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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article but the last paragraph was just wrong. Implying that the public were being irrational for not buying apartments in the building, when the engineers said it was safe is incorrect. The engineers said it is currently safe but it was sinking so the safety would have to be periodically re-evaluated in the future. When you are buying an apartment, the value you get is not only its current value of living in it, but the ability to live in it for many years in the future and the ability to sell it or give it to your kids some time in the distant future.

Considering the crazy SF prices, especially for new condo developments, the future is especially important when buying an apartment in SF.

So it is perfectly rational for people to refuse to buy based on an engineering statement that the building is safe but may not be safe a couple of years from now.

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Nevermind the fact that the sinking was already three times worse or more what the same engineers that are assuring it is safe said it would do. Doesn't instill a lot of confidence in your future predictions when your past ones have been so completely wrong.

I'm not buying the "we didn't know people would build and drill nearby" argument. It's downtown San Francisco for God's sake.

> Nevermind the fact that the sinking was already three times worse or more what the same engineers that are assuring it is safe said it would do.

It's not the same engineers. The first ones may well be wrong and the later ones right.

But how would anyone know which engineers would be guaranteed to be right? Who is to say any engineers would be for sure going to be right ahead of time, given how little we know?

Maybe! Or they could both be wrong. If you'd like to bet that it's only one set of engineers, you can get in on the action for $0.7 - $3.4 million dollars: https://www.sanfranciscocondomania.com/condos/MILLENNIUM-TOW...

But given that most people buying a home are looking for a low-risk proposition, I get why prices dropped. Especially people buying condos; a big part of the point is that a lot of the hassles are taken care of for you.

> Especially people buying condos; a big part of the point is that a lot of the hassles are taken care of for you.

I sometimes wonder about that. For what it costs in ongoing condo fees, you could pay someone to provide exactly the same level of worry-free maintenance on a regular house.

The part that's worrying is the catastrophic cases. I had complex roof leak and while I had to yell and scream and threaten legal action, eventually the management company fixed it; my friend who had a similar problem in his house ended up wiping out his savings replacing the roof.

Well, that probably wasn't necessary. That's basically what home equity loans were supposed to be for, back before people started treating their houses as ATMs.

I used mine as a way to deposit, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Banks have been pushing hard for people to mortgage against the property gain. It is easy to blame 'people' but banks were absolutely in on this and a major driver.

He had the savings available (he'd been planning on retiring the next year), so I don't think getting a loan and keeping the savings would have made him any better off.

I believe the idea is, if you secure the loan against your house, and your house is beyond repair, you can default on the loan, surrender your house, and still have your savings.

Though I'm skeptical of the terms you'd get on a loan secured by a badly damaged home.

Well you're out the value of your house in that case, so I don't think that leaves you any better off. A loan might let you smooth out a sudden big expense, but it's not going to make it go away.

If a five-figure roof replacement wiped out his savings, how was he planning to pay for things in retirement?

Sell the house? I think that's a pretty common 'strategy', at this point.

And live..where?

Plus, if you sell the house with a bad roof, a smart buyer would insist on paying market value minus cost of roof replacement. If you replace roof, you’ll get market value. Either way, you’re going to lose the roof replacement cost.

I don't know all the details of his finances, but he'd worked in government all his life and had a pretty good pension. He also moved out of the city to a lower cost of living area, although I don't know whether that was in his original plan or not.

Ah, some government pensions are pretty generous, that makes sense.

I can see that happening, but only when people don't save for such an eventuality. I was talking with a friend of mine a couple weeks ago and found out that his monthly condo fee is $1000. He spends $12K a year investing in the maintenance of the building. If a homeowner saves that same $1000/month into a maintenance account, they can put a very nice roof on their house every couple years. But roofs usually last 20+ years.

I certainly wouldn't pay $1k/month, lol. I'm sure there are bad deals out there, but the fundamental idea still seems sound, similar to insurance - pay a bit more on average in exchange for getting rid of the tail risk. If you rely on your own maintenance fund, you have to cover the whole of the worst case on your own; pooling that risk should make it cheaper.

You could. At the same time, a new construction townhouse (and maybe even SFH) there is extremely limited maintenance work needed.

Plus, you don't need to be concerned with a HOA saying you can't rent your place out on whatever platform you choose.

Single family home and townhome HOA can, and often do restrict rentals. And short term rentals are restricted city wide

condo fees also cover walls out insurance, many utilities, neighborhood upkeep, etc. given you're already paying these yourself in SFH, it's not quite apples to apples to say full HOA fees would be ON TOP of all of that.

i'd subtract whatever your water/trash/sewage bills are from "typical" HOA rates in your area, and subtract typical difference in home vs HO6 insurance rates, then get to net to compare.

Bur another (third?) set of engineers was also wrong, not anticipating the impact that their work to fix the situation would have on actually accelerating the problem.

It seems this is a chaotic environment that may defy the ability of experts to make accurate predictions.

  > Bur another (third?) set of engineers was also wrong, not anticipating the impact that their work to fix the situation would have on actually accelerating the problem.

The leaning tower of Pisa has a similar history: most attempts at straightening the tower only made it worse. I've heard this about another leaning building, also in Europe I believe, but I cannot remember where.

Big Ben of London.

https://blog.architizer.com/inspiration/collections/ten-famo...

Thank you!

it's almost like humans don't know everything and are still learning.

and/or, details about the soil layer topology which weren't known when the building was built now are known.

Then, there is

"By that time, the building had settled another inch and was out-of-plumb by more than a foot or 30 centimeters. That’s not something you could notice by eye and was probably only discernible to the most perceptive residents, but it’s well beyond the 6 inches allowed by the building code."

Twice the amount allowed by the building code sounds like a problem.

That would depend on how cautious the building code was in this case.

I find it strange that it would be quoted in a distance and not an angle. If at the time of writing, nobody anticipated a building this tall, the 6 inches might be very conservative.

Inches out of plumb are way easier to measure.

That's fine, since the height is well-known, you can convert that to an angle using nothing more than some high school trigonometry.

If the idea is to keep taller buildings straighter, then it makes sense. And that might be an important engineering consideration, considering that a taller building has more leverage.

Actually we use horizontal offset because it is more intuitive. Angles are deceptive for very tall buildings. You end up with a tiny angle eg 0.1deg that it sounds too small.

Also what people don't realize that the swing at the top floor of such a tall building due to wind may be actually about also another foot at worst case.

It's usually proscribed in terms of inches per 100 feet of height.

For things like wind deflection, more than 2" per 100 feet is considered excessive.

> I'm not buying the "we didn't know people would build and drill nearby" argument. It's downtown San Francisco for God's sake.

Downtown San Francisco is NIMBY central, and it is quite surprising people were actually able to build something new there. It's a reasonable assumption that the zoning etc gridlock continues, and very little new construction happens nearby.

Actually, that neighborhood of SF is one of the very very few parts of the Bay Area that are not NIMBY central.

Grady Hillhouse is (per his /about page) a professional civil engineer. He just did a YouTube video on a screw-up that has launched a fleet of big-money lawsuits. He has a wife and little kid. If he is making sure that he won't be the target of any deep-pocketed legal action...that sounds pretty rational to me.

Also, I've noticed that we (computer professionals here on HN, roughly) don't always think that the general public is particularly rational in their choices about computers. Perhaps most professional civil engineers have similar feelings about the public being rational in their own area of expertise?

> Also, I've noticed that we (computer professionals here on HN, roughly) don't always think that the general public is particularly rational in their choices about computers.

Hah, how’s that for an understatement. Most devs definitely see the general public much as Joe Wilkinson sees Fabio.

After the article about how moving the mouse around actually made Windows 95 load faster[0], and modern computers that do irritate users by changing settings on their own, I would say that engineers should probably listen to users more often.

0. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...

From my limited experience Civil Engineers tend to find the public frustratingly shortsighted - although that was water infastructure which yeah, is underinvested as evidenced by the lead stories, let alone the taste.

Yeah this topic is demonstrated in the UK. Long story short the UK failed to regulate building materials, resulting in lots of buildings being clad with inappropriate materials (really long story). A building burned to the ground (Grenfell) killing people. Now there are buildings all across the country with these unsafe materials, and they need to be replaced. There's a huge argument about who should pay - the government? It's their failure to regulate. The builders? They're ultimately responsible for what they built - but would go bankrupt immediately rather than pay? Individual owners? It's their property - but the costs are enormous, and they were sold something with the expectation it would be safe.

So whilst they try and determine who pays, these properties are now basically worthless, banks won't give mortgages, no one will buy them.

I'd say it's the builders' fault, but the lack of capital requirements are the governments fault. The gov should cover bankrupted build firms.

I very aggressively abridged that story, but the builders bought cladding material that suppliers told them conformed to the appropriate regulations. In reality the regulations weren't fit for purpose or enforced. There are questions around how aware of this they were.

Sounds like the banks are just dumb at the surface level. If they take a collateraled loan and pay you get a paid loan. If they take it and fail to pay you either get paid by the proceeds of the sale or real estate for peanuts compared to the cost basis to hold and sell for a way better rate later.

There's also the very real possibility of a massive special assessment on the condo owners to pay to fix the building that should be pushing down the property values.

Moreover, most people can't afford to buy a luxury condo without a mortgage, and banks won't give mortgages on condos where the HOA is in litigation with the builders.

I’ll buy one when one of those engineers does and goes to live in it.

Yeah, the Hammurabi Code…

I don't think they pay most construction engineers enough to purchase even one of the cheaper condos in that building.

Kind of like how high-end tailors can't afford one of their own suits.

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