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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

> 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.

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