'All I wanted to do is build a house' (2010)

The stakes are higher. "Building codes are written in blood."

Or hair braiding [1].

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/06/22/155596305/episo...

You build your house in an area that is not governed by a building code. No permits, no inspections, do your own thing at your own risk. This generally means a rural area.

I guess it depends on your definition of "relatively inexpensive" :)

I've only got residential experience in two states, but from what I'm aware of, there are certainly cheaper routes you can go. Especially with high quality prefab options becoming more common.

From scratch though, towns typically expect a professional architect to sign off on a design, and a licensed electrician to do the wiring, and a licensed plumber to do the plumbing, and on and on. I'm officially none of those things, even though I got myself through college working construction, and I know how to use CAD packages for statics analysis, my degree is in electrical engineering, water flows down hill, and on and on. The DIY option is for all intents and purposes off the table, is what I was lamenting.

They're a solved problem, solved by implementing fire codes.

Or, more to the point, as noted above, they're paid in blood. Each time enough people die in previously unforeseen ways, we come up with solutions in aggregate. Chesterton's Fence is apt here.

The folks who died in the 2016 Oakland fire were maybe doing something hazardous and illegal.

So...not really sure what you're saying...the codes that made that illegal have served their purpose?

Seems like an oxymoron, the reason there are fewer deadly fires is at least in part because things that are hazardous are illegal.

Yes, and while we are at it, let's abolish safety belts, crash zones in car, food safety inspections , motorcycle helmets and non lead paint. These are all solved problems. Things have changed.

> clothing and furniture is far less hazardous, and electrical appliances are lower power and safer now

These are all only thanks to the regulation you despise. Remove the regulation and manufacturers will cheap out and things will get more hazardous and wasteful (see: China)

Chicago is hyper vigilant about those codes, and the electricity requirements for buildings in the city are much stricter than the suburbs.

Yes, good points. I admit I could have done a better job expanding on their benefits.

It seems to me like it should really be a federal regulation, with tiers of strictness by population density or something. Then instead of having different codes for every municipality, you have one standardized set that enforces the major benefits where the stakes are highest, and yet allows more freedom on the edges. But yea, history didn't go that way.

At this point, Trump making a promise is Bayesian evidence that he'll work towards the opposite.

> My understanding is that substantial improvements in this regard can be achieved for 10% or less additional cost.

Are you serious? That is an insane cost increase.

If you're willing to pay an extra $200-300/mo (at NYC or SF rents), you can already spend that much more money and find an apartment with thicker walls. Why do you feel the need to foist this (trivial) concern on other people? I'm sure most people in the world would happily take a ~10% reduction in rent in exchange for slightly noisier neighbors.

the Uber permit was a story because it WASN'T safe; it got in the news for running red lights.

Except the bit where self-driving ubers were running lights and driving unsafely.

>>It's the same thing that Uber was doing with the self-driving car permit, if you actually pay attention to the details. Neither are less safe, it's just that both didn't kiss the ring of the bureaucracy and the civil servants didn't like it.

This is ridiculous. Uber's self-driving cars have run red lights on at least one occasion[1]. Their technology is quite far behind that of Google and others.

Furthermore, the permit in question is both very easy and cheap to attain. We aren't talking about years of bureaucratic process.

The most likely reason Uber has refused to attain permits is because doing so would require disclosing accidents.

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/14/13960836/uber-self-drivin...

No Über/lyft (and airbnb, et al) are doing something different. Regulatory arbitrage - Purposely breaking the law in order to have a structural advantage over competitors.

This guy didn't want others to play by one set of rules while he played by another (advantageous) set.

>This isn't about building codes. It's about stickers and permits

That is the building code. It is all about stickers and stamps. Why is a tree that grew on my land that I cut myself not acceptable? It has nothing to do with the wood obviously, it has to do with creating make work jobs for bureaucrats to "inspect" and stamp lumber.

Bingo. This is about bureaucrats stamping papers and money going to approved vendors. Not about safety.

Reminds me of what I had to do with my car when I moved to California due to "emissions" regulations. CA emissions meant that even if performing as it did 30 years ago as a new car, it would not have been legal, since they keep raising standards year after year to the point where the car, as built, was illegal. After doing significant repair work (myself), it exceeded California's strict requirements. By the numbers it blew clean as a whistle, better than stock. But I used [cue the scary music] after-market parts (!) that did not bear the great stamp of California, and therefore failed emissions anyway as "tampered". Ended up having to sell it to someone out of state because California wouldn't budge on the stamps and bureaucracy.

I feel for this guy. Regulations and codes should serve some identifiable overall good. It shouldn't be simply about compliance and getting the right stamps on the right papers.

Multiply the simple act of kissing the bureaucrat's ring a million fold and you get secular stagnation in the economy. Every small decision by entrepreneurs of whether to try that new product must be weighed against the bureaucratic burden. Every new "common sense" rule comes with permanent costs. Each time a regulator has latitude to determine whether you can move forward with your project -- as opposed to a strict rule book with concrete requirements -- that regulator is susceptible to corruption and political retaliation. When the needle starts to tip toward entrepreneurs not taking the risk, then you get stagnation. The bureaucracy will slowly strangle the vibrant economy to death.

Did building codes exist when that electrical was laid down, and did it help?

The thing is, a lot of things are done without upholding those building codes anyways. They often burden the common sense person, like the article subject, while people just trying to cheat the system will still do so.

It sounds like your contractor ignored the building codes as much as they could, same as just about every other budget contractor.

Building code doesn't accomplish half of what it's supposed to, but somehow manages to cost a lot more than it's supposed to.

Where I live, all electrical work must be done by a licensed contractor. You used to be able to take a test and do it yourself, but no more.

I recently had some work done by an electrician. It was permitted and inspected. The inspector merely looked to see that it had been done by a licensed electrician. I inspected and found several problems, which he ended up fixing (he wanted to be paid, after all). I know several people in the trades who say this is very common.

If the inspector only understands some official stamps but nothing about the substance of building, you will get this. I suspect they thought its cheaper to hire / train people to follow simple rules (there must be a sticker) as opposed to estimating if the building actually is safe.

It's related to cargo culting. People who do not understand anything of the domain or substance end up making decisions. By default, we are in a constant slide toward the dark ages. We need renewal and self questioning to prevent that.

This can happen with any standardized process. Some analogous processes that HN can empathize with include "agile", TDD, hiring processes, etc. Standardization inherently removes some judgement and subjectivity, and can have both positive and negative trade-offs. IMO the best we can do is find the right balance, because neither extreme is palatable to me.

A lot of times the process differs if you are known or a no body. Which is what you describe.

The town I live in has slum lords that are linked with the powers that be (friends, etc) that get away with appalling conditions unless someone points it out.

The city also is cracking down on AirBnB/Short term rentals due to a "lack of housing", yet we have a university that has added 6000 people in the last 20 years and about 1000 beds (including converting doubles into triples). The 2-300 short term rentals aren't the problem. The process to add an ADU (we looked into it), fees were 30+% of the budget.

I'm rambling, but process has replaced safety and holds up actually adding housing stock.

It's not just safety. Sound insulation, thermal insulation, not having to wait for hours for hot water. The standards aren't just meant to protect against dangerous houses. They also try to protect against crappy quality. A family shouldn't need to be an expert in construction to buy a house.

You are looking at a conflict of the needs of many and the needs of a few (scale). Maybe it is higher quality, but how can an individual inspector assure that without evidence? The reality is housing is often up for 100+ years with ~10 owners. If everyone does their own thing, a significant portion of this will be poor quality housing that damages the quality of life of people in the future, and is too costly to justify rebuilding.

Compare this to individual developers using their own syntax and coding styles across a massive codebase, some of it is inevitably adding in technical debt for the future.

> I agree it should be optional to just live in an uninsured and unsellable shed if you want.

I'm seeing a lot of that sentiment, and my libertarian nature does agree with it; however, houses are often directly connected to a shared electrical, water and sewage systems -- improper design of a structure can have serious effects on these systems and thus on the neighborhood as a whole.

So, to allow that ideology, you'd also have to prevent these homes from being connected to these services.

What first world municipality allows you to drive around children who are unrestrained?

No, children shouldn't be allowed to live in unsafe structures, I can't believe this is even a question.

I hope you include roof-leaks and window-leaks in your "structurally sound". I've seen many leaky windows and roofs that an inspector would/should have caught.

Sucks to buy a home and get drenched when the first heavy rain comes -- and find out the work was done with no permit.

To nitpick on something...

You say:

> I agree it should be optional to just live in an uninsured and unsellable shed if you want. The buyer or insurance company can make the inspection, should they want to.

But then go on to say:

> Should a publicly funded fire department put out the recurring fires in your house due to your homebuilt fireplace and diy electric wiring?

You can't have your cake and eat it too: allow reckless behavior, disregard neighbors' lives and property, and have a reasonable life and property loss prevention policy?

The purpose of your publicly funded fire department is to extinguish fires before they spread to nearby properties and cause even more loss.

The efficiency at which your city/town/village/county/etc's fire department performs this, is something everyone's insurance company pays very, very close attention to when building the elements and costs of policies that'll serve your neighborhood.

Your choices (albeit simplifying it a bit), are:

a) staff up on building inspectors and fire inspectors and spend on office space

-or-

b) staff up on fire fighters and spend on real estate acquiring parcels of land, building firehouses upon said parcels, acquiring more fire-fighting apparatus, and contribute additional funds to the state's firefighting training academy and your fire fighter's pensions and life insurance policies

To me, this (inspections vs. emergency response) is the very definition of proactive vs. reactive.

I don't want "adults who are willing to take the risks" as my neighbors.

Where do you live?

The problem is often (though not always) that the inspectors applying the standards can act in arbitrary and capricious ways. A professional contractor will often have one inspector approve a technique or design, then have another inspector come along and tell them to tear that section down and rebuild it.

...

His point is the codes require a certain stabilities so that they are "constructed to survive a natural disaster". Without the codes, people cut corners, and then later disaster strikes.

I looked into it and I couldn't sue the city, but I could sue the builder. The only problem was that all of the builders who worked on the houses I've owned went bankrupt back when the housing market crashed, so there wasn't really anything I could do.

Also screws have poor toughness compared to nails, and should never be used for framing.

Just because it looks strong doesn't mean it is strong.

"Not sure if this was the issue, but some grades of stainless steel screws can't be used with treated lumber because of an increased corrosion risk."

If it's actually stainless, that is an approved connector for treated lumber. It's more expensive than galvanized, but much more resistant.[1]

It's plain old steel - untreated - that has very bad galvanic corrosion properties inside of treated lumber.

[1] http://www.finehomebuilding.com/2012/09/06/whats-the-differe...

I don't think any one in this thread is saying building codes or regulations shouldn't be a thing, it's more that regulations shouldn't be so complicated that they become barriers to entry, and that common sense should be applied alongside the regulations. Who gives a shit if there isn't a sticker on your lumber if the lumber is of good enough quality?

There is a difference between safety and blind obedience to building codes.

Building codes are about standardizing things so builder and inspectors barely have to communicate - at a glance they can see they followed x, y, z.

But the law should have a place for homeowners who do things safely, just not exactly how a builder would do it. That's why many places require permits for various work (for example electrical work) - unless you do it yourself, in which case you are exempt. And that's the right way to do things.

Just like you don't need the health department in your kitchen, but you do in a restaurant.

A funny thing happened when Hurricane Andrew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Andrew) came through South Florida. Homes built in the 1950s (way before "modern building standards") did much better than those build in the 1980s and very early 1990s.

While building standards exist to ensure a base minimum of safety and quality, that's it---it's a base and there's no real reason to exceed it (it just adds expense). The older homes were built more conservatively (the Brooklyn Bridge is something like six times the strength it needs; compare to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)) built "just to spec").

> And ends with people burning to death in slums:

Mostly these "cheap" slums were built with regulations, but with a short amount of money. Actually mostly they became slums because the owner does not care and the regulators never look at those since the owners has dozen of houses and it would be problematic to look at it every x years. so the houses getting worse over time and nobody actually keeps them in a good state and than bad things happen.

Actually this is a BIG problem in our modern world. some people actually need _cheap_ homes (not everybody makes a six figures a year). And thats why the problem begins, socialized buildings never happen. Mostly they build a chunk of good homes for people with a lot of money and the old ones never get repair/refreshed, but thats the only ones people with fewer money can have.

citation needed

Selling houses is a very formalized process, this should be easy to enforce. First of all, there is a deed of sale that gets signed over, the unsuitability for resale could be listed on the deed. Remember selling a house usually is a super involved process that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.

It almost sounds to me like you don't WANT to find a better solution.

This is a fair point. In honesty I think the intention behind building codes is to prevent builders from building buildings that endanger others (e.g., fire hazard) or selling buildings where the buyer is not aware of the risks. The former I think we can all agree is necessary and fairly straightforward. I think the latter is more complicated. Perhaps people can't effectively judge the risk they take on by living in a potentially less safe environment and so are not willing to pay for improvements that would improve their utility?

An example would be water heater must be installed with clearance meeting standards as specified in NFPA 3.1.6 (made up number). You still have to get the documentation from the private group.

It is much easier to get access to those now, I did have to register an account and I believe I was limited on the number of codes I could view, but I only needed to view one so it was a non-issue.

Ah, I wish you could just show knowledge without the formality of schooling or an apprenticeship. Way too much effort for something I only have a passive interest in. Appreciate the response!

I mean obviously the story told from his point of view is going to be one sided.

That said if the complaint was simply that the materials used had not been through expensive certification _and there was no cost effective alternative for individuals_. Then it starts to sound a lot like regulation as barrier to entry.

That's a strawman summary, and destructive to the discussion.

The state argued that bulldozing his house was the right thing to do, more on process than any evidence as it seems his house was structurally superior to standard houses, plus he couldn't afford any other house... Whether he didn't know the regulations, or was performing civil disobedience isn't relevant to whether these regulations are too rigidly enforced.

There's a bit in there (paragraph 8) about how he met or exceeded modern building codes, as determined by an independent third party, yet was getting hit for not meeting modern building code.

Whether that's the whole story or not seems to be left to the imagination.