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That's not progress; that's addiction to luxury and oppression. That's the opposite of progress.

A 30-story apartment building is not practical without indoor plumbing, structural steel, and grid power. The tallest dwellings prior to those maxed out at around 5 stories.

What qualifies as progress is a matter of opinion, but generally speaking, denser cities produce more rapid technological innovation.

I have no way of knowing whether the new mystery tech would make dwellings taller, or cheaper, or more environmentally friendly, or more mobile, or more self-sufficient, or better workspaces. It's the sort of thing that is only obvious in hindsight. It may already be invented, but does not yet have a practical and economical application.

Whatever it is, it might require a cartel enforcer to mandate it in order to yield greater benefit for the society as a whole. You're not being oppressed when the city forces you to give up your well and septic system and connect to the municipal water and sewer. In theory, you're achieving greater gains through (enforced) cooperation with your neighbors. In practice, you may be oppressed by official corruption in such a way that it wipes that common benefit out.

And luxury is relative. The poorest person in the U.S. can have a better defecation experience in a public park toilet than the richest king in the world could have had on his private, hand-carved night-stool 500 years ago. One day soon, it might be considered luxury to crap in a hole in the dirt... on Mars--as the alternative would be to do it in a pressurized closet, into a machine that recycles the water out of it and turns the rest into agricultural compost.

But you know what? It's not luxury to sleep on the sidewalk and get peed on by dogs after your house was bulldozed because it doesn't have indoor plumbing. Or because you didn't start building it in the first place. 30-story apartment buildings might be fine, but declaring buildings "uninhabitable" because they lack luxuries — and prohibiting people from living in them — is an injustice that falls heavily on the poor.

The intent of a building code and the actual result of its enforcement may differ by a wide margin. The injustice largely comes from selective enforcement under inappropriate circumstances.

I didn't intend to make a point about building codes, but rather about how quickly humanity changes its standards for technological advancement. For tens of thousands of years, a mud hut with tile roof and underfloor heating would have been a luxury accommodation. Now, for a lot of people, it's rustic and primitive, fit only for camping trips rather than permanent habitation.

Humanity is scary not only for its ability to construct shelters like this without any specialty-evolved biology, like a woodpecker's beak, a beaver's teeth, or mole claws, but because it can extrapolate the idea of shelter so far beyond our current survival needs that even a thing that well exceeds the minimum requirements is still considered obsolete.

Yes, and of course the result of building codes can often be justice — the people who died in the Haïti earthquake died of a lack of building codes, after all.

I agree that we take learn to things for granted quickly. I think that's unfortunate and leads to a lot of unhappiness. Forcing our addiction to needless luxuries on others is a significant way that it leads to unhappiness, but far from the only one. You also see people dying of lack of physical activity, for example.

I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the intent of a building code". Since we have not yet produced artificial general intelligence, building codes are not yet sentient entities with intent. Different people who supported the enaction of the building code had a wide variety of intents; the different people who convert it from a piece of paper into a pattern of human behavior, by enforcing it, also have a wide variety of intents. Most of these are unknowable.

The intent of the building code is the intent of the people who wrote it. The obvious intent of requiring seismically isolated foundations on new construction is to prevent deaths and injuries due to earthquake damage. The purpose of mounting newly-installed electrical outlets ground-hole up instead of ground-hole down is to prevent failure from a thin conductor falling onto the plug and bridging the hot pin to neutral. The purpose of requiring flush toilets was for better sanitation and less odor nuisance at a time when modern composting or incinerating toilets had not yet been introduced. The purpose of requiring low-flow toilets was... to make a concession to environmentalists while severely annoying everyone else with spinning unflushable turds?

For the most part, it is very easy to determine the original intent of a building code, especially relative to some other varieties of laws.

The enforcers of the building code sometimes betray that intent. This is unfortunate, but there is little that a legislator can do to control a cop or county inspector that may be separated from the consideration of the bill by time, distance, wisdom, and attitude.

Building codes do little good if they are not updated frequently, and appropriate for economic conditions. Earthquake-safe architecture in all residential buildings is not appropriate for Haiti, but it may be for vital infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, ports, power plants, and hospitals.

Thanks to changes in U.S. economic conditions, it may be necessary to revise building codes to make it easier for people to buy new homes costing $40k or less, rather than go deep into debt for an existing home with median price $230k. It does no good to mandate by law that the worst possible home that can be built is still too expensive for anyone to buy.

It should be obvious that one guy building shelters from scratch in the outback is not going to significantly affect the housing market. But there's always that one guy, that power-tripping bureaucrat out to make an example of someone, who ruins it. The problem is not the building codes. It's that guy, who uses them as a club to enforce conformity, rather than as a standard which may accommodate reasonable variances.

It's because of that guy that building codes should not have the force of law. You just can't put the power to knock someone else's house down in the hands of a jerk or an idiot.

While I agree with most of what you say, and it captures important aspects of reality, I think it's still a dramatic oversimplification of reality, to the point of naïveté, in two ways that are in some sense contradictory opposites.

First, it treats people as individuals unaffected by social forces, whose power is treated as unrelated to how they choose to use it. In reality, the dynamics of power in a social organization is an arbitrarily complicated topic, and deeply constrains how people who have power can use it; and people's opinions mostly arise from the conventional wisdom of their social groups, which is subject not only to the limits of bounded rationality, but also to memetic selection pressure.

Second, the legislative and regulatory process is far from the disinterested consideration of the common good you ascribe to it; it's a conflict-filled social process involving constant negotiation among regulators, legislators, and their constituents. It is a mistake to try to understand it as if it were a sentient entity attempting to achieve certain goals by choosing means that its beliefs predict will promote those goals. To a significant extent, the individual people acting inside of it are such entities; but their goals and beliefs are at odds with one another, and as a result, the overall system does not behave in such a fashion. Sometimes it may happen to do so, which is often because the relevant part of the system is dominated by one or another powerful elite that is sufficiently unified to behave that way — although often the interests it promotes are not the common good, but a narrower set of interests. More often, due to collective action problems, it thrashes around in ways that appear irrational and random if you attempt to understand them using the metaphor of a sentient entity.

Your puzzlement about how we could have ended up with such perverse regulations as those that gave rise to low-flow toilets is a good example, but in fact public choice theory abounds with examples.

I say these are contradictory opposites because the first amounts to treating human beings as isolated contemplators, sort of floating in a void, while the second amounts to treating them as mere cells in a superorganism, devoid of individual beliefs or interests, their individuality entirely subjugated to the goals of the collective — a sort of Hegelian apotheosis through what seems to me to be the ultimate degradation. (Perhaps with the occasional exception of that guy.)

I think that with a somewhat more nuanced theory of human collective action, we can understand what does and doesn't work about existing forms of social organization, and then collaborate to improve them, providing us with alternatives that allow everyone to flourish in ways out of the reach of hunter-gatherers building seismically-unsafe huts, out of reach of proletarians toiling in misery in Foxconn factories, and even out of the reach of Captains of Industry hoping fondly to turn our nation into a new Somalia or Honduras.

Our houses still have a lot of room for immediate improvements. For example having a flushing toilet in the same room where you wash your hands and shower yourself is probably not an optimal design. I've seen a few studies measuring bacterial communities that came into this conclusion. Not to diminish the importance of toilets, though. They are a fantastic Victorian innovation.

You also want to control air currents so that mold doesn't go to other rooms, but few designs account for this.

Many materials off-gas harmful chemicals. Formaldehyde, often in some glues, is one example. I see a lot of room for measuring and ensuring homes are healthy. Perhaps a big task for IoT.

Heck, nearly everything in a bathroom can be improved: faucets (re-adjust every time you use them, run water until desired temperature is reached); sinks (too shallow to do anything in, faucet gets in the way); medicine cabinet (reach over sink, too shallow so stuff falls out, fingerprints on the glass every time); toilet (cold, too low, smelly, spray goes everywhere, noisy); shower (curtain useless, water leaks out, run wasted water until warm, can't spray water UP at all, crowded for two or more) and so on.

Spider Robinson had a character in the Callahan's Saloon series that went into some detail on this.

Bathrooms usually have fans that vent outside to take care of moisture. All new homes have ventilation that replaces the air at least twice an hour. This is not to say that it couldn't be better addressed, but these issues have not gone unnoticed.

Why do building codes terrify you?

If this guy built his house in an Australian suburb, yes, he would be required to tear it down and probably face a fine for failing to get planning permission. Since he's in a remote area, he can build the house if he wants to.

Australian residents agree, by their locally elected councils, that houses in suburban areas must have flush toilets. They believe that it's an improvement over dumping household waste in the street.

I think what the GP may be getting at, with respect to building codes, is that while some of them are valid safety concerns, there's a lot of them that can be attributed to "regulatory capture" -- At least here in the US, I've lived in one jurisdiction where residential electrical (120V 15/20A circuits) was mostly required to be in metal conduit (EMT or better). Elsewhere in the country, as long as it's in a wall, type NM cable (insulated solid conductors in a plastic jacket) is acceptable in the same situation. The only explanation I ever heard for this was that we were in the suburbs of a city where unions had historically lobbied for certain practices in electrical and plumbing work that guaranteed more labor had to be done. (I'm not trying to make a comment about unions here, corporations are responsible for many similar situations in US law.)

> 100 years ago, it would have been an acceptable dwelling, or even desirable.

I don't think a mud hut was ever considered acceptable in any moderately advanced country back in 1915.

Thank you, if people kept agreeing with him I was about to have an aneurysm. I have a rental property in upstate NY that was built in 1895 and is at least a century ahead of a mud hut. I'd argue several centuries, but I guess it depends on which civilization you are comparing it to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_structure

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)#Modern_cob_buil...

http://www.sotaconstruction.com/project_details.asp?id=42

Even mud hut technology has advanced well beyond huts. The "greenest building in Pennsylvania" is a glorified mud hut with underfloor heating. It contains more than just one century of advancements over the most basic earthen construction.

And perhaps you haven't seen the sort of houses that people lived in, even as late as the 1930s, in some parts of the country. Let's just say there is a good reason why pre-manufactured homes are popular in certain places. Upstate New York may not exactly be a representative sample for the housing conditions in 1915.

I live in India and my parents lived in mud homes. My grandparents just upgraded 5 years ago. And by no means am I poor.

The idea that technology has some linear progression is an illusion. I stayed in a "mud hut" several years ago during a trip to Morocco which had running water, flush toilets, and electricity. It was built of mud not because the builders lacked access to "better" technology, but because big mud bricks were a simple, practical, and economical building technology well suited to the desert environment.

I grew up in New Mexico. Adobe construction ("mud huts", if you want to get all ethnocentric about it) was ubiquitous there in 1915 and is still common there today; it's substantially more comfortable than most of the modern alternatives, but also more expensive. Some of my relatives there had outhouses when I was growing up in the 1980s.

I remember doing a heat transfer simulation in a modeling and simulation class -- seems that the typical adobe wall was just about thick enough to induce a 12 hour phase shift in heat transfer (so that the heat of the day would reach the inside of the dwelling during the coldest part of the night, and vice versa). Thus cool in the heat of the day, and warm at night (this works well in a desert climate where it's very hot in the daytime and quite cold at night).

It probably took generations to arrive at the optimum wall thickness.

We have surviving adobe walls from four hundred and fifty generations ago at Çatalhöyük, but it seems likely that they've been in use for much longer than that, and just haven't survived. So we've had several generations to experiment. :)

And you have to wonder what is going to be invented before then that will make us look at the homes we are living in right now and think, "How did I ever live in such a backwards, primitive building?

If you didn't see it, you might appreciate this article from a bit ago about preserving some of the last remaining turf farm houses in Iceland:

  Until a century ago, and even into the 1940s, the nation’s 
  skyline was dominated by squat, clustered turf houses. Yet 
  despite turf’s vital role in Iceland’s history, you won’t 
  see much of it today. Over a few brief generations, 
  Icelanders have grown ashamed of and buried this 
  architectural tradition, which has taken on the connotation 
  of backwardness.

http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/turf-war/

(Separately, I'll mention that I really appreciate the level of effort you put into your comments here. They are great!)

I don't see the terror. Many of the things we do today will one day be considered hideously backward and barbaric, sure (I've seen comments about manually-driven cars in other threads - how did we ever accept something so deadly as "normal"?)

As for people not spotting the value of something, that's ok - the market sorts it out. Not many people would have thought that the most urgent thing African farmers needed was mobile phones. But there was profit in it, so some entrepreneurs did it, and it all works out.

Maybe not 'terror' (that was just echoing the previous post) but its at least a sad thing that people living closer to nature are in actual violation of a building code.

Cheetahs were once down to a couple of dozen members; they are doing fine. A fun fact: any cheetah can take an organ transplant from any other, since they are nearly genetically identical (have identical blood/immunology factors).