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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Remember: regulations are written in blood. You can't simply build things willy nilly. The Grenfell Tower fire is a recent and stark reminder of what happens when you don't apply a lot of trained and expert input into things.

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Safety regulations are.

The reg that says I cannot raise my roof 6 inches to squeeze in a loft conversion because then it won't be the same as my neighbours is just a hangover from the 50s...

You can, however, build willy nilly copies of things that you've already approved previously and deemed are still habitable. Even that though is unpalatable, by right development hardly happens anywhere these days.

The thing that changes is where you're building it. China tried the cookie-cutter approach and see what they got: buildings falling down. It turns out that even if you approved something in one circumstance it doesn't apply to another. Since the ground conditions are different, each building is truly different.

This isn't software where you can put it in a Docker container. There's a reason why everything requires planning approval in almost every big city in America: lives matter. People matter.

If you got rid of cookie cutter buildings because they might be fraught then you'd have to condemn most of nyc and most of london. The home era boom these articles all cite came because they were just churning out the same floorplans or more or less the same buildings with the same materials all day. In the US you could even order one of these standardized homes from the sears catalog, have it shipped to you already cut and build it yourself or hire a contractor who does these same homes all day. I really believe we are letting perfect be the enemy of good here, and saying we'd rather tolerate things like people living in overcrowded tenemant conditions or in cars or tents, because that's the status quo today for many of the working poor with these prices, over potential unknowns of reusing a building plan.

They came from a different time when we didn't care about the lives of construction workers. We have unions now to protect workers' rights and we have regulations and code to protect people living in these buildings.

That's why they say regulations are written in blood. People have lost their lives so that we can have the rules and regulations that keep our standard of living so high.

We need more regulation, not less. OceanGate has just reminded us of that. We should take five souls worth of lessons to heart.

A lot of regulation has no safety purpose. Stuff like parking minimums requiring an expensive parking structure or space dedicated for surface parking, mandating x amount of units be rented under market rate, overbuilding elevator capacity, insisting on things like balconies, or void space for astroturf that reeks of dog pee. All of these things are sometimes mandated by ordinance or code, increase the costs per unit and limits the size of the potential build per construction loan, and these are costs beard by the renters ultimately.

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