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Bay Area workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations
- saagarjha 3y ago[flagged]
- blackhawkC17 3y agohttps://archive.is/YOaNY https://archive.is/YOaNY
- pinkmuffinere 3y agoI think most of us can acknowledge that what they did was wrong, but it still is an impressive amount of devotion, and cost effective work.
- Yoric 3y agoYeah, it's the kind of case where it's hard to decide between putting them in jail or giving them some kind of award. Possibly both.
- shiroiushi 3y agoDefinitely jail. These low-income losers should be punished as strongly as possible, to make an example out of them. It's too bad the Bay Area can't just round up all low-income trash people who can't afford $5M+ homes and ship them off to far-away concentration camps, but until that's legal, they should do everything in their power to keep these useless people out. Whatever useless low-income jobs they were doing, these people don't belong among the people of the Bay Area. Restaurant cooks, janitors, supermarket workers, schoolteachers, firefighters, all these kinds of people are low-income trash and should be pushed out, and the Bay Area will be better off without them around.
- Two4 3y ago</s> ⬅ here, you forgot your closing tag
- shiroiushi 3y agoInterestingly, I actually do wish all these lower-income workers would leave the Bay Area (or at least the highest-priced parts): I'd love to see how all the NIMBYs fare without any supermarkets, restaurants, schools, or firefighters.
- infotainment 3y agoOh they’d do fine — don’t worry, those low income people just love to spend hours and hours commuting from the Central Valley. Their lives will become worse, but not the NIMBYs!
- firstplacelast 3y agoI would love to just see a hyperlocal minimum wage set in CA that's tied to housing prices. Live in enclaves with an average home of 10M dollars, your house cleaner will need to be paid $500/hour type thing.
- shiroiushi 3y agoWhat I'd like to do is pass a state law that requires employers to pay commuting costs for their employees, plus only allow up to one hour of unpaid commuting. So, suppose the only people applying for your job live 2 hours away. You'll have to pay 1) the federal mileage rate ($0.50/mile??) (or better yet, an even higher state rate to account for higher costs of car ownership there), or buy the employee a company car, for their commute time, and 2) the employee will get paid for 3 hours of commuting time, and only have to actually work 5 hours on-site (but getting paid for 8), so you'll have to hire another employee to cover the time difference. These people living in 10M homes should be paying $500 per plate to eat at a restaurant and $20/gallon for milk from the supermarket. And yes, $500/hr for the house cleaner. Here in Tokyo, it's normal (maybe legally required?) for employers to pay for employees' commuting costs. Of course, since the best public transit system in the world is here, a commuting pass doesn't cost that much.
- chucksta 3y agoDefinitely earned their place leading some internal jail improvement programs
- fortran77 3y agoIt’s not ok to steal public funds. It’s sad that you think that merits a reward.
- Y_Y 3y agoReminds me of the opening of the Suez Canal, where a British naval ship did something that obviously pleased the admiralty but which they were obliged to condemn. > As the time approached for the ships to ceremoneously enter the new canal for the first time, the contingent of British ships were second to the French in the congested approach. Captain Nares had difficulty accepting this positioning, and so, during the night and without using lights, he maneuvered Newport forward into an inextricable position in front of the French yacht accorded the honor of entering the canal first. The French were understandably upset, and protested to the Admiralty. Captain George Nares received an official reprimand from the Admiralty, but was, apparently, the object of great admiration for his clever actions, and was questioned at length about how the feat was accomplished. From https://web.archive.org/web/20151009025658/http://aquarium.ucsd.edu/Education/Learning_Resources/Challenger/people1.php https://web.archive.org/web/20151009025658/http://aquarium.u...
- mistermann 3y agoConsidering it costs $900k for affordable housing, I'm not sure what the word wrong even means at this point. If democracy is good (the greatest?) and that's what it produces, I think we might have to start redefining the meanings of plenty of words...or should, anyways. Oh well, I'm sure it will all work out fine as long as we think positive.
- rendall 3y agoYour thesis here is that since housing is unaffordable in California, and California is a democracy, therefore democracy produces unaffordable housing?
- netsharc 3y agoThe old quote is, "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.". It feels like whatever -ism you want to organize society under, you have to have checks and balances, in order to prevent things like grift causing 900k apartments...
- rendall 3y agoIt might be too broad a brush to paint capitalism or democracy as the unique cause of the Bay Area problem of unaffordable housing, given that affordable housing exists in both capitalist and democratic regions in the US and around the world.
- mistermann 3y agoWhether "unique" is in the claim is not a trivial detail. One should always be wary of bugs in the interpreter, they are far less battle tested than compilers, operating systems, etc.
- netsharc 3y agoMy point is, the -ism doesn't matter, corruption exists everywhere, so saying the corruption is the result of capitalism/democracy is bullshit. Indeed a "proper" democracy seems to be a lot more resilient against corruption, although I wonder if it's more to do with the society's cohesiveness, e.g. in Scandinavia. Then again the crazies like to call Scandinavia "a socialist hell hole", so maybe even socialism can be done right if you have the right society...
- dheera 3y agoI don't think what they did was wrong at all. They were serving their city, they have every right to be housed by it and not be priced out by greedy landlords.
- hackerlight 3y agoMisusing public money (instead of their own money) was wrong but I don't have a problem with the squatting part. There wasn't a clear victim and it satisfied someone's need for housing in otherwise unused property. That's commendable, even if it was illegal.
- roughly 3y agoIf they’d paid for it with their own money I’d have a hard time getting real mad about this.
- splitbrain 3y agoI wish there were pictures. I am having a hard time imagining what "apartment in a train station" actually means.
- poisonborz 3y agoThey are converted offices, I imagine something akin to resting rooms for rescue workers. I wonder what the plan was. They could never profit from this. They risked so much just to have a hidden sleepover place between commutes?
- Yoric 3y agoWell, given the prices in Bay Area, perhaps they were simply priced away so far that it saved them several hours per day? Or perhaps it was closer to family?
- tomjakubowski 3y agoOne of them, the deputy director, received $270k in pay (before benefits) in 2021. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2021/san-mateo-county-transit-district/joseph-v-navarro/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2021/san-mateo-co...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- infecto 3y agoThank you for sharing this. I hate all the hoops everyone is using the justify why it was ok what they did. These were not some sort of sleep area for all employees, these were private accommodations for these two individuals.
- Animats 3y agoThe Daily Journal had pictures. I go by the Burlingame station, which is a nice Spanish-revival station from the Southern Pacific days.[1] SP built good stations, and Caltrain maintains them mostly as decoration. I'm surprised they don't put a Starbucks in each one. Google Street View coverage is so good that you can see the apartment.[2] [1] https://flickr.com/photos/rajbhatnagar/5626838344 https://flickr.com/photos/rajbhatnagar/5626838344 [2] https://earth.google.com/web/@37.57977486,-122.34480873,10.51372621a,0d,60y,266.97527424h,90.04717249t,0r/data=IhoKFnF0MGk3emVfaXhrNGF6cWJSNnp3T2cQAg https://earth.google.com/web/@37.57977486,-122.34480873,10.5...
- lores 3y agoEndearingly amateur work next to Untergunther, the people who built an apartment and a workshop behind the clock of one of Paris' most famous buildings, repaired it, and left. https://urban-resources.net/untergunther.html https://urban-resources.net/untergunther.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/26/france.artnews https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/26/france.artnews
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- zer00eyz 3y agoOhhh this tops my first thought: https://collider.com/secret-mall-apartment-jesse-eisenberg-jeremy-workman/ https://collider.com/secret-mall-apartment-jesse-eisenberg-j... I gotta say fixing a clock is way more impressive than a secret mall apartment.
- pbronez 3y agoAny idea where you can watch that? All I can find is the SXSW event
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mathnerd314 3y agoAre they still active? Can't find anything much later than this 2012 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99z-GT8y1jA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99z-GT8y1jA
- Nursie 3y agoOr there's Van Allen, who built himself a 14x10 concrete bedroom under part of London's Hampstead Heath... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22493078 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-how-homeless-man-built-life-underground-bunker-hampstead-heath https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-...
- habitue 3y agoThis is the kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism that is illegal to build in most American cities
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThere are malls with included housing in Shanghai, but the housing is luxury hotels.
- kragen 3y agoto clarify, they're not being charged for building apartments without a permit, or trespassing on the train station, or anything like that; they're being charged for embezzling public funds to construct housing for themselves. the location of the apartments is relatively irrelevant
- throwitaway222 3y agoThe funny part is that when the government does it, they give themselves a pat on the back for spending 500k - 1M for a 700square foot space for 1 homeless person.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bufferoverflow 3y agoOr over $1M for a modular toilet https://www.silive.com/news/2023/03/1-million-for-a-toilet-in-a-nyc-public-park-talk-about-waste-opinion.html https://www.silive.com/news/2023/03/1-million-for-a-toilet-i...
- roughly 3y agoOh, yeah, that’ll do it. As Chris Rock said, never commit two crimes at the same time.
- skissane 3y ago> they're being charged for embezzling public funds to construct housing for themselves Did they actually "construct housing for themselves" though? They never owned said housing, I think at all times it remained the property of their employer, and I assume all their use of it only occurred while they remained employees. Now they are no longer employees, they no longer have access to that housing, whereas their employer is free to use it as they see fit. If they'd used public funds to pay for the renovation of their own privately owned residence, that would be a very clearcut case of what you are talking about. I think this case is not clearcut.
- karaterobot 3y agoA lot of the article is devoted to people being surprised they could build two apartments in the Bay Area for $50k. I hate to be this HN guy, but they didn't build anything. From what the article says, they took an existing structure and added a shower and sink to the existing plumbing, and installed some countertops, and some security cameras. They did all the work themselves, so the $50k is just for what seems to be two rooms worth of materials. They didn't buy the land or build a structure from the ground up. Without knowing more details, an average of $25k actually seems high to me if I think about turning a small office into a bedroom with a kitchenette. One guy spent $8k, which seems about right, and the other guy spent $42k, which seems enough to build a pretty swanky bachelor pad.
- dilyevsky 3y agoWell if they hired somebody else to do it, 8-42k bid difference is possible - i’ve seen worse.
- justinclift 3y agoIt kind of sounds like one of these guys just expanded out a break room to avoid having to do the commute so often. If he'd shared it with his team members he might have been able to spin it as something official. ;)
- noodlesUK 3y agoSee also another daring act of guerrilla building: a homeless guy who built an underground bunker in Hampstead Heath, a park in London. No embezzlement was required for that one, and it lasted for years. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-how-homeless-man-built-life-underground-bunker-hampstead-heath https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-...
- mb7733 3y agoThis was a great read, thanks for posting it. I didn't really understand what he received so much jail time for though...
- qup 3y agoHe was found guilty of owning an improvised firearm that he maintains he had nothing to do with
- mb7733 3y agoRight. But as the article tells it, it wasn't even found in his possession; it was found with a bunch of junk in a park, along with some of his mail. Apparently his DNA was on it but then they admit there was doubt about how conclusive that was. I'm just amazed that that kind of shaky evidence could result in a 5 year prison sentence. All that aside, what the hell is a pipe gun? What exactly did they find? A length of PVC... https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/homeless-man-living-on-hampstead-heath-jailed-for-making-and-burying-gun https://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/article/homeless-man-livi...
- hiatus 3y agoFrom the image, that does not look to be PVC but a metal pipe. It is possible to create a firearm from a pipe that can fire shotgun shells. Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJUtEnCLVUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJUtEnCLVUI
- amarshall 3y agoMeanwhile, in NYC… https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/secret-man-cave-discovered-below-grand-central-platform-3-mta-employees-busted/2634061 https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/secret-man-cave-discov...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- palmfacehn 3y agoThree employees utilized an unused and unknown space as a break room and, >"It just completely destroys the reputation of Metro North, it's so disturbing on so many levels," said Rinaldi. "These employees should not be doing this when they're on the job, so to have this thing set up it completely unacceptable."
- gaucheries 3y ago[flagged]
- jhatemyjob 3y agoThis is based on so many levels
- non-chalad 3y agoBased literally only at the foundation of the building.
- Loxicon 3y agoMeanwhile, the politicians that were enriched by SBF and FTX are still at large...
- throwaway743 3y agoGood for them even if they did embezzle. If it was an exorbitant amount and for luxury, fuck that. But what they did was convert a space for modest housing on a small budget. Rather have my tax money go towards that than insanely overpriced gov contractor projects riddled with fraud, waste, and abuse
- wiml 3y agoPaging Geoff Manaugh. Geoff Manaugh to the courtesy phone, please.
- dinobones 3y agoConstruction cost a mere $50k? These guys should be promoted to top management in SF public servants, with that kind of money management they could house all the homeless.
- SllX 3y agoBringing them into the system would only bring costs in line with existing costs now. It's not that construction labor and materials are overly expensive, it's that union construction labor, materials, permits, inspections, lobbying, and community meetings, are expensive. Plus they didn't pay for the land either.
- csharpminor 3y agoMore people need to know about the role unions play in obstructing new construction. From locking up permits in CEQA reviews to blocking pre-fabricated structures, they are one of the driving factors behind a housing unit costing $700k at the very minimum. This puts housing out of reach for anyone making less than $150k/year. It’s a 3rd rail issue for anyone in the democratic machine, which is why we won’t see meaningful progress in housing or homelessness under the current incumbents. I’m actually pro union in most other contexts, especially when workers are underdogs. But in CA there are some unions which are quite powerful, exclusionary, and have negative effects on society.
- Moru 3y agoIf not the unions, there is always someone else that drives the prices up. In Sweden we don't have this problem with the Unions but it's still very expensive with housing.
- csharpminor 3y agoThe same problem can have different causes. Forgive me, but this sounds like rationalized fatalism. I’m genuinely curious, what keeps Sweden from building more cheap housing?
- wibbily 3y agoAround the turn of the century, an artist did something similar in a Rhode Island mall; he found a void space left over from construction and turned it into a furnished apartment. Incidentally I think he's still banned from the property. https://trummerkind.com/mall/What_Happened.html https://trummerkind.com/mall/What_Happened.html
- dheera 3y agoWhy not charge the greedy landlords that priced them out of the cities they were serving?
- arwineap 3y agoWhat would you charge them with?
- imgabe 3y agoHousing interprets regulation as damage and routes around it.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoOTOH I think regulators sometimes interpret more housing as "unruly" and try to block alternative routes.
- 999900000999 3y ago>Former Caltrain Deputy Director Joseph Navarro and contractor Seth Andrew Worden face felony charges for misusing public funds to build the mini apartments in the historic Burlingame and Millbrae stations. Neither facility is being used by the public. Click bait headline. I imagine if they used their own funds instead they'd just be told to stop. Homeless people tend to not get charged for encampments. How about commuting the sentence and putting them in charge of public housing. Seems like they're doing for much cheaper than the state.
- keyle 3y ago"Life, uh, finds a way..."
- gfaure 3y agoThis reminds me of an urban exploration video on YouTube taken in a dead mall, where the people found a hidden apartment in a crawlspace where someone had apparently been living — there were signs that the area was being actively used.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwiforgtnlzy 3y agoReminds me of a plot element of the difficult-to-find movie called Shooting Fish (1997) where 2 guys squat inside a giant water tower and turn it into their secret lair. (Yes, it's fiction.) Meanwhile, mere mortals can't afford Bay Area rent and either commute insane distances, live in their cars, or leave. In other news, people do sometimes live in surreptitiously in storage units. And if you're really very poor, squatting in property that is unused and locked up for investment purposes seems a moral duty.
- tomcam 3y agoReal-life upgrade to the boomer classic “From the mixed-up files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler”
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoText-only, works where archive.is is blocked: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2024/04/06/two-bay-area-railway-workers-charged-for-building-secret-apartments-inside-train-stations/&sca_esv=e4952731b002d90d&ie=UTF-8&strip=1&vwsrc=0 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=5038774415350316&w=OXpJ7sq9hgvzXrTQMuSmzXf7ZVG0SqvV https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=5038774415350316&w=OXpJ7sq... links -dump https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2024/04/06/two-bay-area-railway-workers-charged-for-building-secret-apartments-inside-train-stations/
- skissane 3y agoI wonder what Caltrain is going to do with these "secret apartments" now they have been discovered? Allow staff to use them officially? Rent them out to the general public (could be difficult due to security issues)? Abandon them in place? Destroy them? I wonder if the defendants' lawyers are going to try the argument that they weren't "misusing public funds" because they built them for a "work-related purpose" (e.g. have somewhere to crash after overtime, which might enable them to get more rest and hence improve their work performance), and if they do make that argument, whether it is going to fly with the judge and/or jury.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Drunk_Engineer 3y agoWhile these guys were taking a few grand for a kitchenette, Caltrain top management gave away $150 MILLION to some well-connected friends for the failed CBOSS signal system project. CBOSS was an complete sham, but of course nobody will go to jail for that.
- gxs 3y agoExactly, or the billion+ spent on “feasibility” studies for building a rail line between SF and LA. What a joke.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ant6n 3y ago> Former Caltrain Deputy Director Joseph Navarro and contractor Seth Andrew Worden face felony charges for misusing public funds to build the mini apartments in the historic Burlingame and Millbrae stations. Neither facility is being used by the public. Wait, what is the crime here?
- sokoloff 3y agoIf I take public money (either cash or paid working time) and convert that to a use directed by me rather than public benefit, why wouldn’t that be fraud/theft and maybe embezzlement?
- mschuster91 3y agoIf anything, these two should be acquitted, and instead Caltrain be charged for letting space where people could live in go so unused and uncared-for that it took whistleblowers to find out the "illegal" conversion. With property comes responsibility, and clearly Caltrain didn't give a fuck about its property.
- everyone 3y agoI have often thought of finding some obscure nook or bit of waste ground in the city and simply building a secret house there.
- xuhu 3y agoA cabin in the woods doesn't have the same charm it used to have, it seems.
- api 3y agoImagine for just a moment if the Bay Area had started back in the 90s building housing aggressively to meet demand, as well as good transit and related infrastructure. Today it would be the greatest city in the world. Really. It’d be like a cross between Tokyo, Berlin, and Shenzhen. It would be well on the way to passing NYC in GDP and probably would soon become the world financial capital. It would be the tech capital of the world and maybe even the cultural capital since real estate hyperinflation would not have driven away all the artist types. The Star Trek world element of Starfleet Command being in SF would seem prescient, not one of the least believable elements of the world. (SF would never build enough housing for that!) I would probably live there instead of being thankful that I managed to build a strong career in tech without doing so. But no, its residents instead wanted to preserve a time capsule of the 60s and 70s and that interest overlapped with the cynical interests of real estate speculators. So instead we get the world’s only slum for rich people, a place where only the mega rich can afford to live and the streets are littered with homeless. A place that pretends to be “woke” and progressive while pricing out anyone who makes less than $200k. A place that is doing its best to divest itself of its core industries and has already driven out everything that once made it culturally cool. SF is doing to itself as a city what a chunk of its residents are doing on the street with fentanyl. Absolute suicide. But hey I guess you saved some old houses and preserved the “character of the neighborhood” once you pick up this week’s load of OD corpses. Other cities should take note. NIMBYs must be opposed ruthlessly, everywhere, without compromise. Don’t let them hide behind fake political posturing. If you oppose housing you are not progressive. You are consigning people to poverty and homelessness.
- brianleb 3y agoAbout a year ago, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board was found to have a "secret sex room". https://veritenews.org/2023/06/26/payroll-fraud-and-a-secret-sex-room/ https://veritenews.org/2023/06/26/payroll-fraud-and-a-secret...
- selimthegrim 3y agoSewerage and Water Board is often an employer of last resort for people released from Angola.
- Wohlf 3y agoWell any empty room with a door lock can be a private sex room if you really need one.
- ambyra 3y agoMy fav takeaway is that no one is angry at them. They built nice homes for 10 and 40k. If they were to do it legally, it would cost 900k. Where are the extra 850 Ks going? Transit workers probably don’t make much money in the first place, maybe they should be provided housing anyway.
- stetrain 3y agoValue of land and cost of utilities. If you want to build a 6 unit residential building in the Bay Area you first have to buy the land it will go on, and then build a building on it which will tie into and distribute utilities for electricity, water, sewage, and possibly gas. The cost of finishing out each unit within goes on top of that foundation which already existing in this case, where the units were converted offices inside existing buildings already owned by Caltrain. Maybe it should be easier to rezone and repurpose existing land and buildings into residential units. A lot of the regulations that hinder conversion of non-residential buildings into residential are there for good reason, for things like ventilation and fire escape. Regulations written in blood after previous tragedies.
- ambyra 3y agoI don’t understand what new codes they would need to follow, these buildings were already made to be occupied by people, with all applicable codes covered.
- stetrain 3y agoMost residential codes require an exterior openable window in each bedroom. If you take an office building and subdivide it into residential units that may not be easily achievable. Things that may be adequate in a large open floor office may not be when turned into individual separated dwellings.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoI would think anyone having outstanding financial leadership ability, who cares about the financial shortfall resulting from this kind of irregularity, would seriously consider recovering an amount equal to the misdirected funds (and then some) using the Airbnb technique.