‘One step at a time’: entrepreneur buys stairwell in London to help startups
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
How does a structure that's just stairs have a separate title that can be sold? The entire premise of this is so incomprehensible to me.
Brits -- is this a common thing?
You can sell any subdivision of land. Happens all the time, e.g. a house on a large plot of land is demolished and the land divided into land for multiple new houses. Or two neighbours might exchange some land if the border is not convenient. Is this not a thing in the US?
What parent is asking is whether selling just the stairs in a building, or happenstances to that effect, are common in Britain.
But they aren’t buying the stairs. The stairs are worthless. They’re buying the land underneath.
As far as I understand the stairs are disconnected from the adjacent property and unused.
edit: here’s the first article when it was still up for sale: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/30/step-to-rich...
More about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/30/step-to-rich...
No this is a London thing because London property prices are ridiculous. For the price of a London bedsite you'd be able to buy a detached house in most other places in the UK.
“I own a £2m mansion not too far away, but I think I actually prefer the staircase."
Discovering a situation is unsafe for firefighters once they are already in it is the norm, not the exception, when fire code violations are present.
Or better yet one of those "child inside" stickers but "no firefighters" so they know the building had opted out.
“One idea I’m playing around with is: someone starts at the bottom of the stairs and pitches their idea to me and if, by the top of the stairs, I like it, I fund their business.”
Which idea? What use and what capacity? The ideas in the article run a wide gamuth of different uses and proposed capacities.
You are right if they would stuff the staircase full of stuff and a crowd to achieve the same density as a normal shop that would be probably unsafe. But that is far from the only thing which is mentioned in the article.
One plan he mentions is a sort of meeting space where people pitch him while walking up the stairs. That would be what? No extra obstruction in the staircase and a max occupancy of 5? (How many people do you realistically want to pitch simultaneously?) There is nothing unsafe about that.
The other plan he mentions is to make the stairs his private office. I don’t see the floorplans but I don’t see why you couldn’t turn the space into an office with an occupancy limit of let’s say 3. Basically an overgrown garden shed. To do that you might need to do some construction work.
The very fact that he has a list of ideas going from hard to easy means to me that he is aware of the very constraint you are mentioning.
About his more ambitious ideas: if he has sense he should sit down with an engineer who is well versed in the local safety regulations. Clearly the more obstructions you design in to the space the more limit you need to put on capacity. You can also imagine putting limits on how high people can go. You don’t need to use all of the stairs. You can for example use ground floor and the first landing as popup store, second landing as “crew only” storage space and block of the rest of the stairs. How many people can you let in the building then? Once he knows the shape of the limits he can work within he can start thinking to find a program which can safely work within those limits.
More likely tho it's a publicity stunt for the founder networking organization he runs.
How is taking risk trying to increase the amount of wealth not positive? I would understand if he said "I have a better plan for this place than developing it for sale", but this line of thinking...
What concerns you about this line of thinking? Without it we wouldn’t have food banks that could service 100s of people, why not just build another cafe where there is a food bank and give 5 people a job rather than 100s food?
Both need to exist (sadly for the food banks) in this world.
But that is what he says. Earlier in the article it describes exactly what he plans to do with it. Namely “hoping to get permission from the local council to turn it into a pop-up shop, office or “live-work space” that entrepreneurs can use – potentially for up to a month at a time – free of charge.”