The City of Alexandria, Virginia has a new fire station built into a apartament building. The building is low rent for city workers consisting of firefighters, ems workers, police officers and school teachers.

  The lower section of the building is the fire station with four bays in the center with 15 single occupancy bedrooms, offices, kitchen, dining area, tv area, workshop, laundry and storage rooms.

 The four floors above the station consist of 64 apartments.

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Wow! now theres a Outside of the box concept.
Without delving into the socio-economics of this. Before the construction downturn, SDFD was going into a similar situation. For basically $450/mo HOA dues, they were going to get a new station to replace one built prior to WWII.(BTW it does have poles). With costruction costs of another downtown new station estimated to be $22 Million dollars, it made sense.
This is a great multi-use, high density housing way to do things. I saw this in several cities in Korea while I lived there, where a Fire Station was located in the first Basement level of a 30-40 story building, with parking garage under for three or four levels and the Ground level through third floors being business occupancies.

Korean Apartment developments usually consist of half a dozen towers of 20-40 floors, each floor with four very large (2500-4000 sq ft apartments, so having a fire station in that development is a good thing. These developments are actually mini cities with their own clinics, pharmacies, grocery stores, health clubs, night clubs, and even day care centers and schools. In some case little villages which were once run down farm houses, pooled their land and developed an apartment city and each villager then got their own apartment in the new cities and their share of the proceeds.

The Fire Stations I've seen in these cities range the basement station where the apparatus drove straight out and up an inclined ramp to street level to a stand-alone "Lego city" style station in the middle of the complex.

All in all, I think multi-use buildings with city services on the ground levels, including Fire Stations and EMS stations are the way of the future in urban and some suburban areas.

Greenman
It's a great idea! Once one city starts an idea like this, more will follow especially the way the economy is today. Not only is good for the city, it's good for the firefighters as well!

If the department had to put a recall out for a large incident, they would be available quickly! lol...
i say.....GOOD IDEA! i was a little concerned while reading this....just bc well the apt fires i always hear about but the ppl living in these apts u say are FF/EMS personnel n what not. i def agree with rusty on this one for sure! its a great way to conserve or save on space. i kinda wish something like that was available for volunteers...if we were to get a call you be like right there or for full timers, if you had to go in to work for back up youd be right there. i assume not every FF/EMS personnel lives there, a few of them prbably have houses n families but still for the guys that do live in the complex thats fantastic!
We had a volunteer company in our county that had thought about building a apartment building behind their station for their members but never got around to doing it.
Now one station in our county bought three single family homes behind their station and rent them to their members and their families.
Now our station owns 5 acres next to our station and there is property next door which may go up for sell because the owner couldn't get the property zoned to build some houses on it . So who knows what could come to be if we get to buy that. Build a new fire station or add another parking lot for fund raising or maybe we could look at Alexandria's idea.
is this a sprinklered, central station monitored structure?
I'd prefer to keep my home life farther away from my professional life.
By law all new buildings in the Washington DC area are sprinkled, including new built single family homes.
This is not new. Look at large cities. Some of their firehouses are are in highrise buildings. It's new to the suburbs. This firehouse is in a great location, not in a bad neighborhood. May be this is a good idea, but I agree with Ben. When I'm off, I'm off. I live 10 miles from my station, sometimes that is not far enough.
Kind of how Kentland in Maryland provides dorms for their college student volunteers.

Greenman
It's a lot like Soldiers living in barracks above their company headquarters.

Greenman

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