I’d definitely be fine with a bedroom with no windows. I’ve gone to great lengths to try and block light from my window with black-out curtains (helps with odd sleeping hours). Even in my office I normally keep the blinds closed. I love nature - but I’d rather just go outside to experience it.
Is there some huge public demand for bedrooms to have windows or is this yet another example of a zoning regulation designed to push up property prices?
I was trying to think about who is supporting all the regulation that makes these types of changes harder, and it occurred to me that a lot of people really do think they can legislate living standards.
Like, I'm certain the thinking is that if we require all bedrooms to have windows, then everyone gets a window and there are no tradeoffs. It seems as those not smart enough to do organic chemistry go from pre-med to public health, those not smart enough to do econometrics go into public policy instead of economics.
You mentioned Denver having a disorderly vibe on underpopulated streets, and that DC could have a smaller, more crowded downtown with good vibes. Maybe that's true. I've been to NY a lot this year and the streets in mid-town are pretty packed and lively and some of the liveliness is people clearly fucked up on drugs, rooting through trash, stumbling around twitching. I saw a guy actively putting a needle into his arm right on the street a few weeks ago, early evening, right by Times Square. Maybe it's less crowded than before, I don't know. But to me it just looks as crowded as ever, but now it's dangerous. I'm not a "cities are scary!" person. This is different and needs to be dealt with to get cities, or NY at least, back where it was.
I have been fully Fijan-pilled on windowless bedrooms. Why spend over 1k to put up shades and curtains when you can just not have windows in the first place?
so i’ve ended up in the situation where through circumstances i’m currently actually living in a windowless basement in new york and tbh i’ve found it unpleasant enough that it’s made me seriously re-evaluate some views on housing.
i know the housing shortage is what it is (and is a reason why i live in a windowless basement), and I’m probably being blinded by my PMC upbringing and social circle but…I really don’t know if people should be living like this and if there isn’t a better way. a place with limited to no natural light sucks.
We converted a very large finished basement open space to two small bedrooms and a playspace when we had kids (we live in East Harlem, NYC). The bedrooms are very small and windowless and aren’t technically bedrooms. But man, they are amazing spaces for kids to sleep. Total darkness. Add in some white noise and we’ve had kids that have basically never gotten up from 3 months up til 5 years now. We also built a ‘shed’ that my wife and I now both work in. We have a small back yard, being the first floor of a 7 floor condo building. We wired the shed with electricity and Ethernet and it is a great quiet place for the zoom-based work my wife does.
These spaces are both unconventional, but everyone who comes over realizes that we’ve essentially made one large living space awesome, while having four small working/sleeping spaces that are functional only. Maybe this works less well with the kids as they get older, but we actually love the norm of bedrooms being just for sleep, that all other activity in the household is open and together. I’d move to one of those windowless bedroom spaces with awesome big window living rooms- that floor plan looks awesome to me.
The Lex and Leo apartments at Waterfront metro in DC opened about 5 years ago and have interior bedrooms. https://lexandleowaterfront.com/floor-plans/ I think the buildings prove Matt’s point because they were a conversion of two old office buildings to living spaces. Most apartments have transome windows high in the wall between the bedroom and the living room. Ironically the affordable units that have AMI income qualifications do not have the transome window “amenity”.
I don’t know if these apartments had a special variance or what, but they definitely advertise the interior rooms as bedrooms.
I think that managers and businesses feeling like they can’t mandate return to office without a mass exodus of very hard to replace talent at the moment is a big motivator for letting people at least try these conversions because that, to me, is what makes any “downtown will bounce back” ideas wishful thinking for the fore eagle future. I personally would like to get out of my apartment sometimes and work from the office, but if I want to go when other people are going, it becomes a coordination problem I need to solve since we have no prodding from management. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create some hard and fast rules amongst office people, but when you get used to flexibility and then have to do the work to create useful in-office days yourself, it becomes really easy to just stay at home.
If I read the 116 comments that came before to verify that this is not redundant, I will never get it written.....
There are three reasons why windows are in the codes: Light, Ventilation, and Egress.
Natural light is nice, but we can replace it with color corrected lighting. Lots of work environments do not have much natural light. Nor do northern cities in the winter. This is not really a big deal.
Ventilation can be replaced with mechanical ventilation. In residential settings, air is usually forced out with fans and naturally slips in through cracks. If you convert an office building to residential, you may want to design a way to bring some air in.
Egress is a tradeoff. Every modern bedroom has two methods of escape from fire: the door and a window. Each floor of every modern building has two methods of escape for the other rooms: typically front and back doors.
The example layout does not provide egress and would be expected to result in more deaths by fire, including deaths of firemen. That may be a tradeoff that society will accept. Providing egress from converted office space will be very expensive. But this is the problem that needs to be minimized if it can not be completely solved.
Good points, but I would have liked to see some discussion of why the bedroom window is regulated and what we might do about it. The answer is fire codes; there's a legitimate safety rationale for wanting bedrooms to have more than one way out. That may be outdated, or there may be simple things that can be done to mitigate it, but neither of those things is immediately obvious to me.
Austin is being absolutely hammered by the move to remote, because we’re (still barely) a “low cost” city and now that a lot of young professionals are free to move where they want, we’re the cheapest of the hot cities for that demographic. Admittedly, I’m part of the problem because there’s also a non-trivial amount of former Austinites who had to move and are now moving back. (Moving back to Austin was basically unheard of years ago, because it used to be thst it was nearly impossible to have the kind of success you’d have outside of Austin while living here.)
As a result of this change, rents are going absolutely bonkers. There was an 80% increase in the median rent over the last year. Even though lots of new places are being built, demand is so great it just isn’t physically possible to keep up.
Also, the fact that Austin is no longer a college town is causing some weird things to happen. (The University of Texas is still just as big as it ever was, but Austin has grown so much that it is no longer the center of gravity it once was.) For example, there used to be a lot of basically-SRO apartments for students. Places where they’d had lots of big suites with 4 individual bedrooms and they would lease out each bedroom. Students could live there and have more amenities than the dorms (like a full kitchen in the suite) but still basically have the dorm situation of random roommates. It was also less worrisome than renting a single big apartment with a bunch of friends since everyone in the suite was on their own lease of if one person decided to fuck off for Europe you didn’t have to scramble to make up for the lost share of the rent.
Now, a lot of those old places are converting to regular apartments. Which results in really weird listings like this apartment you could rent that has 3 bedrooms and a “study” (but that “study” has its own bathroom since it was once a room rented to a single college student).
I feel like a lot of the energy that’s been spent on “work from home” vs. “not work from home” would have been better directed at “four day work week,” something everyone could benefit from, not just people with intangible email jobs.
Isn't it odd that so many things about buildings that might or might not be nice to have -- parking, bedroom windows -- are mandatory? I suspect the same goes for building codes that (probably at the time) specified best practice given the technology at the time.
I saw this post. My idea was to have windows from the bedrooms into the central living area. (Like offices do).
On the remote working… I always wonder if I’m a remote worker. 90% of my work in in the field. I fly to the job site. Work. Fly home. My “office” (actually my bosses office) is in Pittsburgh. I fly there occasionally for projects, but the most of the few zoom meetings and other miscellaneous stuff, I do at home.
All I know is there are two things I would hate.
1. Going into an office everyday and seeing the same assholes every day for years on end.
2. Working from home full time. How boring. I’d kill myself. I know remote workers have to slack. I do.
I actually enjoy my job cause it’s a combo. New people at every job site.
With that specific floor plan, you could put in windows between the bedrooms and the big open-plan living space. That way you could get some natural light into the bedrooms. They'd probably have curtains that are normally left drawn (so other people can't see into your bedroom!) most of the time.
I woke up to no electrical power this morning (scheduled maintenance that I'd forgotten about: power came up about an hour later, no harm no foul). I was very glad that all I had to do was open my blackout curtains and then there was some natural light; I would not have enjoyed getting dressed in pitch darkness.
I’d definitely be fine with a bedroom with no windows. I’ve gone to great lengths to try and block light from my window with black-out curtains (helps with odd sleeping hours). Even in my office I normally keep the blinds closed. I love nature - but I’d rather just go outside to experience it.
Is there some huge public demand for bedrooms to have windows or is this yet another example of a zoning regulation designed to push up property prices?
I was trying to think about who is supporting all the regulation that makes these types of changes harder, and it occurred to me that a lot of people really do think they can legislate living standards.
Like, I'm certain the thinking is that if we require all bedrooms to have windows, then everyone gets a window and there are no tradeoffs. It seems as those not smart enough to do organic chemistry go from pre-med to public health, those not smart enough to do econometrics go into public policy instead of economics.
You mentioned Denver having a disorderly vibe on underpopulated streets, and that DC could have a smaller, more crowded downtown with good vibes. Maybe that's true. I've been to NY a lot this year and the streets in mid-town are pretty packed and lively and some of the liveliness is people clearly fucked up on drugs, rooting through trash, stumbling around twitching. I saw a guy actively putting a needle into his arm right on the street a few weeks ago, early evening, right by Times Square. Maybe it's less crowded than before, I don't know. But to me it just looks as crowded as ever, but now it's dangerous. I'm not a "cities are scary!" person. This is different and needs to be dealt with to get cities, or NY at least, back where it was.
I have been fully Fijan-pilled on windowless bedrooms. Why spend over 1k to put up shades and curtains when you can just not have windows in the first place?
so i’ve ended up in the situation where through circumstances i’m currently actually living in a windowless basement in new york and tbh i’ve found it unpleasant enough that it’s made me seriously re-evaluate some views on housing.
i know the housing shortage is what it is (and is a reason why i live in a windowless basement), and I’m probably being blinded by my PMC upbringing and social circle but…I really don’t know if people should be living like this and if there isn’t a better way. a place with limited to no natural light sucks.
We converted a very large finished basement open space to two small bedrooms and a playspace when we had kids (we live in East Harlem, NYC). The bedrooms are very small and windowless and aren’t technically bedrooms. But man, they are amazing spaces for kids to sleep. Total darkness. Add in some white noise and we’ve had kids that have basically never gotten up from 3 months up til 5 years now. We also built a ‘shed’ that my wife and I now both work in. We have a small back yard, being the first floor of a 7 floor condo building. We wired the shed with electricity and Ethernet and it is a great quiet place for the zoom-based work my wife does.
These spaces are both unconventional, but everyone who comes over realizes that we’ve essentially made one large living space awesome, while having four small working/sleeping spaces that are functional only. Maybe this works less well with the kids as they get older, but we actually love the norm of bedrooms being just for sleep, that all other activity in the household is open and together. I’d move to one of those windowless bedroom spaces with awesome big window living rooms- that floor plan looks awesome to me.
The Lex and Leo apartments at Waterfront metro in DC opened about 5 years ago and have interior bedrooms. https://lexandleowaterfront.com/floor-plans/ I think the buildings prove Matt’s point because they were a conversion of two old office buildings to living spaces. Most apartments have transome windows high in the wall between the bedroom and the living room. Ironically the affordable units that have AMI income qualifications do not have the transome window “amenity”.
I don’t know if these apartments had a special variance or what, but they definitely advertise the interior rooms as bedrooms.
I think that managers and businesses feeling like they can’t mandate return to office without a mass exodus of very hard to replace talent at the moment is a big motivator for letting people at least try these conversions because that, to me, is what makes any “downtown will bounce back” ideas wishful thinking for the fore eagle future. I personally would like to get out of my apartment sometimes and work from the office, but if I want to go when other people are going, it becomes a coordination problem I need to solve since we have no prodding from management. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create some hard and fast rules amongst office people, but when you get used to flexibility and then have to do the work to create useful in-office days yourself, it becomes really easy to just stay at home.
Perhaps we’ll learn something from the dorm with many windowless bedrooms that Charlie Munger is building at UCSB:
https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15378-exclusive-interview-with-billionaire-charlie-munger-on-controversial-ucsb-dorm
If I read the 116 comments that came before to verify that this is not redundant, I will never get it written.....
There are three reasons why windows are in the codes: Light, Ventilation, and Egress.
Natural light is nice, but we can replace it with color corrected lighting. Lots of work environments do not have much natural light. Nor do northern cities in the winter. This is not really a big deal.
Ventilation can be replaced with mechanical ventilation. In residential settings, air is usually forced out with fans and naturally slips in through cracks. If you convert an office building to residential, you may want to design a way to bring some air in.
Egress is a tradeoff. Every modern bedroom has two methods of escape from fire: the door and a window. Each floor of every modern building has two methods of escape for the other rooms: typically front and back doors.
The example layout does not provide egress and would be expected to result in more deaths by fire, including deaths of firemen. That may be a tradeoff that society will accept. Providing egress from converted office space will be very expensive. But this is the problem that needs to be minimized if it can not be completely solved.
Good points, but I would have liked to see some discussion of why the bedroom window is regulated and what we might do about it. The answer is fire codes; there's a legitimate safety rationale for wanting bedrooms to have more than one way out. That may be outdated, or there may be simple things that can be done to mitigate it, but neither of those things is immediately obvious to me.
Austin is being absolutely hammered by the move to remote, because we’re (still barely) a “low cost” city and now that a lot of young professionals are free to move where they want, we’re the cheapest of the hot cities for that demographic. Admittedly, I’m part of the problem because there’s also a non-trivial amount of former Austinites who had to move and are now moving back. (Moving back to Austin was basically unheard of years ago, because it used to be thst it was nearly impossible to have the kind of success you’d have outside of Austin while living here.)
As a result of this change, rents are going absolutely bonkers. There was an 80% increase in the median rent over the last year. Even though lots of new places are being built, demand is so great it just isn’t physically possible to keep up.
Also, the fact that Austin is no longer a college town is causing some weird things to happen. (The University of Texas is still just as big as it ever was, but Austin has grown so much that it is no longer the center of gravity it once was.) For example, there used to be a lot of basically-SRO apartments for students. Places where they’d had lots of big suites with 4 individual bedrooms and they would lease out each bedroom. Students could live there and have more amenities than the dorms (like a full kitchen in the suite) but still basically have the dorm situation of random roommates. It was also less worrisome than renting a single big apartment with a bunch of friends since everyone in the suite was on their own lease of if one person decided to fuck off for Europe you didn’t have to scramble to make up for the lost share of the rent.
Now, a lot of those old places are converting to regular apartments. Which results in really weird listings like this apartment you could rent that has 3 bedrooms and a “study” (but that “study” has its own bathroom since it was once a room rented to a single college student).
https://www.estatesateastriverside.com/Floor-plans.aspx
I feel like a lot of the energy that’s been spent on “work from home” vs. “not work from home” would have been better directed at “four day work week,” something everyone could benefit from, not just people with intangible email jobs.
Isn't it odd that so many things about buildings that might or might not be nice to have -- parking, bedroom windows -- are mandatory? I suspect the same goes for building codes that (probably at the time) specified best practice given the technology at the time.
I saw this post. My idea was to have windows from the bedrooms into the central living area. (Like offices do).
On the remote working… I always wonder if I’m a remote worker. 90% of my work in in the field. I fly to the job site. Work. Fly home. My “office” (actually my bosses office) is in Pittsburgh. I fly there occasionally for projects, but the most of the few zoom meetings and other miscellaneous stuff, I do at home.
All I know is there are two things I would hate.
1. Going into an office everyday and seeing the same assholes every day for years on end.
2. Working from home full time. How boring. I’d kill myself. I know remote workers have to slack. I do.
I actually enjoy my job cause it’s a combo. New people at every job site.
With that specific floor plan, you could put in windows between the bedrooms and the big open-plan living space. That way you could get some natural light into the bedrooms. They'd probably have curtains that are normally left drawn (so other people can't see into your bedroom!) most of the time.
I woke up to no electrical power this morning (scheduled maintenance that I'd forgotten about: power came up about an hour later, no harm no foul). I was very glad that all I had to do was open my blackout curtains and then there was some natural light; I would not have enjoyed getting dressed in pitch darkness.