Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/10/railway-workers-built-secret-apartments-in-train-stations.html
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I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess they didn’t get permits for any of their construction, and didn’t comply with local, or probably any, building codes. These codes and permitting processes exist for a reason. We need housing to not only be affordable, but safe. I’m sure that $900,000 could be brought down a lot if we just eliminated building codes, but I don’t think we want to do that.
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The binary choice posed by “$900,000 could be brought down a lot if we just eliminated building codes” is the thing, though. Like the choice is between million-dollar affordable housing and living in the Primitive Technology YouTube channel.
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It was 3,000 of funds on the books that went missing, but it was entirely likely that other resources that weren’t missed found their way into these apartments. Besides their own labor, they could have misled other workers into contributing their efforts to the apartments, and “surplus” building materials were likely incorporated into it as well.
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It’s still a pretty significant delta; but (as best I can tell from the article) the price quoted for the illicit apartments was purely the sticker price of the modifications; with the malefactors’ project management valued at zero; and the offices they appropriated also not included in the price.
Even if you skip code compliance and permitting, new builds where you are paying your project managers and the people doing the design are presumably going to run substantially more than relatively light-touch renovations where the project managers are carefully dodging credit for their role.
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It’s wrong, I’m glad they were caught and an end was put to this.
It is also kind of awesome, and I’m not all that mad.
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Yeah, where i lived in WV, there were no building codes outside the city limits. Some of what went up out there was flat out horrifying. Every now and then, a structure would collapse, taking the occupants with it. We had one guy build a 7 story palace up the side of a gully. It was really impressive, until it all fell in. Not so great then.
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Plus they weren’t actually “building” any new structures, they were converting existing office spaces into unauthorized housing. So apples and oranges, really.
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I mean, the Mercury News article included the following link: (Which was weirdly just the url, no link or surrounding text.)
Any explanation why it has to cost >$900K is going to have to explain why that has changed so much since 2019:
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Corporate greed.
“But the supply chain disruptions from the pandemic!” Um, that might explain the bumps from 20-21 and 21-22. the 22-23 jump? CORPORATE GREED.
And as far as building codes? There for a REASON, just like the National Electric Code, the NFPA codes, etc.
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And then there was this in Alberta - we don’t need building permits, we’re the gdamn Government and no one needs to know.
The space was later used by Government ministers to get together for drinks and party during the Covid lockdown restrictions… claiming once again that the rules don’t apply to them.
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It was more than $3k. Says so in the article… $50k.
They just had to limit individual receipts to $3k. This is a common practice in purchasing by not wasting the bean counters time in micromanaging day to day purchases to the penny. The trick is that employees abuse these limits by instead submitting multiple receipts that are all just under said limit.
But yes, the true cost is definitely more.
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$50k to add a bathroom and kitchenette inside an existing structure seems pretty much on the nose, if not a bit pricey. They didn’t even need to do the demo to get rid of existing stuff, like in normal kitchen/bath renovations.
The fact that it costs 18 times more to build a complete unit of affordable housing from scratch, including surveys, permits, foundation work, wiring and plumbing from scratch, etc., doesn’t really seem that crazy.
It still seems insanely expensive, but the ratio when considering the whole scope doesn’t seem that wild.
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We had a house collapse 5 doors up from me last August. Fortunately nobody was injured, but there was a gas leak and a watermain break. He put on a second storey on a bungalow, then started digging out the basement, without proper footings/underpinning. It sounded like an earthquake when it came down. And there is some question as to how this got past the building inspectors.
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So does Caltrans now rent those apartments out at market rates or are they now a pied-á-terre for managers?
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They could have just had a blow-up mattress and bought a shower head that attached to the mop closets’ faucet, and used the station’s bathroom and never been caught.
But spending 50k of taxpayer money to make it all plush was what eventually got them found out.
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I’m more worried about corporations seeing this as opportunity to extract more from workers. Can’t escape from work by going home if you live at work.
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Well, you don’t want it to fall down like some unpermitted West Virginia shack, do you? Building codes, written in blood!
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A violation of codes nonetheless.
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Yes, they are there for a reason. But the other way that you can tell that the cost increase isn’t because of the building codes is that the cost changed but the building codes didn’t. (At least, as far as I know. Presumably the articles would have mentioned this important fact, I hope.)
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