Proposed law requiring sprinklers in brownstones
@soslope: i hope you get some likes for your post as at the base of it all you are correct. but someone else referred to this proposed law as government “overreach” and as a small business owner, all i keep seeing is legislation that costs us more without any give back and usually the legislation arises because someone who has limited resources did something they shouldn’t and they make the rest of us pay. i can see the self closing doors and that makes good sense. but a sprinkler system? do small landlords really have this money? or buildings with rent controlled units in them. will the legislation allow them to pass some of this along to the tenants? there is nothing wrong with letting people who might leave doors open pay for what they might do wrong just like business owners and homeowners have to pay for what they might do wrong. spread the responsibility a little.
stevecym
in General Discussion 4 years and 7 months ago
54
Please log in, in order to post replies!
54 replies
IronBalls | 4 years and 7 months ago
It’s absolutely crazy. I’m a landlord. Vacancies are piling up. Just covering property taxes will be a challenge. You can’t just require sprinkers in an apartment when you do a renovation. Sprinklers require complicated engineering, architectual drawings, and water risers. It’s an absolutely insane idea especially since so few people die each year in fires. It feels to me that our current City Council is purposely trying to put private landlords like myself out of business.
SoSlope | 4 years and 7 months ago
Related question: how would people feel about a requirement for a central station monitored fire alarm system in attached row houses? With the new DIY alarm systems, the cost is not that high (perhaps $200 to install and $100 per year to monitor depending on how many smoke detectors you need).
I always worried about a fire starting in the wood frame house next to me when no one was home and spreading through the party wall to my house. If my neighbor wasn’t home to hear their smoke detector, I likely wouldn’t know until the fire was completely out of control and had burned through the wall.
yudashasom | 4 years and 7 months ago
Lots of other cities require monitored fire alarms
The difference here is a plumbing union/organization greased the Council members palm, not a electrician/monitoring company.
If the media would put half the effort into investigating democrats, instead of only republicans, we would see a lot of interesting stuff
hkapstein | 4 years and 7 months ago
I’m not a huge fan of the monitored fire alarm. How often does a tenant set off the smoke detector when cooking for example? Do you want a fire truck at your house every time this happens, and a potential false alarm fine? And what about the impact all those false alarms would have on FDNY?
Interconnected alarms might be a more attractive option, although you would likely have to rewire sections of the building which would also be expensive, but not so much so as sprinklers. If a wireless interconnected option were allowed, I think that would be something most people would be happy to put in. Although they might regret it when the tenant stir fries and the baby is sleeping.
SoSlope | 4 years and 7 months ago
You can get pretty close to a wireless interconnected system. (I have wireless smoke detectors that tie back to the central hub. When one goes off, it doesn’t set off the sirens in the other smoke detectors, but it does set off all the alarm sirens in the house.
However, my worry is about a fire next door when my neighbors are not home. It won’t matter if their smoke detectors go off. I won’t know until the fire is so large that it has burned through the wall, possibly blocking my exit (and destroying my house, which could have been saved if the FDNY arrived). My point is that, with party walls, we need to be concerned about more than just our own home.
hkapstein | 4 years and 7 months ago
8-12+ Inches of solid masonry is a considerable fire barrier.
brooklyndempsey | 4 years and 7 months ago
The risk with this type of requirement is that it would likely become just as crazy as the proposed sprinkler law.
So you are thinking of a reasonable DIY wireless alarm, but what comes out of the city process is actually based on the current central station monitoring rules for large buildings, with an architect filing, annual inspection, annual city filing fee, a $250/day fine, and a requirement that it is installed by a licensed electrician who becomes liable if there’s any issue. And applied to 1-2 & 3 family brownstones.
This is absurd, and not what is suggested above, but also wouldn’t be a surprise given the track record with the sprinkler rule.
SoSlope | 4 years and 7 months ago
@lmiller: There is a current law that you have to have smoke detectors, right? That requirement doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles you describe. Not everything coming out of the city process has to be crazy and go to extremes.
brooklyndempsey | 4 years and 7 months ago
@soslope I like your optimism about what would come out of such an effort but unfortunately do not share it.
There already a number of rules for central station systems, if you look at 3 RCNY §17-01 and 17-04 you’ll see that a number of the items I mentioned are actually similar to current regulations for central station alarms in the city. There are terminal fees, inspection rules, registration requirements, etc. These items are there for a reason–the NY fire department is automatically dispatched if one of these systems is triggered, and false alarms or sending them to the wrong place is a real issue.
It’s similar to the situation with the sprinkler law–applying a “big building” system to one of our little brownstones isn’t easy. Even without the city politics factor.
yudashasom | 4 years and 7 months ago
Stop voting these people in!
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
@no permitz: I think the problem is that a lot of us want a progressive agenda but then the progressive officials seem to feast on the very element of the population that funds it all. They get carried away and dont know when to stop. A lot of people in this city think that anyone who owns a home is “rich” (I hate that word). I dont own a four story brownstone but as I read this I wonder what is next and when will it stop and when are they coming for me.
Someone mentioned above that the dob might not have the resources to enforce this, but that is not good enough. Laws like this on the books can really hurt people as they go to get insurance, sell the property, or if someone gets hurt in a fire.
And something else. I read some wacky off the wall comment a few weeks back that said AOC and her cohorts want a city free of private landlords and wish to convert all rental properties into public tenancies. I tried to find the article to post here. I know it is a stretch to suggest, but when I saw this post I thought, for my own amusement. ” it is part of their p lan to take over private real estate and have the improvements paid for by the former owners”. If I suggested this to some of my family and friends on long island or to those 170,000 who voted a certain way in Brooklyn, they would fully believe this is part of a broader plan. I pray it is not.
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
i went ahead and read more about what spurred this proposed legislation. it was a fire in the bronx that killed 13 people in 2017. a child was playing with a stove and set the apartment on fire and the mother managed to get her children out but it did not dawn on her for the safety of the people up stairs, to close the door to her apt as the left. so make the landlords pay.
SoSlope | 4 years and 7 months ago
@stevecym: Have you ever run out of a burning apartment with two toddlers? Are you positive that you would have the clear and calm mind to stop in thick smoke, turn around, put one of your screaming, panicked toddlers down on the floor, and close the door behind you? I am pretty calm under pressure and I know that you are supposed to close doors behind you in a fire, but I cannot say with absolute certainty that I would remember this in that moment. And even if she did as you suggest, we do not know if it would have saved all of the 13 people killed or 14 injured
That is why there are back-up systems like self closing doors, smoke alarms, central station monitoring, interconnected alarms and sprinklers. And yes, the obligation to provide some of these lifesaving systems does fall to the landlord.
SoSlope | 4 years and 7 months ago
Here is the fire @stevecym mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Bronx_apartment_fire#:~:text=On%20the%20night%20of%20December,York%20City%20in%2025%20years.