Five over one apartment buildings, like the one in Iowa...

[residue]

That's now the law here in CA.  Builders can construct more than one housing unit on land that was previously designated for only one unit.  Developed areas should be unaffected (for now), but new construction might have mix of homes and apartments.  All it takes is one bad renter to reduce the quality of life for everybody.

i reckon this is the start of the end of the suburbs, hopefully it leads to more walkability and less car dependent areas

[IroNat]

i reckon this is the start of the end of the suburbs, hopefully it leads to more walkability and less car dependent areas

Once rental enters a single home area it usually goes to sh*t.

By this I mean owners converting their single family home to multi-family.

[SF1900]

Rory, Henda, BigRo, Wes and Goodrum?

Not Bigro.

Tbombz, instead.

[Gym Rat]

Doesnt mean anything to me, and probably never will... Rural NH might get hit with this crap someday, just not in my lifetime where I live.
Everyone has 3+ acres, etc...

[ROBOAK]

It has to do with the building codes.  Fire treated wood is now categorized as non combustible.  Building code allows building of non combustible material to be five stories high if they have a sprinkler system.  It's the cheapest form of six story building you can make and usually the first story is cement.

How Fire-retardant treated wood (FRTW) is made:

Just a simple pressure treatment process.

Makes sense why this building technique took off.

[sync pulse]

well it turns out that the building was not a five over one...but a repurposed building that was 100 years old.  Load bearing masonry walls with an interior steel framework.
It seems that the brick masonry gave way.

[Irongrip400]

Off topic/on topic. A project we worked on, is one of these 5 over 1 apartments. They’re about to turn these things over in the next two months and a plumber took a core drill and busted through the tendons on one of the post tension sleeves. Now they’ve got to do $250,000 worth of work to it and bring in this company out of Florida to fix it. Me, I’ve seen how these post tension/pre stressed structures come down once you start breaking them up a bit, and I’ve got to say I’d never live in this thing. Just go on YouTube and look at a parking garage demo. Same type of shit, they just fall apart once the cables start breaking. I’m no engineer so I could be talking out of my ass on the danger, I just know what I’ve seen.

[Palumboism]

It doesn't look like fire retardant treated wood with a sprinkler system.  Not the same thing.  This building would not pass code in USA.

[ROBOAK]

It doesn't look like fire retardant treated wood with a sprinkler system.  Not the same thing.  This building would not pass code in USA.

How the fuck can you tell what kind of wood it is?, it's on fire...

[Palumboism]

How the fuck can you tell what kind of wood it is?, it's on fire...

Fire retardant treated wood behaves much differently in a fire.  These buildings were under construction meaning they probably had sprinkler systems that were not operational yet.  Also, many different sized buildings were involved, some as low as three stories and many without exterior siding. 

A completed five over one with an activated sprinkler system would behave much differently in a fire, which is the whole point of the building code.

[ThisisOverload]

Off topic/on topic. A project we worked on, is one of these 5 over 1 apartments. They’re about to turn these things over in the next two months and a plumber took a core drill and busted through the tendons on one of the post tension sleeves. Now they’ve got to do $250,000 worth of work to it and bring in this company out of Florida to fix it. Me, I’ve seen how these post tension/pre stressed structures come down once you start breaking them up a bit, and I’ve got to say I’d never live in this thing. Just go on YouTube and look at a parking garage demo. Same type of shit, they just fall apart once the cables start breaking. I’m no engineer so I could be talking out of my ass on the danger, I just know what I’ve seen.

I'm a Structural Engineer with 25+ years in forensic evaluations.

You are correct, but this applies to literally every single structure ever built.

You can have one small failure in a football stadium and half the roof will collapse.

One footing fail in a large bridge and it will collapse.

That's just how physics work.

We can build things more robust, even with wood, and they will last 100+ years easy.

But nobody is going to pay for anything above your standard building/development code.

I always tell people i can build a house that can withstand a F5 tornado, but do you have that kind of money to spend on chance?

[Moontrane]

Off topic/on topic. A project we worked on, is one of these 5 over 1 apartments. They’re about to turn these things over in the next two months and a plumber took a core drill and busted through the tendons on one of the post tension sleeves. Now they’ve got to do $250,000 worth of work to it and bring in this company out of Florida to fix it. Me, I’ve seen how these post tension/pre stressed structures come down once you start breaking them up a bit, and I’ve got to say I’d never live in this thing. Just go on YouTube and look at a parking garage demo. Same type of shit, they just fall apart once the cables start breaking. I’m no engineer so I could be talking out of my ass on the danger, I just know what I’ve seen.

I have no idea what any of that means, but I enjoyed reading it. 

A forensic guy I knew investigated an elevator crash in NYC, one fatality.  I forget the mechanics of it, but the elevator lost control of upward travel speed and it crashed into the overhead.