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tv   [untitled]    April 12, 2011 5:00am-5:30am PDT

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and occupancy of your building so we will always, if there's an issue we will go to the certificate of final completion and occupancy. that's you know, three story building and that's legally what you have according to our records. if you want to show us a mistakes has been made you bring that documentation forward. this is the key government document. someone mentioned the 3r report. it's a collection of records and not an original source. it's a collection saying yes there was a permit issued on such and such date. it's not the original. just a reference to the originals. if someone says my, 3r says two units but it's three, the 3r
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report is not the controlling document. it's simply an information compilation. here's a report on page 316. >> again, the 3r report is made up from the dob meants from the micro film so theoretically they should both match. >> but there are many things were where their are questions if their good. >> is there anything that's good? >> what is this complete compilation. there is no single source of documents and that's message i'm trying give. >> i don't think that you should be or make a blanket statement that people are saying 3 r's are not good but their limited utility. their intended to tell a buyer
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of a piece of property what the building department thinks it knows at any given time. that has substance and value. it isn't positive about the actual character of the building you need to go to source document. however if there is a conflict between what exists in the record and the 3r, that's something city agencies and repeal bodies will examine when you present that information. >> yes, sir.? >> you mentioned the certificate of completion and occupancy and the key document. how do we obtain those? >> that is one of the records you can request when you go to the micro film and say give us all certificates of final completion. >> but again not every building has a certificate of
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final completion and occupancy. one is because we have ns certificates before a certain time. you may say and we take that's a gospel. >> how do we find out how the building was constructed and you have multiple sources that conflict. how do you come to the truth? >> there are source s we'll talk about. the water department jeremy, right? >> spring valley water company. >> this on page 8 item two describes what these records are and if you go to the water department offices down across unite had had nations plaza on 1155 market street they will bring out the original document
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and their very efficient and quick and it takes a few minutes. they are all written on pencil on onion skin. you can find out how many horse troughs were approved and things like that which is often very useful in determining when there are multiple buildings on a residential lot it will help determine if the secondary building has a history of habitant occupancy or what occupancy it was. >> once again you can get those at what? >> 1155 market street. the manager of the water department that time gathers staff while the city was burning and some people were hauling buckets of water and
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somewhere hauling records out. if your researching a building that's pre 06. that's probably some of the best sources of information about your building that you will be able to find. you will be able to find who applies for the connection. sometimes it was the owner or the builder and the date it was connected and those go back to -- i've seen some from the late 18 60's. under the address. also the public library, 6th floor history room on micro film, the roll stuff, a copy of the ledgers by street. so if you're looking on 17th street, they'll have the water department will have put in by
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year, every person on 17th street that came in. so, it's not by address but by street and year. a little odd but across reference. >> so after the original document there will often be taped and stapled additional service records from various points in time when changes were made and you'll see those on item 41 and 42 and 40 are all these things. in this case they all say the same thing but it gets much more interesting when we're trying to get a chronological stockpile of how a building came to be. this is not saying again, it was a legal change but at,x time in the past, water department official acknowledged a new service hook
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up for that property, thus many city agencies will honor that's an accepting that's an a date when new water service was provided to a unit or something like that. >> other than the water department what other sources do we have for original information. >> sometimes the sand win map's. 80's to 96 you can bracket those. so it will show up on the 1899 but not the 1896 map you can narrow it down there if it existed on 1886 map and you don't know how much older than that it is and you can't find a water connection record, there's little hope. but sometimes you will be able
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to find. there's an 1869u sds,ge odectic, service map representation that's somewhat accurate, not where lots are provided but there's a little black dot and the whole thing is about 24 inches by 30 inches and covers the whole city. so it's not fine grained but you can say there was blob there in 1869. >> do they have this many the history room? >> yes. if you do a web search you can find it on-line. there's one source where you can actually like zoom in and there's another,us coast map from the 1850s but i would
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think pretty much any building from the 1850s is already kind of done. >> this gentleman has a question? >> are they consistent block numbers from year to year and agency to agency. >> they have changes. when the original city was layed out by the city surveyor it was called the 50 bar survey. when it was expanded to market. so up until the teens the city kept those as separate surveys and theres the different surveys in the outside lands which is sort of the western part of the city. >> the uninhabitable part of san francisco. >> they were different surveys and blocks in those. mission block 38 and then in
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the 19 teens or 20s everything was consolidated into the big block and lot list. so mission block 32 became block 3927 or something like that. >> this is a good time to put a plug in on the san francisco public library history room. on page 38 you will find a document how to research your san francisco building. they have lots of references to other agencies but quite frankly the san francisco history room in the san francisco library is a fantastic resource and people there are extraordinarily knowledgeable. and page 14 talks about when the photo collection is open. you have to wear white gloves and can look at a couple at a
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time and they will often have photos of your block or neighborhood or the ones that are fascinating and part of your collection as well. >> my experience with that resource has been really excellent over the years. they really take a lot of pride in the collection and get excited when somebody wants to use it. i encourage you to use these people as a resource. the street photographs are not the only resource for photographs that are really invaluable. they have a lot of news related photograph ss that are indexed sometimes by dris strict or street but never by address but that does not mean you won't see the address your after. san francisco heritage located in the,li z, 200 franklin
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street, 441 -- 3000. they have original print version of the sand born map from 1830s. building files and files on architects that practices in san francisco and major contractors that worked in san francisco their biographies and certain indexes that are not available else where. so i would suggest contacting them. >> and joining. it's a nonprofit organization that preserves san francisco heritage. >> okay i want to flip through some of these other materials we brought along to show you.
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not the building codes. here today, fantastic book you want to tell us about it. >> here today, is the end results of years worth of research done by the junior league of san francisco. a book published in the late 1960's and there's an enormous volume of research. architecture, social that went into the making and not every building researchs in the making of this book is published. there are background files that san francisco library history room, the planning department has an index but the library has on their web page the index you can download some you can go by the street and check to see if the number of your buildings listed and they will
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have a research file on that building. >> -- just to mention i have in, my here today, copy the resolution of boardrd of supervisors adopted this as an official list of resources in that time. so if you have your property lists or even in the back where there's a listing of olive street all of the shingles are a later addition it maintain as purity of line. especially is the blind window on the side. if your buildings listed in one of these your a qualified historical resource and you may use the space historical building code which provided alternatives to the other building code requirements and this is a great resource for us to approve the most important
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resources in the city. >> if that window needs to be repairs whoa to you. >> i get a lot of requests to use the state historic building code. it's called the san francisco golden age postcards and we had a copy of this and i suddenly realized a lot of people came in and they're not listed but i have this wonderful old photograph from wherever it might be. 1930s and i can use this to help document that it's appropriate to use the state historic cold or code and it's showing every aspect. old cable cars and when they were taken out officer vice and put out on the beach to make little houses and all over the city. great book. i'll pass that around. did you want to mention
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anything about it. >> i was going to touch upon the block book one last time. the library if you look on page 9 of the research guide they've got the block books from 1960, 94, 06, 07', 09' and 10. there was long thought to be along ellipse from the early part of the 20th century but i recently like two years ago found out the assessors office has the 19, 14 all the way through 1974 block books if you find your block and lot you can find out who owned that building up to the 50s i
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believe. at least through 1946 because we have a copy of the 46 so you can find out who lived there and if you go to the asses ri quarters office and they don't know what your talking about if you're looking straight ahead, there's a balcony that goes around the upper level and on the far left side there's a column that comes down from the call connie and it's at the base of that column that you can direct the researcher to go to get these micro films. >> talk about secrets of city government. that's great. >> i guess that's what i had to say. there's a little secret document out there. >> in terms of working with these agencies and little places where all this information lies, just as i was talking about how excited people are at the public
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library history room to help you you will find there's agencies not there to help you research your home as you might find. the assessor is thinking their job is to asses your home for taxation so your interest is not their concern necessarily. we talked about the property card each property has. this building card. most clerks when you approach them and ask for that they will send you to a computer monitor so to see what they have on-line. stand firm. you want to see the source document. they'll do it if you push them to do it. >> okay. couple more resources here. >> when you find out the people that used to live in your building, you can then go
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to the san francisco directories and their available that public libraries and they have many many years worth of these and you can find out that lawrence fox was married to betty who was a stockbroker and presided at 42 pacific avenue. you can find out if the owner was also occupying the building they owned so you can start to build a biography of the people that lived in your house through these city directors. >> i wanted to mention the building department has miscallaneous records of all sorts and let me just, a lon the length of letting you into the inner city secrets of records being kept. this is the unreenforced masonry building survey. we have people here on the
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third -- second floor that do upgrade work and we surveyed all the buildings and there's photographs and descriptions and some of it made it to the building department of records and we have soils reports. maybe very valuable if there's a voils report of your neighborhood. i bought my house and thought it was in ma great location. but the earthquake turns out shook our neighborhood really badly. the soils reports would have shown me that and will show you that and we have maybe tens of thousands by block and lot number here on the second floor that building department. on the six floor is the housing inspection division. they have their own separate records, what they call street
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files for buildings three or more units and sometimes fewer occasionally if their stuck away in there they have inspection records of all the multi-family buildings in san francisco and they're suppose to go out and look at them once every five years unfortunately, they recently cleaned the files out and we lost a lot of the day-to-day records of people. we have the summary documents but there's still quite a few. here's the secret. you look that files up there and you open it up and there's all these records and a lot of stuff you don't know sm gone, but inside the file is a pocket and inside the pock seat microfiche so, then you can request copies. how do they do that. >> there's a viewer to see, you can stick them in and see
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what documents are on that and if you need copies someone from housing will escort you to the micro film counter and wait your turn to get whatever prints you need. >> those are very valuable records and your goal should be to put together that complete binder. let's see. what other information. oh, the 76 survey files upstairs. >> we have the original files and we also, i guess there are two secret things i can share. lawrence held up the binder for the unreenforced masonry building. if your buildings on there and you think it's quite snappy, we have the negatives. we also have the negatives from the 1976 survey and if you make
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an appointment with me and my number is up there, i can make arrangements to have enlargements of these made for you. then, the 76 survey itself was a windshield survey that the planning department worked on with some graduate students that looked at what they felt in their served jury pool to be the representative top ten percent of the top stylist architecture so they gave us photograph and some information of the outside of the building from 1976 often thousand buildings in every part of the city. >> how do you know if yours is
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on that list. >> the planning department has a list of all the surveys any given property may not have background information on. you can call the planning information counter and ask that it be looked up and you can come in and -- >> -- okay. planning information counter. 583877. best to call early in the morning and be patient. we're currently under staffed. i would call at 8 o'clock. 8 a.m. and 30 minutes after. if you call at thirty to 5 preponderance you might not get anyone. >> we're almost done. another couple of minutes. but i want to point out one of the easiest references lying
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around the counter. we have one on the first floor of this building and one on the six floor and the floor next door. the san francisco realty directory. if you look at this you can find by address, on or broad rick street, the construction or type, single family dwelling, zoning code, value, block and lot. last sales date. walk up and all this information is right there so you don't even need to go to the library for that. >> that's information from the tax assessor so it should be
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the same information as the tax assessor. >> it's a good simple starting point. jeremy, what's that magnifying glass for that you have in your pocket. >> just because it has that sherlock holmes thing. so much of what i do involves looking through directories and all of these map's for changes that have been made and tracking when those things were done and there are other sources in text that can be very difficult to get through but have really wonderful pieces of information. the voters rolls. the pulp directories tell you things about the fabric of the city. i had an interesting case to establish a legal dwelling unit that had to pre date a certain
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date with a ceiling height and it turns out a person resided at this address that was a bartender and a regular sterd socialist. the owner of the building that lived there owned the bar and he was the current chairman of the socialist party of the city. with that city planning was willing to acknowledge the bartender lived in his bosses unit in the basement of his house. there you have it. >> amazing. we will stick around and answer questions after but we have to stop right now because the time is up and i want to thank jeremy, paul, and moses and alan and thank you all for coming and we'll see you next month. month. thanks.
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hello, i'm ivette torres. welcome to the 11th season of samhsa's road to recovery television and radio series . this episode will highlight the many accomplishments of the 2010 national recovery month observance and look forward to a successful 2011 campaign...so- join the voices for recovery: recovery benefits everyone. in 2011, national alcohol and drug addiction recovery month is expanding its reach to include the celebration and recognition of individuals, families, and communities who have overcome mental health problems and we have changed the name to national recovery month. recovery month offers help and hope not only for individuals receiving substance use and/or mental health recovery services