UP AGAINST IT
Building inspectors don’t get no respect even though our wealth and safety depend on them. The least likely mine of wisdom I’ve acquired through employment was as clerical support for the Bureau of Buildings in Portland, OR. It was scary stuff.
Law enforcement has stages and hierarchies. At the top should be the majority needs of the people, and that is the point of democracy, but it has been displaced by profit-based corporations whose constituency is imaginary.
The next level down is supposed to be government, which is separated into three streams to keep from becoming a dictatorship. One of those branches is legislative, meant to put on paper the best restrictions or promotions for the benefit of everyone.
Executive policing creates agencies who are supposed to be local or to address specific defined issues. Once created, these are presumably regulated by oversight from the executive stream of various levels of government.
Agencies, such as the city bureau of buildings, hires — through civil service — qualified on-the-ground people to go into the field to check that laws are being observed. The laws, in the Bureau of Buildings, include the “best practices” of engineering, construction and maintenance. Codes from building, plumbing, wiring, roofing, earthquake standards, flood plains and so on are relevant at this point. Some inspectors stay in offices to read blueprints and plans. These are regulated by permits.
My worst assignment as a clerical specialist was responding to nuisance complaints that came in usually by phone. Trash collection, vermin, runaway vegetation, potholes — hundreds of pesky problems that put people into apoplective overdrive.
My best assignment was to the site development team, which looked at proper places to build and how to adapt to them. Once, the whole team took the day off to go look and learn at the site of a neighborhood that had slid off a hillside en masse. That was new construction, a development in Washington state. At home the most perplexing problem was a mansion full of precious objects that had slid down from its view-preserving height and was teetering on the edge of a bluff. It was so unstable that no one dared to even go inside to rescue the precious possessions. No one could figure out how to stabilize the house. I don’t know what finally happened. It was kept secret, as is much of what goes on, in order to preserve public support and the illusion that it was possible to always know what to do.
Recently, I don’t know of any building in Oregon that has “pancaked” the way the Florida condo did recently. The inspectors of maintenance had warned again and again that the Florida building was in danger of collapse, but politics and greed overruled reality. Engineers warned that the Portlandia Building itself, which is basically built on the same principles, would be in danger if there were an earthquake like that expected some day. Michael Graves himself admitted the building was a warehouse with decorations, and that it was occupied beyond the projected capacity.
We have a tendency to think that the biggest and most glamorous buildings are the most carefully and safely built. This video shows an example in San Francisco that is a contradiction to that. A skyscraper appears to be tipping over because its foundation was not on bedrock as advised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxS71614E_0
Building inspectors go into the field where, like all those other feet-on-the-ground people, they were in danger. St. Andrews Catholic Church had worked a deal to save nearby low-cost houses, often owner-built during the Depression and WWII. Otherwise they would be demolished to make way for something more valuable. The small houses were jacked up to be trucked away and one of the inspectors went to see if they were safe. They were but under one old house he found a heavyduty contractor’s trashbag with a dead woman in it.
Cell phones were a step towards safety, but even the basic offices in the Portlandia building meant emotional tirades from people who were enraged by the idea that they could be prevented from building what and where they wanted to, even if they had no credentials. I kept bear spray in my desk drawer. though I was feet back from the front counter. The people who had emigrated from the USSR were not generally so angry, but they were persistent, coming back again and again. They were the least likely to even apply for permits and used tactics they learned in their origin, like how to tap into electrical lines on the street poles.
One woman who had been evicted from a faulty boarded-up house had figured out how to make it look sealed by attaching the door with bungee cords so that if you knew where to push, you could get it without it being obvious. She was betrayed by a long electrical extension snaking through the grass over to the neighbor’s house.
My brother, with typical resistance to authority, figured out that there was always a minimum size below what required inspection so he built my mother a back “deck” that was more of a porch, and created a shed for volatile liquids at the back of the lot. It was tall enough to store garden rakes and shovels, but only two feet on a side.
I was always impressed that people would live in sub-standard buildings, creating a class of slum landlords that attracted media. If they were challenged too much, these owners — often rich and connected — could create a firestorm that got inspectors fired. But inspectors also knew if balconies fell off buildings or roofs collapsed so that people were killed, no amount of insurance could keep them out of jail. I helped compose an algorithm to create a list defining slum landlords. A young Presbyterian minister took on these people as a cause and was effective because public sentiment was on his side.
Clerical specialists were supposed to be naive and easily shocked, since they were usually women, so part of their early employment always included being sent on a ridealong with an inspector. It happened that I was sent to the neighborhood where I had grown up in better days.
We went to a fourplex where the plumbing was siphoning the basement laundry and septic drain water into the upstairs sinks and bathtubs of the apartments. One apartment had no furniture but a scatter of crib mattresses on the floor and a rollaway in the middle of the room. It was literally crawling with infants and toddlers and stunk of pee. The door was answered by very fat, very young, and very black woman wearing nothing at all. When we came in, she got back under the thin blanket on the rollaway where she had been sleeping. She didn’t protest or ask questions.
We didn’t turn her in. If inspectors began to turn in matters for other jurisdictions, no one would ever open the door. When I was growing up, I was taught never to let any firemen in to look for hazards because my father stored so many papers in the basement near the coal furnace.
In San Francisco besides sky scrapers, the sidewalks are sinking. This was known, predicted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef84rFGGykE
Despite destruction all around the Portlandia building, no one has attacked the front entrance. Maybe that big statue wielding a trident spear is deterrent. Maybe more planning strategies should include art.
