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Housing inspection

David HQS

David HQS

Registered User
Joined
Mar 27, 2018
Messages
4
Location
Salt Lake City
I am looking for any information about bedroom qualifications regarding windows.
I'm mostly needing info on newer constructed apartments that advertise 1 bedroom units
but the room listed has no window.
 
Well there are a variety of answers


Normally EACH bedroom has to have a window or door directly to the outside.

Openable and a certain size.


Now if it is a studio where everything is in one room, like a Motel 6 room all you need is the entry door.


Now the fun part, depending on when the Building was built, the building code adopted by the city at that time,

And the building has a fire sprinkler system, the window may not be required.
 
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David HQS,
Now we need to know what Codes were adopted in the affected jurisdiction(s) at time of construction.
Different States and/or Local jurisdictions have different Codes adopted.
As noted above, generally an opening to the exterior is required, but what that is specifically will be based on the adopted Codes.
 
Both buildings are up to code with fire sprinklers. I'm looking for a loophole I can use for HUD's requirement
that a bedroom MUST have a window.
 
David HQS said:
Both buildings are up to code with fire sprinklers. I'm looking for a loophole I can use for HUD's requirement
that a bedroom MUST have a window.
Click to expand...


The best resource is the Building offical for the city they were built in.

That person should be able to tell you readily why no window.

But
These are not stuido units??

There is a seperate bedroom with a door to it??

Being sprinkled that may be the out.
 
In addition to JBI post #6

IBC, EERO's (windows) are required for single exit buildings. Where at least two exits, or access to at least two exits, are provided on each story of a Group R-2; i.e. multi-unit apartment building, then the provisions for EERO's are not required, where provided with mechanical ventilation.

Another exception is if the bedroom is provided with an exterior door that opens to a public way, or to a yard or court that opens to a public way.
 
Last edited:
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The key word here is HUD, if a HUD financed building you are bound by their requirements too.
In many cases they are more stringent then local codes.
 
ADAguy said:
The key word here is HUD, if a HUD financed building you are bound by their requirements too.
In many cases they are more stringent then local codes.
Click to expand...
Ben Carson is pulling HUD away from its key mission
Fifty years after the Fair Housing Act, Carson is shifting the agency’s focus.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2018...n-hud-discrimination-fair-housing-anniversary
April 11 marks the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, a measure meant to ensure that people from marginalized groups have an equal opportunity to buy or rent homes and are not discriminated against.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act in the days after civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers combatting housing discrimination to be one of its key missions.
But a half-century later, housing advocates are worried that President Donald Trump — who was once sued for housing discrimination — and HUD Secretary Ben Carson are abandoning this important goal.
Those concerns were exacerbated in March, when HUD confirmed that it was considering replacing anti-discrimination language in its mission statement with a reference to encouraging “self-sufficiency.”
The changes have yet to be finalized, but civil rights groups, fair housing advocates, and politicians are alarmed that a government agency expressly tasked with combating housing discrimination would consider making such a move.
“Secretary Carson is sending a message to the country that he does not take discrimination in the housing market seriously,” Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Newsweek in March. Even if the language changes happen, she said, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and the agency still have a legal obligation to fight housing discrimination.
Carson has pushed back on the idea that the agency was moving away from that mission. “The Department’s mission statement has changed from time to time to capture the dynamic nature of our work. It changed in 2003 and again in 2010. Now, in 2018, we are considering another change to our mission statement and are seeking comments and ideas from our senior staff,” he wrote in a March 8 letter to HUD staffers.
“The notion that any new mission statement would reflect a lack of commitment to fair housing is nonsense,” he added.
Still, the proposal fits with the new conservative direction that Carson has been pushing HUD toward for months. Though his efforts have, at times, been obscured by his lack of experience and a number of ongoing scandals at the agency, the changes to the mission statement, coupled with Carson’s moves to roll back Obama-era housing policies, suggest that Carson wants to radically shift a key part of HUD’s fundamental mission and focus.
HUD is supposed to help marginalized groups. But Carson seems to be trying to change that.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the main federal agency tasked with overseeing housing in the US. This includes programs related to homeowner protection, mortgage lending, affordable housing, and community development.
The agency is also supposed to promote anti-discrimination and fairness in housing, and, under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, is authorized to investigate claims of housing discrimination. Because of this, much of HUD’s work revolves around assisting marginalized groups, particularly people of color and LGBTQ individuals.
But recent reports suggest that the agency may be deemphasizing this part of its mission. In March, the Huffington Post broke the news of the changes to the mission statement, citing a leaked March 5 internal memo issued by Amy Thompson, HUD’s assistant secretary for public affairs.
In the memo, Thompson says that the mission statement is being updated “in an effort to align HUD’s mission with the Secretary’s priorities and that of the Administration.”
The original mission statement, which is still on HUD’s website, contains several references to “inclusive and sustainable communities”:
HUD’s mission is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. HUD is working to strengthen the housing market to bolster the economy and protect consumers; meet the need for quality affordable rental homes; utilize housing as a platform for improving quality of life; build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination, and transform the way HUD does business.
But as HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel notes, the new statement removes a significant number of words and replaces references to inclusive communities with a line about self-sufficiency:
HUD’s mission is to ensure Americans have access to fair, affordable housing and opportunities to achieve self-sufficiency, thereby strengthening our communities and nation.
In a March 7 statement, HUD said that the changes were “modest” and that mission statements from the agency will continue to “embody the principle of fairness as a central element.” The agency added that “HUD has been, is now, and will always be committed to ensuring inclusive housing, free from discrimination for all Americans.”
Carson has long been critical of how HUD approaches housing discrimination
HUD would not be the first agency to change a significant part of its mission statement under Trump. In February, US Citizenship and Immigration Services removed the phrase “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement language.
Much like the USCIS change, adjusting the HUD mission statement would serve as a symbolic confirmation of a policy shift that is already underway. Since assuming leadership of HUD last year, Carson has moved to deemphasize the importance of anti-discrimination work at the agency.
The first signs of this shift appeared during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. In a 2015 column for the Washington Times, Carson criticized an Obama administration rule that would require recipients of HUD block grants to complete assessments explaining what their communities look like and how they were working to combat segregation. Carson argued the rule was not focused on explicit discrimination, calling it a form of “social engineering” that relies “on a tortured reading of the Fair Housing laws.”
In January, the Trump administration announced it was delaying the implementation of the rule until 2020, although due to the way the rule is structured, this actually means it won’t go into effect until much later.
This isn’t the only Obama-era rule Carson has attempted to avoid. As Jeff Andrews writes for Curbed, HUD has also moved to delay the Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMR) rule, which would give people receiving Section 8 housing vouchers more options when choosing where to live. This would allow them to move out of the poorer, more racially segregated areas that voucher recipients are often limited to.
Carson wanted to postpone implementing the rule for two years to give housing authorities more time to implement the change, but civil rights groups filed a lawsuit saying Carson had not followed legal procedure when implementing the change. The court sided with the groups over Carson and the agency is now working to put the SAFMR rule into effect.
The HUD secretary has also opposed same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights, and the agency has actively moved away from combating anti-LGBTQ discrimination in housing. According to ThinkProgress, HUD has withdrawn a survey about LGBTQ homelessness and has quietly eliminated publications that show how to prevent violence against transgender people living in homeless shelters. The agency is currently being sued for more information on its handling of LGBTQ housing issues.
 
In late March, the New York Times reported that the head of HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity division paused several fair housing investigations last fall. The investigations had been ordered by previous HUD Secretary Julian Castro. And some preliminary cases, including an investigation into Facebook’s alleged practice of allowing advertisers to exclude certain racial groups from seeing housing ads, have been terminated.
“For all intents and purposes, this administration is stopping the enforcement of civil rights and fair housing laws at the worst possible time,” Gustavo Velasquez, who served as assistant secretary for fair housing during the Obama administration, told the Times.
Housing policy experts have been troubled by these developments. “Carson has sent very clear messages, through both his policy decisions and public statements, that he doesn’t think the federal government has a role in reducing racial disparities,” Jenny Schuetz, a fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told me. “That’s very concerning because we still have large disparities between blacks and whites in homeownership, housing wealth, and neighborhood quality.”
Those disparities can be severe and were exacerbated by the Great Recession. Research from the Urban Institute found that black homeownership rates in 2015 were roughly the same level as they were in 1968. And black Americans continue to be more likely than other groups to live in areas that are racially isolated.
“Black families haven’t seen material improvements in their housing situation along two measures: homeownership rates and wealth,” Schuetz explains.
But Carson — who once referred to poverty as a “state of mind” that could be overcome with “the right mindset” — has shifted HUD toward promoting “self-sufficiency.” One of his largest projects revolves around the creation of EnVision Centers, one-stop shops that would encourage people “to leave HUD-assisted housing through self-sufficiency to become responsible homeowners and renters in the private market.”
According to the HUD website, the project, which would see some 3,000 centers created in the next few years, would focus on providing training and resources in four areas: character and leadership, educational advancement, economic empowerment, and health and wellness. The New York Times notes, however, that Carson’s new pet project hasn’t received much support from the Trump administration, getting just $2 million in funding over the next year.
Carson denies claims that he’s shifting HUD’s goals away from combatting housing discrimination. “A lot of people think we’re changing the whole Fair Housing Act and what it implies, like affirmatively furthering fair housing,” Carson said during a visit to Memphis this week. “We want to be able to give people grants, but we also are changing the way we do things, where we’re providing people with a ladder that they can climb.”
But despite Carson’s words, fighting housing discrimination seems like it has become a priority in word only. And that’s going to have an impact — on the agency itself and on thousands of marginalized Americans all over the country.​
 
mark handler said:
One of his largest projects revolves around the creation of EnVision Centers, one-stop shops that would encourage people “to leave HUD-assisted housing through self-sufficiency to become responsible homeowners and renters in the private market.”
Click to expand...
Gosh that would be a crime to have some people actually get off of the governments enslavement programs and become self sufficient/reliant
All of these existing welfare programs need to be re-evaluated towards how do we help people become self sufficient and get away from the government trough
 
mtlogcabin said:
Gosh that would be a crime to have some people actually get off of the governments enslavement programs and become self sufficient/reliant
All of these existing welfare programs need to be re-evaluated towards how do we help people become self sufficient and get away from the government trough
Click to expand...

This is all political, now building departments are going to be enforcing HUD requirements?

HUD is supposed to help marginalized groups. But Carson seems to be trying to change that.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the main federal agency tasked with overseeing housing in the US. This includes programs related to homeowner protection, mortgage lending, affordable housing, and community development.
The agency is also supposed to promote anti-discrimination and fairness in housing, and, under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, is authorized to investigate claims of housing discrimination. Because of this, much of HUD’s work revolves around assisting marginalized groups, particularly people of color and LGBTQ individuals.

Carson argued the rule was not focused on explicit discrimination, calling it a form of “social engineering” that relies “on a tortured reading of the Fair Housing laws.”
Click to expand...

This is the radical left wing agenda, building officals should avoid politics at all costs, even if it means not enforcing some political codes. In 2003 I was getting started to remodel a home I built in 1976, the owner asked me to please not get a permit, he didn't want any government employees in his home, I told him I had to get a permit but not to worry, I agreed that most government employees were bad but building inspectors were my friends, as a matter of fact I walk the house with them every time I call them so he didn't have to worry. That was 15 years ago and after reading things like this I wonder if government employees should be in homes, that customer has retired and built a new home out of state so he doesn't have to put up with Democrats anymore, another customer who I built a new home for in 1978 has just retired and built a new home in Nevada, one of the reasons that he built there was that county hadn't voted Demodratic since the '40s, he was also able to hire private inspectors so no government employees would be in his home.

A new Initiave has qualified for the ballot to split California into three seperate states, prior attempts have failed to get on the ballot, so in November we will be voting on this, even though it's questionable that congresswill allow it to go through, this is starting to gain the momentum we had for Prop 13 in 1978 where we took tax moneiw away from the state.

Zero Hedge said:
An initiative to split the state of California into three different states has gathered enough support via signatures to qualify as a ballot measure in November.

This is one important milestone for those who want to break away from the harsh Communist policies of much of the Golden State.¹
Click to expand...


¹ https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...nia-3-states-just-reached-important-milestone
 
HUD is the responsibility of the designer, builder, and owner.

When I was in the building department, I would use HUD references to justify decisions about accessibility, however; as the building official or their designee, I had the right to interpret the codes.

It was also my responsibility to inform people about potential HUD shortfalls in plans to ensure that I did not become entangled in the accessibility lawsuits that were (are) sweeping the nation. I was pretty much covered as long as I indicated their was a problem and would often write that in plan review letters as a potential issue for HUD - but I could not deny the permit if the building met or exceeded building code.
 
The states are not required to enforce Federal laws. Where have I heard this before?
 
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