No smoking in your own home, California city orders residents | Hacker News Reader

No smoking in your own home, California city orders residents

thetimes.com

16 pointsvoisin26 comments

Clickbait, because the law only applies "inside apartments, condos and other shared buildings where multiple families live."

This law already exists in many cities and should exist everywhere. It's one thing to smoke in your own detached house, but when you share walls with others, smoking becomes harmful to others' health, too, not just your own.

My downstairs neighbor smokes heavily and burns incense all day and night, and it's bad enough that I'm seriously considering moving. Sometimes I can see smoke visibly rising from the floor. This would not be a problem if the city I lived in had common-sense laws against smoking inside multi-unit buildings.

Thanks for that context. That makes a huge difference to me. I'd march in the streets for your right to do something I detest inside your own house, and protesting the extreme lengths someone would have to go to in order to enforce a ban. No smoking in a building shared with a bunch of other people? Bummer for the smokers, but yeah, my asthma agrees with you.

I really wish that in India these smoking bans in multi-apartment units existed (and made highly enforceable).

My family and I have had a big struggle for years with a chain-smoking neighbor whose smoking from their balcony causes our entire living room to smell of cigarette smoke even if we keep 1 small window open on one entire side of the living room. Thus, it's an unfortunate tradeoff between adequate fresh air ventilation and chronic secondhand smoking exposure (and thirdhand (via likely deposits on furniture fabrics)). Fortunately, very recently we implemented a "blocker shade" protruding from our balcony perimeter (and we keep 2 other small windows on one side our living room almost always closed), which seems to have helped reduce the smoke in our apartment.

How is it clickbait? Individuals can own a unit in a condo or apartment building.

>My downstairs neighbor smokes heavily and burns incense all day and night, and it's bad enough that I'm seriously considering moving. Sometimes I can see smoke visibly rising from the floor. This would not be a problem if the city I lived in had common-sense laws against smoking inside multi-unit buildings.

That sucks, I wonder if your building is up to code?

As someone who dislikes the smell of smokers, I like the idea of the law but I worry about allowing the reach.

> How is it clickbait?

Because you can still smoke "in your own home." You can't subject your neighbors to smoke in a multi-unit building.

> I wonder if your building is up to code?

Certainly, as of the 1920s, when it was built. I don't think that new buildings (at least those built with fire-resistant wood frames, which is the current trend) are really better at preventing smells from moving between units anyway.

Please move! It only takes one mistake by your neighbor to start a fire and you will have very little time to react.

My concern about code is because there should be a minimum fire resistance rating between floors. The fact that you can see the smoke through your floorboards when your neighbor burning incense makes me think that there is no such barrier.

Home means more than single family dwelling....

Edited to put my more important thoughts up top and my mundane reply to the thread at the bottom.

> if your building is up to code?

Aren't you worried about the reach of code as well?

No? I'm sure some code is unnecessary, but I like living in a house not prone to killing me.

Yeah this title is pretty terrible. The HN guidelines [1] state

  please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

This title smells pretty linkbait to me. Especially since "no smoking in your apartment" would have been more accurate (it also applies to homes you don't own, e.g. if you are renting).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OT, but I was at a playground with the kids over the weekend and they were playing in a section that was all sand. While we were playing it struck me that there were no cigarette butts anywhere in sight. As a kid there were cigarette butts everywhere--you'd always have to scoop around them when you were playing in the sand and they'd be littered around the edges of the grass, walkways, etc.

Really made me think of how different it is today and how out of place smoking around children is.

Right! And there was always dog poop everywhere too :(

And I remember watching E.T. in the cinema when it came out and you could barely see the screen for the amount of cigarette smoke.

Note that this is for apartments - smoking inside an apartment can easily spread to other units. I live next to a neighbor who smokes, and as a former smoker I don't feel I can complain that much, but there is often a persistent smell of smoke in my home.

It's not just apartments, also Condos and other shared buildings..so would a duplex count?

As someone who doesn't smoke and hates the smell of both cigarette and weed, this is great but if someone bought a one half of a duplex and then couldn't smoke at home? Seems a bit overreach. With property prices rising, fewer people can live in single family homes.

They could go outside.

Or they could buy/rent a half of a duplex where both owners consent to indoor smoking.

Yeah I don't see this as that crazy. My entire apartment complex (albeit in Oregon, not California) is smoke-free and the smokers have to go out to the sidewalk to do it.

As you said, this works fine as a per-complex policy; it does not require government overreach, something which California is eager to do.

But isn't that the role of governments? To decide what does require their reach?

Wouldn't the obvious solution be to make the apartments airtight, so as to avoid everything from smoke to cooking smells to whatever bothering your neighbors?

Isn't second-hand (passive smoking) shown to not increase cancer[0]? Really trying to understand this "we don't like something so we will ban it for everyone!" thing.

Isn't your home supposed to be sacred? Sovereign? Aren't the YIMBY people always telling me that apartments are just as good as Single Family Homes and only people who hate the planet want to live in SFH?

[0]: No Clear Link Between Passive Smoking and Lung Cancer https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/105/24/1844/2517805

Making apartments airtight has other serious disadvantages: CO2 builds up and literally makes you worse at thinking; diseases spread more easily; air quality plummets due to VOCs. Humans need fresh air.

And it's not as easy to make an actually impermeable apartment as you'd think it is. Pretty much every material we build with allows some amount of air and particles to pass through.

> Isn't second-hand (passive smoking) shown to not increase cancer[0]?

That study takes one position on secondhand smoke and lung cancer, but lots of other studies have found that it does cause serious health problems, including but not limited to lung cancer: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/health.html

I would assume the cost of making all existing apartments that well insulated (and actively ventilated to compensate), not just from the outside but from each other, is prohibitive. Raising standards for new construction sounds nice from a QoL and energy efficiency standpoint, but I’m not sure if the upfront costs or technical feasibility are there.

And from your link - “Passive smoking has many downstream health effects—asthma, upper respiratory infections, other pulmonary diseases, cardiovascular disease—but only borderline increased risk of lung cancer”. I think that’s still more than enough to make one person’s smoke their (wall-sharing) neighbor’s business.

That article reads a lot like a press release. It also includes things like:

> The only category of exposure that showed a trend toward increased risk was living in the same house with a smoker for 30 years or more. In that group, the hazard ratio for developing lung cancer was 1.61, but the confidence interval included 1.00, making the finding of only borderline statistical significance.

"Well, it could cause a 61% increase in cancer cases, but our error bars are so wide that there's really no way of knowing, so it's probably fine."

The obvious solution is to let people pick if they want to rent/buy in a smoking complex.

Presumably if this is so popular it has democratic assent, it would create a market advantage and through the free market most everyone gets what they want.

It appears what's happened is some people picked apartment complexes with no contract banning smoking, then had a sad face about their choice.

Ah yes, the invisible cigarette

https://archive.ph/eltxj

I hope we soon start judging other drugs like ethanol in same way. Banning use inside homes and near buildings were people live would help lot with noise pollution.

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