I recently moved to a larger apartment to get a dedicated WFH office and have more space for our cats. However, I quickly started having internet issues with devices in the new office room. Amazingly, the first signal was an automated email from the company IT saying the fleet management software on my laptop detected a poor wireless signal and provided a guide for how to improve. I didn’t read into it until I started getting consistent video call drops, game disconnects, and download speeds 1/10th of what I used to.

Before experimenting, I wanted to establish a measurable baseline. Download speeds were too variable (1 mbps sometimes, 100 others). So I chose signal strength (RSSI). On my Mac, it’s visible by holding option and clicking the wifi menubar icon. On my desktop PC, I used InSSIDer. On my phone, I downloaded an app, but it’s also available in some developer setting.

I measured about -72±2 db at my desk. Not good.

The first thing I tried was picking a different broadcast channel on the router. I don’t live in a particularly large building, so nothing was too crowded and I didn’t see any difference in RSSI.

Next I tried moving the router around the living room. The desk is about 20 ft and around a corner from the router. I could cut 5 ft off by repositioning the router. No differennce, which surprised me since I thought the distance would matter.

A friend had a spare AC3200 router. I set that up in place of the ISP-provided one, which is of dubious quality. No difference.

Then I started to make a map of RSSI around my apartment to see if there were any weird artifacts. The living room was in the -40s db. The hall and doorway to the office was -50s db. But as soon as you turned into the office to face my desk, it went to -70 db. The doorway had line-of-sight to the router, while everywhere else in the room got poor signal.

Now I knew if I could get line-of-sight, the signal strenght would be improved. My desktop had an external antenna, so I could buy some more coax cable to place that in the hallway. But that wouldn’t help my work laptop. (I actually did this first since games are the priority, but bought the wrong cable and moved onto a general solution 😭)

A lot of folk on the internet said they solved similar issues by using a mesh network. I didn’t really want to spend more money since I had two routers already! I set up the ISP-provided on in my office and poked around the settings. No option to join an existing network or any sort of bridge/mesh mode. I looked through the Nighthawk router settings (and docs), but no luck either.

The Nighthawk router has two 5 Ghz radios. There had to be a way to get one to join a network and the other to broadcast one. I flashed the open source firmware Open WRT (super easy!) and found a guide for setting up bridge mode (lots of steps, but it worked on the first try!). I placed the 2nd, bridge router within line-of-sight to both the main router and my desk. All devices got in the -50s db RSSI! And the success was reflected in practical speed tests and game pings.

This was a fun project to learn a bit more about about radio waves propagate in an apartment and how to configure a network.

This summer, the CA state legislature voted on a number of bills to address the state’s housing shortage, including SB 1120, which would have legalized duplexes on most residential lots and fourplexes on some (it passed, but too late to reach the governor).

I recently wrote about how building a relatively small number of fourplexes could have a large impact on the housing deficit. That post proposes that the rarity of fourplexes means it wouldn’t impact a neighborhood’s character. My neighborhood has many ~fourplexes that blend in by looking similar to their surrounding single-family homes. I hypothesize that many <=4 unit buildings are actually the same size as many single family homes, thus fit in with the neighborhood character.

Results

The following graph shows the normalized distribution of building size for low-density buildings in LA county, grouped by their number of units. The peaks represent the most common building size with that number of units. The data is normalized, meaning the curves are stretched to have the same height. Single family homes are by far more common, so this was needed to make the curves comparable. A consequence is the fourplex curve is noisy since there are many fewer buildings to make up the curve.

These curves have significant overlap, meaning there are many existing fourplexes that are the same size as many single-family homes. Most fourplexes are larger than most homes, which makes sense since there are four times as many units in the building. There is even more overlap between single-family and duplex buildings, with duplexes being about a third larger.

For comparison, the graph below adds data for medium density (LA zone R3, or 5-25 unit buildings) and high density (LA zone R4/5, or 25+ unit buildings). There are a few medium density buildings that are the same size as single family homes – think a set of bungalows and a Palisades mansion – most are significantly larger. They are much closer than the high density towers, which don’t even share much overlap with the medium density buildings.

Conclusions

Duplexes, triplexes, and even fourplexes can fit into single family neighborhoods due to their similar possible size. Of course there are large fourplexes out there, but the data show that it’s possible to allow multi-family buildings without compromizing character with respect to building size. (And the power of zoning can be used to enforce those size limits).

This fits into my experience– e.g. my neighborhood has a few multi-family buildings (particularly SFHs with ADUs) that look like single family homes from the street and I’d only know the difference because I am interested in these things and look it up. This is a reason fourplexes are still considered “low density”.

The data also show how 5-25 unit buildings are the missing middle density. There is a lot of understandable fear of towers coming in and changing an area, but middle density is far from the size and density of towers, while providing much needed housing and walkability to an area.

Future Work

Buliding size is far from the only factor in how a building fits into a neighborhood. Objectively, the size of a building relative to its lot size is a measure of density and could be used to see if multi-family buildings are a significant change in neighborhood’s density. There are also subjective factors (e.g. design aesthetics, greenery, age), and economic impacts (e.g. gentrification and displacement of families) of development, which can be hard to model. The housing bills try to address those points, but I believe the uncertainty of how they might adversely affect people’s homes and neighborhoods have prevented the larger bills from passing.

I’m currently watching a CounterStrike tournament that’s nominally “hosted” in Cologne. Between actions they run B-roll shots of the German city, which make me nostalgic and jealous of the walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Particularly now in a COVID-induced WFH age, I’m very aware of how low-density and residential my neighborhood is.

Which prompted me to look into potential “denser” neighborhoods to move to, with the hypothesis: if more people live somewhere, there’s likely a higher density of interesting stuff to satisfy them.

There are other few constraints on where to look, such as commute times. So we picked a couple places, drove out there, and walked around to get a feel for walkability. They were deserts! Despite their >2x higher density (and proximity to some of our favorite places to grab a beer), they didn’t have the density of cafes/restaurants/bars we expected.

We plotted ~100 of our favorite places to go on the Westside, all places we’d love to live within a walk of. Then compared it to a map of population density. From initial glance, there’s not an obvious correlation between population density and density of (our favorite) commercial units.

Density goes from dark red (low) to yellow (high). Red pins: interesting restaurants/cafes; Yellow pins: places w/ outdoor seating; Green pins: grocery stores; Grey pins: Metro stations.

This observation makes sense– almost none of the westside is zoned as “mixed-use”, where higher populations and commercial business coexist in the same area. Instead, commercial properties are generally limited to the lot immediately adjacent to a major street. For example, Pico has a large number of interesting places on our map, but is boardered by blocks of single family zoning.

A few takeways I got:

1. There is a ton of intersting stuff within biking distance on the westside. Time to get the bikes in good shape again!
2. The separation of commercial and residential areas make most of the westside a (walkable) food desert. Legalize mixed density (or ACUs)!
3. The new Google office at the Westside Pavilion is surrounded by blocks of single family zoning. Those few thousand employees won’t be able to live nearby due to lack of housing.