if there's active litigation

(1/2)

Los Angeles

@stephenjacobsmith.com Am I misreading this, or are they assuming an average floor-to-floor height of almost 15 feet?

In short:

1) different areas are included/excluded
2) RFAR calculates FAR based on total lot area, whereas FAR calculates based on "buildable" lot areas (except for commercial-zoned parcels, where you can use total area)

In theory, it'd be possible in LA to have a building across three lots where FAR is measured differently on each third of the building.

Don't you just love when Floor Area Ratio is measured differently on each half of a building?

What makes this even more ridiculous is that the parcel actually had a multifamily General Plan land-use designation.

The zoning was literally "wrong."

The city lost a landmark court case on this issue all the way back in 1982!

Why did LA fight this project in court?

Surrounded by apartments, a hotel, & a bank, one of its parcels is zoned Suburban Agricultural

Despite state law saying they had to approve it, LA wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars to "protect" the RA/R1 zoning