https://x.com/roybelly/status/1882945942477029771
Context for the title, in case you're wondering: https://archive.is/UL7jK
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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I know this is going to be a wildly unpopular opinion: regulations like these are written in blood. There was apparently no real effort to make the church properly habitable. People would be just as outraged (or more) if this headline was describing 18 charred bodies found in a burned down church that was REPEATEDLY told to do things the right way.
If this was anything other than performative or a malicious attempt to secure lawsuits and/or headlines, the church would have been updated, they would have secured an appropriate facility, or these people would be in the congregation's homes.
Absolutely 100% completely. But in this case it I'm not sure the church is actually violating codes, but rather the city is using the claim as a smokescreen to punish them for helping homeless people.
This article quotes the city.
The only thing worse then inadequate housing is no fucking housing in the winter
Couldn't make it past one paragraph, article or comment 👍.
Sorry, i get where your coming from, but if they were actually interested in helping or protecting the homeless, they would have stepped in to assist in an emergency. But their intention is to make the homeless problem “disappear”
You're right, but people won't want to hear it. The people on the other side are right, too - it isn't better to freeze to death than it is to die from smoke inhalation. But you just don't violate fire code in public buildings, or people die. Anyone could list dozens of examples of this happening with tragic results after a basic web search.
The correct response to this situation would have been for the city government to assist the pastor in meeting the fire code, especially since he is providing a valuable public service by housing the people that nobody else wants to help.
Instead of a peaceful solution that probably would have been cheap to the taxpayer and could have been a PR bonus for the city, they chose to smack him with the letter of the law. Because people freezing to death in the streets isn't their fault, but people burning to death after the city overlooked a fire code violation would be. All they care about is their liability.
The problem is that this fire code wasn't written in blood, it was written in cash. The specific code they were violating was that commercial zones cannot house people on the first floor. That's it. There's no actual safety issue there.
Just so we're clear, that's the ground floor?
Correct- in other words, the one that is fastest and easiest to get out of in the case of a fire.