Ask A Genius 720: New Work, New Place, New Comments

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/14

[Recording Start]

Rick Rosner: You just moved into a new place which sounds great; your place of employment which is this giant equestrian joint catering to dozens and dozens of horses and riders and competitors and you have a really great apartment there and that led us to talking about living spaces. So I can give you the history of my living spaces. Starting when I was two, my mom married my stepdad and we moved to Boulder and we lived in a rental house and then when I was four we moved into the house that I would live in until I was in my 20s. 1600 square feet, not a big house; my mom always wanted a bigger house and thought we could get one. My dad was always turning her down because it turns out unbeknownst to my mom, my step Grandma who was apparently like soap opera villain mean, my stepdad managed the family business; a lady’s ready to wear a store and had a secret deal. I mean it didn’t have to be secret but he kept it secret from the family. 

At any time if his mean ass mom decided she wanted to get rid of the store he had to have enough money on hand to buy the entire business. So he never felt comfortable buying a nicer house because he needed to have this nest egg in case my step grandma decided to fuck with him. So we lived in this fairly small house for all my growing up years. Then I went to my hometown school because I kind of had a nervous breakdown or just a freak out or just a whatever bad behavior thing where I wanted to go to Harvard but then I didn’t because I figured I’d never ever get a girlfriend. Anyway, I fucked up my chance to go to Harvard. I came back to my hometown school, University of Colorado and I lived in the dorms off and on kind of half-assedly because I always could come home and spend the night there. My parents’ house is like three quarters of a mile from campus. I could just walk home with my bag of laundry or drive home if I had a car at the time and so I’d live in the dorms kind of half-assedly, move in late which was bad and stupid because you want to move into the dorms as soon into the school year as possible because that’s when everybody gets drunk and fucks each other. And so I missed all the hooking up just because I was lazy which was stupid because all I wanted to do was get laid but I didn’t figure out the strategy. 

So, a dorm is like 10×11’, so I’m living in 110 square feet when I’m in college, 120 maybe. I met my wife when I was living in the dorms. I was way too old. I knew I was getting too old to live in the dorms when I was too old to scare the other people in the dorms like I didn’t give a shit about the accoutrements of living. I liked working in bars and I’d occasionally get laid you know somebody would take me home. I’d occasionally take somebody back to whatever miserable place I was living though not my parents’ house, that would have been weird and I just never did the thing where you get an apartment and you build a whole adult life. And I’m going to college half-assedly and for the first couple years um I could scare people into turning down their fucking stereos. I’d walk out in the hall in a towel all veiny and covered with scars and muscly and bam bam bam on the door and I’m like “Turn down your fucking stereo.” They’d turn down the stereo and that worked until I was 24-25 and by then when you get to be that age and you’re still in the dorms you’re just a weirdo. It’s like its way too old to be in college. So people quit being scared of me. And so I knew it was time to leave college and go back to high school one last time.

So, I moved to Albuquerque and lived with my dad and my brother half in the closet in my brother’s bedroom; they lived in a condo. There was room to put the mattress I was sleeping on was half in the closet so that was okay but then my dad got married for a third time and I got kicked out. Then I moved into an apartment where I paid of 122.50 a month to have a room that was 6×12 foot. So I lived in 72 square feet plus I had use of the disgusting rest of the apartment including like a toilet that would drip water. It was on the second floor and when you flushed water would go from the toilet… I guess the tank, it wasn’t poo water. It would go from the tank into the kitchen sink just drip through the ceiling.  There were generally no cleaning utensils. Usually you had to go into the backyard. The two guys I lived with were stoners and they just let a bunch of dirty dishes and pots and shit accumulate and then one stoner guy is like “I don’t want to wash all these, I’ll just take them into the backyard” which is this little patch of dirt and just hose them down which since they’ve been sitting in the sink for weeks or months didn’t do anything to clean them. So the stoner he just said fuck it and there was just a bunch of stuff in the back. Somehow I had a pot of my own where I would cook a Hungry Man clam chowder with a can of tuna mixed in, that was my breakfast.

So then I did a semester of that. Rent went up at one point to 127.50 a month. Then I moved to New York and moved in with my girlfriend now wife and we lived in 300 square feet. We had a bedroom that was 200 square feet, a kitchen that was about 70 square feet and a bathroom that was about 50 square feet and then there was another bedroom that we rented out to a succession of roommates including a guy who just wanted a place to keep his cats because I think his girlfriend was allergic to them. So, anyway 300 square feet, New York City, 100^th in Broadway, above a restaurant bar which sucked because bars in New York City closed down at like four in the morning and assholes would leave singing at 4am. 

Then we moved to Brentwood in LA and lived in 700 square feet. Then we bought her grandparents’ condo in Encino. After her grandpa died grandma got too old to live in the condo, so we were living in 1300 square feet and we moved into our first house which was 2200 square feet and then we moved into the current house and along the line I’m getting decent. We move into the house we’re in now just as I got steady work with Kimmel and this is a housey fucking house at this point. It started as 2600 but then we pushed out a little bit, now it’s 2700 or 2800, plus we turned the attic into a usable space, so it’s a big ass house. And now it’s just Carol and me and it’s too much house but that’s okay because we paid it off a long time ago. And it’s a really a huge house if you’re one of the little dogs we have. The dogs are like 1/5^th our height. So multiple everything by five cubed and it’s not a five squared because let’s go off an area, so 25 times 3000 square feet basically. The dogs live in the equivalent of a 75,000 square foot house not that they care, they sleep 12 hours a day.

Our trajectory has been to live in more and more spacious places otherwise that trajectory is probably done with. Now we’re probably on the down slope of that, the next place we move into will be smaller and as we get older and more debilitated, well if we’re lucky we’ll end up in senior living and then maybe in Board and Care like Carol’s mom has gone from 2800 square foot house to a 700 square foot apartment and in Senior Living to a 200 square foot room in a Board and Care Facility. So, that’s the way it goes in terms of square footage birth to death. 

There’s been a trend in America and probably the rest of the world, well not Europe; Europe is less as holy than we are. The average size of an American house has gone from probably 1100 a thousand square feet in 1900 to 1500 square feet in 1950 to probably 2500 square feet now because people just have to… well with higher ceilings you’re nothing if you don’t have 10 foot ceilings on your first floor. We don’t have that. This house was built in ‘66 and it has 8 foot 2 inch ceilings which are perfectly fine except probably not grand enough for the neighborhood where older houses get knocked down and replaced by 4000 square foot houses for 3 million dollars. 

So this house is not grandiose enough. In fact, we got a deal on it when we bought it in ‘98 because it was built for a big family in ’66, so it has a lot of small bedrooms, very small master bath; it was four feet wide which is just nothing and kind of had an inferiority complex. So it was very cheap per square foot and per the neighborhood. Then we fucked around with it, turned the master bath into a reasonably sized bathroom but it’s still not going to be grand enough. So, it’s odds are 50-50 that when we sell the place it’ll be knocked down even though the house will sell for given since there’s a housing shortage since it’s L.A, we’ll get seven figures for the house even though they’ve paid that much for it, they’ll knock it down and likely… The house might be big enough and it’s got a third floor; the attic. There’s a reasonable chance that they will just tear out the guts of it and push it out the back and expand it to 4000 square feet and then sell it for 3.2 million which will be none of our business because we’ll have sold it and moved on. 

The housing in America is like everything else in America; it’s gaudy and wasteful though the LA building code within the last 10 years, the code book went from being this thick to being about this thick with earthquake proof and Green Building. I mean the like this place has a lot of windows and got the shit hammered out of it in the ‘94 earthquake. We didn’t live here then but we know that it got beaten up and it doesn’t have a lot of shear panels because a lot of L.A houses don’t have a lot of windows because you make houses earthquake resistant with 4×8 panels of plywood built into the walls and you need a certain number of these to make the house shake proof. A house destroys itself in an earthquake when it doesn’t rock as a unit. A house survives by rocking as a rigid unit. It destroys all the shit inside as the whole cube of the house rocks but the house itself stays intact as long as it’s got enough shear panels to transfer force evenly throughout the house so the bottom of the house doesn’t move more than the top of the house.

So, we didn’t have any shear panel because this house was built before that. So, 10-12 years ago we tore open the corners of the house and put in Hardy frames which are just metal frames that anchor the… well, they do the same thing; they keep the house moving as one integrated unit instead of swaying as a bunch of separate floors. And people bitch about L.A building code but it’s better to have hard ass building code than have what happens when there’s a huge earthquake in Guatemala and Guatemala City and 7000 people died. The Northridge Earthquake which was like a 6.8 or 6.7 substantial, not quite the big one, the big one will be in the 7s or maybe even an 8. I think only 63 people died in this, in an earthquake that killed a hundred times as many people if it occurred in a Central or South American country without decent earthquake codes though that’s not fair, I think a lot of other countries in earthquake zones now have decent codes, I don’t know.  

And then green building, so you’re not just like polluting or your impact on the environment’s a little better, you can get square footage bonuses if you build green where you’re only allowed to stop making mansions in L.A and a lot of other places, you’re only allowed to build houses that are like 40% the size of your lot. We’re on a 6000 square foot lot which is a pretty standard LA lot and under the current building codes, if you were building fresh you’d only be able to go to 2400 square feet because that’s 40% of 6000 but if you build green, they’ll let you pump it to 50% or go to 3 000 square feet which is just a lot of fucking house and we’ve looked at a lot of houses in L.A. 

L.A is the land of dumb construction because you’ve got people with a shitload of money and you have nice weather which means that the houses can be, except for being earthquake resistant, they don’t have to be weather resistant. So, there’s a lot of leeway and people just kind of let their imaginations roam free and their imaginations are shitty. So you have a lot of dumb fucking houses in L.A where in other cities like Denver for instance, where it gets cold and there’s a lot of brick construction. You don’t have brick construction except fake brick in L.A because brick doesn’t hold, it’s got no lateral… its sheer modulus is fucking tiny bricks sliding in an earthquake. So you need to build a structure that has integrity and then just put these half inch thick brick looking tiles across the front if you like brick. But anyway, not a lot of brick. Places like Denver you might have more consistency of design because it’s cold and people know how to build for the cold. Anyway, American houses; big and dumb, L.A houses; bigger and dumber. 

[Recording End]

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.