From the New York Times comes an article about an apartment complex in Belmont, California. Belmont is according to the paper, a quiet Silicon Valley city. It is now the first instigator of a law outlawing smoking in your home if you share a wall, a floor or a ceiling with another apartment.
Public health advocates are closely watching to see what happens with Belmont, seeing it as a new front in their national battle against tobacco, one that seeks to place limits on smoking in buildings where tenants share walls, ceilings and — by their logic — air.
This is pure genius. Many of us live in apartment complexes and share walls. There is no denying that cigarette smoke drifts between apartments. In the first apartment that SK and I lived in together, we had a neighbour who smoked. Once we walked through the fire door into the little lobby area near our front door, there was often smoke in the air. This smoke drifted into our apartment just as happily as it drifted out of the smoker’s apartment. It used to drive me crazy. We were living in post smoking ban in the workplace Ireland and the one place that I desired more than anywhere else to be smoke free was our home. It wasn’t. In our current apartment, which is a duplex, we have similar problems. Smoking on downstairs balconies drifts up and in through our windows. Smoking on shared balconies is also a curse. Fresh cigarette smoke drifting into our home drives me completely crazy in the summer. Many apartment complexes in Ireland have shared balconies. If you happen to have a neighbour who just loves lighting up in these small enclosed little places, it can be a nightmare, as a strange sort of suction effect seems to form in them with smoke getting sucked from the outside indoors. This happens in particular when these balconies are recessed. We have appealed to a whole series of new neighbours (currently we are on our fourth set of neighbours on one side in three years, all of whom like so smoke on the balcony they share with us) and they have mostly been belligerent and unwilling to stop smoking in this particular spot when we have politely asked them would they mind smoking somewhere else. Our first neighbour’s reaction to our polite request was to camp on their balcony from six pm to eleven pm or twelve am chain smoking and drinking. That is another story though, but the common reaction to us asking neighbours would they mind not smoking on that particular balcony is for them to just continue. Which always pisses me off, because they are smoking on their balcony to keep smoke out of their own home, but they are quite happy for it to drift into someone else’s living room. If approached again, they generally retort with telling us to close our door. Which doesn’t solve the problem, as we have a right to leave our door open in the summer without having to put up with someone else’s smoke. The interesting part about the shared balcony is that it doesn’t actually belong to the apartment. The title is not included in our lease. Technically speaking, our management company could ban smoking on balconies (they have banned laundry and satellite dishes) as the balconies belong to the common areas. But many management companies are spineless and unwilling for the fight. They are more interested in making up rules about what wood stain can be used on the timber decking of the balconies rather than ensuring behaviour on them doesn’t impact immediate neighbours. A public law on the other hand, like the one passed in Belmont would solve the problem. The simple fact of the matter is, smoke from other people’s apartments drifts into homes of people who do not smoke. The only way around it is to never open windows. Homes need fresh air. An interesting part of the article is where it covers one resident’s outrage. One woman claims the anti-smoke drifting measure is a vendetta. It never ceases to amaze me how pissed off smokers get when asked to modify their behaviour. Even if you ask them not to stand in doorways of pubs when smoking so that you can get past without walking through a smoke cloud and having five or six people simultaneously exhale in your face the reaction is always anger. Which is ironic, because the person having smoke blown in their face by five or six people is the person with a right to be angry. They start talking about their civil liberties being taken away from them and their right to smoke. Which is the central issue. They are not being denied their right to smoke. They are only being denied their right to smoke in particular places for the general welfare of the population that they share air with.
I hope these smoking ban arrangements come to Ireland’s apartment complexes.
“I think Belmont broke through this invisible barrier in the sense that it addressed drifting smoke in housing as a public health issue,” said Serena Chen, the regional director of policy and tobacco programs for the American Lung Association of California. “They simply said that secondhand smoke is no less dangerous when it’s in your bedroom than in your workplace.”
The New York Times has a great article about two women in New York who purchased a 4,600 foot loft and converted it into two separate but together living spaces for themselves. I presume together but separate means that they share the front door.
I find this a fascinating way of living apart from someone but gaining the security needed by people as they move toward old age and desire the companionship and security that having someone close by can provide.
You can see how this would be a great template for re-writing the retirement style developments that are dotted around Ireland. But it’s not even about retirement, how many siblings who want to buy their own home and were forced into purchasing together would have loved an idea like this?
The more I think about it, the more I realise how you could not get this to work in Ireland in present circumstances and with present development patterns. Buildings seem to be commercial or residential, with some small mixed use projects. But the vast spaces that create loft style apartments are not to be found in residential developments, at least not once they are sub-divided. Apartments in Ireland are very small by comparison. Scope to purchase two adjoining apartments and knock them together to make one large living space is both cost prohitive and banned by most management companies. How many people live in apartment buildings where it is written into the lease that no structural changes will be made withour prior permission from the management company.
The market downturn counter-intuitively provides fantastic opportunities for more adventourous architecture and apartment styles. Take the empty shells of apartment buildings in places all over the country. They are perfect opportunities for people who really would love to design their own home but cannot afford a site. The simple fact of the matter is that sites to create amazing living spaces exist all over the country. It just happens that the market is crippled by developers not adventurous enough to try something new and start selling shells. Want half a floor? No problem. Want the full floor? No problem. We’ll provide the party walls once the floor space has been drawn up and allocated, a central plumbing point and a central wiring point, you do the rest. You manage the contractors, the architecture, the build and fit out. The recession provides a fantastic opportunity for developers to off load office space that lies empty and apartment blocks where development has ceased. Why can the city councils, county councils and planning authorities not see that buildings can be zoned for several different purposes? If people want to live in loft style apartments, then allow them to buy up half a floor in a stalled commercial project. Lets have some new ideas. SK and I have said for years that empty shells would be such a great addition to the market. Even when we bought our current home, complete with wardrobes, kitchen, tiles the same as everyone elses in our unit type, we wished we had been able to choose some stuff ourselves. To have options. There were none. There could be. What a dream that would be. It’s not as if people’s desire to create their own spaces and re-design their layouts isn’t apparent from the gut jobs done on houses. Why not apply it to the world of new buildings?
