Who gives bigger campaign contributions? The poor, or the rich?
Now, who do you think the major parties give anything resembling a damn about?
Especially when everyone is already expecting the market to collapse messily, and you can use that mess to hide your crimes long enough to get away clean and free?
Both stories make the point the money doesnât really make sense in the individual homes - where youâre losing precious square footage, the thing youâre desperately trying to gain. Leaving equipment only makes sense in a larger, commercial operation.
DailyMail:
âHowever, a top London builder has said that the claims are rubbish - and that the economics donât stack up because London floorspace is so valuable.â
HuffPost:
âthese are major jobs where it makes economic sense - otherwise noâ
I see many, many, mini diggers for sale under ten thousand yoyos in Ireland, probably cheaper a couple of years ago but most people have sold their exces plant at this stage.
How would you lose floor space? The thing digs itself a further hole inside the excavation and you drive it in and pour your concrete foundations on top. Simples.
The only question is: how many jobs is it going to cost ten grand to get the thing out with a crane? Donât forget that it will be the contractor who makes that decision, that is if the owner even letâs them bury the yoke in the ground underneath his new basement. I doubt itâs that common, not because of the cost, but more because itâs rarely likely to be a huge difference either way and itâs rarely likely the owner will give a fuck about the contractorâs bottom line but will be far more likely to say âI say, get that blasted JCB out of my basement or I will sueâ.
Maybe Iâm just utterly ignorant about construction techniques, but the place where this story starts to leave me behind is with the concept of adding a basement or a subbasement to an existing property. How exactly does that work? Wouldnât you compromise the foundation? How do you get the excavator under there in the first place. I just canât picture it.
Yes, but that cavity and the fill would have to show up in the plans and be engineered for (otherwise it makes sense for the contractor to skimp down to nothing on that feature and just dumping regular fill over the exca and hoping no settling takes place in that portion of the ground). Of course, there would also need to be a note in the environmental impact report. So yeah, itâs something that would have to be on record.
Just like rebuilding an old, busted-up foundation. Place beams under the house, jack it up, excavate and construct underneath until you are ready to drop the house back down on the brand-new-foundation/underground-Dr.-No-fortress.
Iâm not sure that âhaving to be on recordâ is really all that big a deal. We are talking domestic builds here. Nod. Wink. I donât see whatâs in it for the owner, but I donât see it as being an unlikely solution to, what I imagine is, a relatively unlikely set of circumstances.
As for engineering? Most builders are pretty happy to substitute concrete when in doubt.
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I donât quite get the âsquare footageâ argument - if the excavators are buried below the lowest floor level, as the article claimed, they arenât taking away any floor space.
Unless the original articleâs author was just fabricating the story out of whole cloth, they were told of the practice by developers who actually have done this, so although the claim that this is now âstandard practiceâ doesnât seem at all credible, itâs presumably being done by some developers, and they have some economic justification for it.
Especially at the bottom of the hole. But yes, very unlikely all around, just not for the reason of preciousness of machinery. And donât underestimate the anal retentiveness of engineers and the kind of people who peruse records at the planning office. Sloppy operating practices happen in spite of those checks, but only in spite.
Obviously. But the three major parties have recently discovered courtesy of UKIP that campaign contributions go only so far when your policies and leaders alienate your actual voters. Pity it took a party of racists and fascists to point this out.
Theyâre called iceberg homes. I thought they were being cracked down on already.
Not only that, youâd be paying for the time to cut away the digger grave and paying for the fill. Thereâs more:
Let me explain the âlostâ floor space this way: A digger (even a small one) would take up about a 10âx10â unbuildable area when buried, leveled and filled (remember you have to hide it). The diggers, in good repair, conservatively cost around ÂŁ30,000. So you lose ÂŁ30,000 immediately, but what else does it cost you?
The houses cost around ÂŁ8,000/sq ft, so in 100 square feet (10âx10â), youâre looking at ÂŁ80,000 worth of real estate! Making the diggers worth less in the equation actually makes it worse (a bigger possible loss) to bury them in an already excavated area under the home. The land itself has that much value.
Any time you open up a basement in a home, youâre seeking to gain the most square footage possible - people hunt for inches! The reason people are even building down in London is that local regs wonât allow them to build up. To gain square footage, and thus capitalize on their investments, theyâre building down. One site I found listed a 50 meter crane at ÂŁ400/day. Highest cost I found was ÂŁ2,000. Couldnât find the road closure cost, but I know itâs a real thing (traffic congestion is a problem). Even so, I doubt the total is over ÂŁ110,000, the combined cost of the digger and lost possible basement room.
It looks like other affluent neighbors, who truly are in residence, have had their fill of part-time owners buying in just to capitalize on the bubble. They decided to get vocal about the physical damage that the retrofits were causing. Applications are apparently being observed with a more critical eye. According to the DailyMail, âOver the last five years, there have been 800 planning applications for basements in Kensington and Chelsea alone.â
Hereâs a more thorough article that discusses the numbers, and just what people are putting down there!
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I think that was the article I originally saw⌠via William Gibson.
Edit: no, it was this one.
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just as the boring machines that excavated the Channel Tunnel were abandoned beneath the passage they had just created
Just because of a personality issue, thatâs still no reason to just ditch them there.
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Londoncraft with excess fatty lifts installed (3 tons sir, please leave your lunch for the next ride) is something indeed. Anyone whoâs anyone is replicating Lara Croft subway levels and such in sparesies. Open world, my geotechnical redundanciesâ hedge rate.
Lesson: Always keep an anecdote handy when traveling the London underground.
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i STILL read this to my kiddo. sometimes he reads it to me. but yes. steamshovels, and convert them to home heaters. basemnts, bubbles, all waste
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âŚand when Albionâs need is greatest, they shall rise again.
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