Foundations, Cattle and Clothes Dryers

A. Your family’s foundation rests on your home’s foundation.

Do you own an older single-family home? Houses built–or even reinforced–before 1980 often need reinforcing to keep them from falling off the foundation during a quake. Houses damaged this way are often written off as a total loss, and can present very serious life-safety danger in a quake. 

The repairs and reinforcement often require adding plywood panels to “cripple walls” (short portions of wall between the top of the foundation and the home’s floor), and new bolts to bind tightly the building’s wood framing to the concrete foundations.

Help is available. If your home’s foundation hasn’t been reinforced against earthquakes since 1980 you can qualify for a state grant to help pay for the work.The cost of this type of reinforcement is not huge, but significant–the state Housing Authority says it averages around $5,300. 

State grants are available but the application deadline for this year has passed, although registering for 2020's grant program may open early next year. The grants are awarded by the California Residential Mitigation Program, a joint effort of the California Earthquake Authority and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The program is called Earthquake Brace & Bolt, and applicants can register for a grant here: https://www.earthquakebracebolt.com/content/RegisteringforEBB

B. Beyond Meat will file for an IPO: why is this big news?

The L.A. company Beyond Meat makes vegan-based products that closely imitate the taste, appearance and texture of real meat. Their increasing popularity among health-conscious buyers has pushed the company’s products into more than 32,000 grocery stores and other outlets and restaurants, and attracted a slew of famous investors that include industry leaders and entertainment figures.

Background: The meat-alternatives industry grew by 22% last year, and now the company has signed up three major investment banks to help them file for an IPO. Why does this register on our radar? 

The popularity of plant-based meat substitutes could help reduce the number of animals used for food. Animals produce methane in huge amounts; an important factor in climate change. Methane accounted for about 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2015, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, and appears to be rising sharply in many parts of the world. The flatulence of cattle and sheep accounts for roughly half of the methane produced by human activity. The impact of methane on global warming is 28 times greater than CO2. If we reduce the amount of meat eaten by humans, we immediately reduce production of greenhouse gases.

Why it matters: the fact that a meat-substitute company is filing for an IPO with the help of large, mainstream banks (J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs) shows that efforts to fight climate change can be made commercially attractive and widely popular, and enjoy support within the interlocking economic structures of our society.

We have seen the success of Tesla and the increasing success of other electric car makers. Now we are witnessing a similar approach in other sectors of our economy. Climate-change sensitivity is going mainstream, and catching up with ideas that were considered, until recently, on the fringes. We should apply the same thinking to our municipal planning efforts (not that the City of Santa Monica hasn’t tried, but there’s a long ways to go, still).

C. Ventless Clothes Dryers: the better choice.

If you live in an apartment building and want to install a clothes dryer, you’ll soon discover the joys of attempting to vent the machine. Most apartment buildings do not include vents for clothes dryers in each apartment. What to do? You can purchase a ventless dryer that cools the warm moist air from the drum and condenses the moisture into a collection tray. No vent required, and no moisture released into the room. 

Ventless dryers come in two varieties. Some dryers, especially older models, use a continuous stream of cold tap water to chill the interior moist air and condense its vapor. That tap water is then discarded into the drain. Others use cool air from the room where the dryer is located. A variation on this second type is a dryer that uses a heat-pump to condense the water vapor and remove it from the machine.

Why is the air-cooled type preferable? Because it doesn’t waste large amounts of drinking water to dry your clothes. Water-cooled clothes dryers waste a lot of potable water. If we lived in a water-rich part of the country things might be different. But in our Southern-California water-constrained environment, we need to think about water with great care. 

A good solution is to simply avoid water-cooled dryers altogether. A better solution would be to outlaw their use in our City, something for City Council to consider. The best solution, if it’s available to you, is to use solar power to dry your clothes: the old-fashioned clothesline. After refrigerators and freezers, clothes dryers are the next biggest consumers of residential electricity.

Solar drying is better for the clothes, and better for the environment.

Daniel Jansenson, Architect, Santa Monica Building and Fire-Life Safety Commission