Gender-related turmoil in Iran – where will it lead?

Posted on December 6, 2022 by BeatingUpwind

Not sure how much you’re following what’s happening in Iran right now, but what’s happening is pretty major – and it’s directly connected to whether people (specifically women) have autonomy over their own bodies. The recent protests were sparked in late September by the death of a woman while in custody of the morality police after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly.

But the protests have continued, and so have the crack downs. Most recently there was an Iranian woman who competed in an international rock climbing competition and “forgot” to wear her hijab during competition. She was cheered as hero by the crowds when she returned to Iran, but was in serious trouble with the authorities. Now there are reports that her family home was just demolished by the police – apparently as retribution for what she did.

Meanwhile, the Iranian team at the World Cup initially refused to sing their national anthem, then they were threatened, and so they started half-heartedly singing the anthem.

If you don’t even have the support of your country’s major athletes and they’re looked up to by the masses – then you’re in trouble!

It seems like the Iranian authorities want things to be more like Afghanistan where women can’t even go to public parks while men are able to live an almost Western life centered around gyms and bodybuilding (fascinating article – highly recommended!)

But the Iranian population is pushing back and it’s unclear whether the authorities can control what’s happening. It feels like the more ruthless the authorities become the more people are throwing themselves into the fight.

There’s even an article recently about gay life in Tehran – curiously it’s centered around one of the most religiously conservative neighborhoods – so conservative that no one thinks to look for gay men there.

The point here is that it’s easy to take the typical American view that Iran is backwards and hopeless, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. It will be fascinating to watch over the next few months and years. I suspect there will be a revolution on the scale of the 1979 revolution. But then what?

When the hardline conservatives are removed from power – who will take up leadership of the country? Something tells me it won’t be as conservative as the other gulf states. This revolution will be based on personal freedom – especially bodily autonomy and huge strides in gender equality – which could lead to surprising results. Will there be a widespread rejection of religion since the current oppression is religiously based? Will the new authorities go as far as being OK with things like porn and LGBT folks (or at least not caring about stuff like that)?

Under the Shah the upper classes tried to westernize the country (instead of modernize it). It was their fatal flaw. But now it seems the masses want some form of modernization/westernization…

Anyway, if anyone tells you that the bodily autonomy, which women, gay folks and others depend on, isn’t a basic tenant of “freedom” – just point to Iran. It seems a lot of Iranians have figured out its importance. I wish them well in their struggle.

Our House Is On The Mount Morris Park House Tour This Sunday

Posted on June 6, 2013 by BeatingUpwind

I know this is a bit late to be posting this, but if you’ve been reading this blog and want to see our end result, our house will be on the Mount Morris Park Annual House Tour this Sunday, June 9, from 11am to 4pm.

That’s our place in the picture to the left. It’s in rather stark contrast to what you expect in a Harlem brownstone (see pictures below) – but we had no original detail to work with.

Apparently something like 600 people will be traipsing through our house. But it’s all for a good cause. MMPCIA does some really great work. We bought those little surgical shoe covers for people to put on so they don’t track too much dirt through the house.

MMPCIA (Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association) produced a rather good video about the house tour. It’s narrated by Syderia Asberry-Chresfield who lives on our block and has gotten to be a good friend.

Our entire house will be open – including the rental unit. (Our tenant was gracious enough to say yes to the house tour). That presented a bit of a staffing challenge for MMPCIA since they provide volunteers to monitor the people going through the house – but it all worked out.

We were hoping to get the garden to a point of completion. We’ve made progress, but it’s not quite there yet. We’re using old joists as “decking” that’ll be laid directly on the ground with pea gravel between them and under them. We’ve applied rot inhibitor to them but over time they’ll disintegrate. At some point we’ll do something better, but the joists will do the job for now and they fit our budget since they’re pretty much free.

Other than the garden, things are pretty much complete. We’re not fully decorated yet – we just have “placeholder” furniture in the living room, our master bedroom bed is just a futon on the floor, and we’re going to need furniture for the roof deck and garden – but we’re getting there. We’re a bit “house poor” at the moment – but grateful we got through the project and can afford to live here now that it’s done – even if we can’t afford all the new furniture we want 😉

More details about the house tour are available on the MMPCIA website. You can can also purchase advance tickets at a discounted price on their site.

So please join us on Sunday. And when you come through the house, feel free to say ‘hi’..

Do You Know Anyone Who Finished Renos In 2012?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by BeatingUpwind

Yesterday was the day that the Department of Finance released the tentative property tax valuations for the coming year. Our valuation went from $333K to $1.91M. That means our property taxes are going from about $3,500/year to something around $21,000/year! [Why does the City seem to want to punish people for improving their communities? I mean dealing with DOB is a nightmare, and now this…]

The way it’s supposed to work is that the amount of improvements to the property is added to market valuation of the property. Normally DOF is limited in how much they can jump your property taxes, but when you do substantial improvements that is the one time they’re allowed to bump the taxes up substantially – but only by the amount of improvements to the property.

If I understand things correctly they threw out the PW3 Cost Affidavit that we submitted to the Department of Buildings and instead used the number $1.46M which their appraiser appears to pulled out of thin air since it’s nothing close to the actual cost. Mind you, “cost” is one of those things that’s a bit flexible and open to interpretation since what you report to DOB is “hard costs” which don’t include everything you spend money on. But it’s not like we’re arguing over small amounts that might be due to the interpretation of “hard costs”. There is just no reality in which we could have spent $1.46M – we simply didn’t have access to that kind of money.

The reason why I’m asking in the title of this post whether people know of other people who completed their jobs in 2012 (and possibly even late 2011) is because I suspect there’s a problem assessor covering Central Harlem. 104 West 120th had an assessment last year of $262K. Their PW3 cost affidavit was for $315K and the assessor gave them a market valuation of $1.5M – so she’s in the same boat we are – it’s just the change isn’t quite as drastic as ours.

If a bunch of us can all band together and go to DOF together, then I think our individual cases will be strengthened and it will seem like the problem is with the assessor. If you know of anyone who might be in the same situation, please have them contact me – jay@beatingupwind.com. I’ll be happy to look up their particulars if they don’t know how to find them. And if you just know the address for buildings that had completed projects last year, please put them in the comments below and I’ll look them up and contact the owners if appropriate.

Update (Jan 21st):

In researching the situation – looking for other places that completed their work in 2012 – I discovered that it’s also affecting some of the folks who haven’t gotten their jobs signed off yet..

There’s a place on 136 that filed a preliminary cost estimate of $50,000, but they’ve had about $650K added to their market value by DOF before the renovations are actually completed. Their taxes will just about triple because of that – not as bad as our case, but they’re probably going to have more added next year when they complete their renovations.

But that’s nothing compared to what’s happening to 241 Lenox (which has also not completed their renovations yet)… They filed cost estimates totaling about $850K. The assessor has raised the market value on that place by $650K which doesn’t seem like a horrible thing on the face of it, but the problem is the tax class was not changed. So their tax bill is going from about $13K/year to a whopping $56K/year. I think they’re doing 2 family plus commercial. I don’t know if that qualifies for tax class 1. If it does, then keeping them at tax class 2 is just spiteful. It’s adding $40K to the cost of their renovations.

Hot Air Doesn’t Always Rise

Posted on November 2, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

When we were designing the house I wanted a recirculating duct from the living room on the parlor floor to the bulkhead 4 flights up. I figured in the winter we could pull the hot air from the top of the stairs down to the parlor, and in the summer we could push cool air up where it was hot.

Problem was, the architect wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea, and his mechanical engineer told me air in buildings didn’t work that way – that the hot air wouldn’t rise. That contradicted everything I had been taught in grade school. He said hot air only rises when there’s moving air. The air in a well-sealed house with the windows shut doesn’t move.

I didn’t believe him and when we got to the end of the project the recirculating duct was one of a short list of things I felt like I would have done differently if I could do it all over again.

Well, who’d have guessed – but the mechanical engineer was right. It’s winter and the top floor is at least 5 degrees cooler than the lower floors. It’s not because of poor insulation – we’ve got an R62 roof and R22 walls and great windows. At first I thought it might be just be that the room where I was when it struck me had had the door closed. But then I moved into the stairwell and it was the same there.

In the summer the area up in the bulkhead would get incredibly hot, but apparently that was because of solar heat gain from the large bulkhead windows (and glass door). But in the winter there’s less solar heat gain even – though the bulkhead is designed to capture winter light and discourage solar heat gain in the summer.

Now I’m perfectly happy the recirculating duct wasn’t put it. The air is cold up in the bulkhead – there’s no point of pulling cold air down into the living space in the winter. And likewise with the summer – we don’t need the bulkhead air conditioned.

The moral of the story is engineers know what they’re talking about. Who’ve guessed? lol

Electric Bills For Townhouse vs. Apartment

Posted on October 23, 2012 by BeatingUpwind

This is a blog post I’ll update as time goes on… But I’ve been wondering how much our utility costs would go up once we moved into a house. Here are the baseline numbers for electrical usage in our old coop. It was 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom, and about 1,350 sq. ft. in a 1939 pre-war (poorly-insulated) building with leaky window A/C units and a Sub Zero fridge:

Summer Average (’07-’09): 29.0 kWh/day
Winter Average (’07-’09): 18.3 kWh/day

Summer I defined as the June 20ish reading through the August 20ish reading. Winter I defined as the September 20ish reading through the May 20ish reading. Actually, winter is a bad term – “non-summer” would be better. So what you see above is the average of three summers (6 total months), and 2 winters (16 total months)

I should also mention that we work from home – so everything you see includes air conditioning during the day – but typically just for the rooms we were occupying, though Dan has a bad habit in the house of opening doors into unairconditioned spaces and cooling more of the house than is necessary. We also have at least one computer on 24 hours a day – since it acts as a server.

From 5/21 to 6/12 we used an average of 36.3 kWh/day (98% over winter average)
From 6/12 to 7/31 we used an average of 37.2 kWh/day (28% over summer average)
From 7/31 to 8/20 we used an average of 54.1 kWh/day (87% over summer average)
From 8/20 to 9/20 we used an average of 41.0 kWh/day
From 9/20 to 10/23 we used an average of 31.4 kWh/day (72% over winter average)

Now, mind you, the house is a lot bigger has more things going on. Instead of 1,350 sq. ft., it’s about 3,200 sq. ft. There’s 180 watts of light bulbs that are on from dusk to dawn (roughly 2 kWh/day). There’s a dehumidifier running the cellar 24/7 – it’s Energy Star certified, but it still uses a fair amount of power. The server we have running is more power hungry. There’s also a booster pump for water pressure, etc. All in all there’s just more electrical demand than there was in the apartment.

The average from 6/12 to 8/20 was 42.1 kWh/day. Since the period started a little earlier than it should have and there were some days we wished we had A/C before July 3 (when it actually got up and running), let’s call the summer average 45 kWh/day – that would be “just” 55% more than at the coop. I’m pretty happy with that, all things considered.

The average up to 6/12 and after 9/20 is 33.4 kWh/day. So once again we see power going up roughly 11 kWh/day for A/C during the summer. That’s great since we’re cooling more space than we did at the apartment with about the same amount of energy. In fact for about 6 weeks during that time Dan had the A/C on 24/7 up in the studio because he was making stuff out of fiberglass and needed to control the temperature. But our building is more efficient and the A/Cs are more efficient.

But the “winter” (non-summer) power is considerably higher. So far, the townhouse seems to consistently use 15 kWh/day more than our old apartment – that’s 80% more power. Electricity seems to be costing about 25 cents per kWh, so that’s less then $4/day, or about $115/month additional. But when you look at the list of stuff (above) that we didn’t have in the old apartment, it sorta makes sense that it costs more to run a townhouse that’s over twice the size of the apartment.

We also have data for our tenant. That’s a roughly 1,050 sq. ft. duplex apartment (basement & half of the cellar):

From 7/31 to 8/20 he used an average of 24.5 kWh/day (15% under summer average)
From 8/20 to 9/20 he used an average of 35.2 kWh/day
From 9/20 to 10/23 he used an average of 20.9 kWh/day (14% over winter average)

Our tenant also works from home. Theoretically his energy usage should be less than our old apartment – the square footage is less, the insulation is better and the A/C is more efficient. Plus, a third of the space is the cellar which almost never needs cooling. But he does have a dehumidifier running 24/7… His usage was 15% below our usage from late July to late August, but then the following month his electricity usage went up considerably for some reason. And then he was 14% over our winter usage in the past month.