Stephen Smith: Safety vs. Sanity: The Surprising Cost of Over-Regulating Our Built World

Speaker 2

This is a theme you find in building codes and standards, which is the United States does not interact with the rest of the world in a deep way. They don't consider, we making it harder to build a new building at all? This is really the challenge of anyone who wants to build multifamily housing and wants to change these codes to make it easier to build denser forms of housing in denser places.

Speaker 1

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial, new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source. Windows and Doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you, nice to be here. So you lead the Center for Building. Can you give everyone a little bit of background of what that is and who you are? Yeah. So the center for building in North America is a, a 501 C three nonprofit, that I founded about two and a half years ago, with the goal of doing a research and some advocacy about, building codes and sort of related, technical construction policy in the U S and Canada. and I got into it. I, my earlier career was spent, I was a reporter for awhile. I wrote about among other things, land use and

Speaker 2

zoning. And then I worked in real estate and dealt with those a little bit. and, know, there's been a lot of, a lot of talk about zoning, you know, the YIMBY movement, yes, in my backyard has really, you know, made that a hot topic of discussion, you know, states and cities, but also nationally. and they've, especially on the West coast have, you know, really won a lot of victories in changing zoning codes. but something that I was hearing and seeing was that Even if you change the zoning code, there are other barriers to, especially urban infill, know, multifamily townhouses, of denser forms of development and already developed areas. And, uh, an area that I was just hearing a lot about was building codes. And then when I tried to learn more about it, found little to nothing that was sort of relevant to what I was hearing about. Um, and so I figured, you know, be the change you want to see in the world. So I founded this organization and the goal is to study building codes, can be quite dense and technical and mostly not very interesting, but a lot of it is very interesting and I think speaks a lot to why this country has such a hard time building cities. And that kind of plays into the first question I want to ask you really, which is like, would anyone listening care about this episode care about this issue? When it's kind of like a building called I'm not a builder or something like that. And, you know, just to kind of kick off a little bit, a thought is, there is a lot of regulation in this country and most reasonably people would say we need regulation, right? We need good regulation to protect people and keep things moving in a positive direction. But at some point that regulation can become and almost always does become over enough time, counterproductive because you've got regulation laid on top of regulation layered on top of, know, trying to this regulation is trying to solve this other problem creates a new problem. And then, you know, before, you know,

Speaker 1

it just builds, never goes away, it never gets smaller. The codebook, every three years it gets updated and it's not like they take out previous sections or remove things, it's just additive. And at this point, I think when we talked last, you were talking about like, you could spend your entire life in kind of like one section of the building codebook, whether it's fire codes and mechanical, because it's just so massive and dense that no one can even wrap their heads around. And I think, and why I really enjoyed our first conversation was, hearing someone else articulate how it's gotten kind of so destructive, how these codes actually are formed and what to do about it too. Not just like a hopeless take of, okay, here's what's next. Now it's gonna be a long fight, all that. so that kind of prefaces it a little bit, but in your words, why should people care about this? Yeah. So, you I think on architect as they work in their more cynical moments, they might say, you the architect is not, not designing the building, the codes are designing the building. And there's some truth to that. you know, we, the, the, the, the built environment is highly regulated for, good reasons. you know, it's not like culture technology, you software where, you know, it doesn't really have a big impact outside of, you know, the exact, doesn't have a. It's not like a field that doesn't have a tangible impact on health and safety. For example, there's massive, you know, massive health and safety issues around the built environment as we see it as a recording. think there's still fires burning within the city of Los Angeles. But, well, not but, but so, you know, it's, we've gone too far to like, You know, totally deregulate the thing, you know, ever since, you know, massive urban fires in ancient Rome, you know, 2000 years ago, it's been obvious that governments will regulate the built environment. And so the question is how. and I think people in the United States often sort of assume that there's maybe not, there's one way of doing things, but there's sort of a narrow range of possibilities. And that's that, but the truth is that the United States and Canada in particular have a very unique way of building and.

Speaker 2

you know, any European could tell you, know, we build out of, you know, brick, stone and concrete and you build out of wood, it, you know, it goes deeper than that. and the American way of building, I think has been, I think pretty well suited to, you know, single family houses on large lots, you know, with a lot of separation between the, know, between each building, and, know, in a very suburban environment and, know, that's how this country, you know, for a long time has grown and. You know, we've developed a lot of innovations in building technology to make that easier, you know, whether it's light wood frame construction, balloon frame and later platform construction and, know, which I guess was invented in Chicago in the early to mid 1800s to, today we have all sorts of, all sorts of very special things in our buildings that you don't find abroad. But I think it's important to remember that this is a unique way of building and it's not the only way. And if you, know, so my organization, There's a million ways to approach the, you know, the question of how do we build, how should we build? What are the ways? And you can spend all day coming up with possibilities. But, I think it's, you know, at least to start more fruitful to just look at the different ways that people actually do build. and. You know, to that end, you know, the Western Europe and sort of more broadly, the rest of the world have one way of building and North America has another. if you, you know, if you. put it in two very large buckets. And I think not often enough in the United States do we think more about how they build abroad and how it, you know, if you go to Europe or Asia and you walk through the cities and say, wouldn't it be nice to have that here? Well, you have to follow their rules if you want their outcomes. And I think, you know, everyone recognizes that with zoning that you're never going to get, you know, a beautiful Tuscan village with, you know, quarter acre minimum lot sizes and two parking spaces per apartment. Um, but I think it's also true of the building codes and these more technical standards that govern, um, you know, the nitty gritty of construction. So. You know, a lot of it is very dense and, most of it frankly is not that important or rather, I shouldn't say not that important, but they're not, they're not, you know, meaningful differences between the United States and other places, but where there are, they can really have a huge impact. And, you know, why you should care is that in an actual development project, especially a

Speaker 2

denser development project. The land is a minority of the costs and you know, the Yimby movement and urbanists and housing reformers have focused a lot on zoning and rightly so it's very important, but you know, that affects the price of the land. But you know, if the price of the land is 20 % of your total development cost, that leaves a lot that you can't touch by changing zoning. And you know, most of the cost of construction is the, you know, the parts on the labor of the actual, you know, the actual bricks and mortar in the United States, you know, the, the wood framing and the gypsum board. So to affect the price of that aspect of it, you need to actually look into the rules that govern the game. And some of those might be as far afield from construction as immigration policy, for example. Construction in the United States and everywhere has a lot of immigrants in it. So your immigration policy will definitely affect the the type and the cost of housing you can build. But, you know, there's also, you know, the technical nuts and bolts stuff, the building codes, the standards that govern it. And I think that is something that, deserves more attention, both from people in the field, but, you know, also from outside of it. I think it's, helpful for the, for the, you know, the building codes and standards world to, to realize that, you know, what they're doing, you know, other people might have an opinion who have not traditionally been And that's what we saw in the immune movement is people from outside the land use world having an opinion. And I think it'd be great for that to come to building codes as well and maybe like the next frontier after zoning. Absolutely. mean, the industries respond to incentives. And in my opinion, as kind of a builder developer, I'm going to design, build, develop company. I'm not an expert in these things, but I've seen enough to see, not only zoning, zoning is one thing that kind of prioritizes, incentivizes super low density suburban sprawl and then super high density high rises. The building codes actually do too.

Speaker 1

It's actually pretty easy to build single family detached house on big lots. And it's actually kind of easy in some ways. I don't mean it's easy to build a skyscraper, a big multifamily building, but the codes kind of work in favor of those. The hardest thing to build is that missing middle housing of townhouses, row houses, smaller apartment buildings, because of some of these odd regulations around. fire or elevators, for example, that we're going to get into. And so maybe a good place to start, because I think it's such a clear one, is with, for example, elevators. And I'll just kind of give one example of how we've struggled with this and been highly irritated in our own building, which is actually making things less successful because of how draconian our elevator rules are in the U.S. So we're building Townsend, this townhouse neighborhood. There's rules around, I'm gonna get some of this wrong, but there's FHA rules around if you have more than four or more townhouses attached to each other, somehow certain regulations get put in place and then suddenly everything has to be accessible. I don't think it's elevator yet, but the weird thing is if you've got three townhomes and you put an elevator in one of them, you're fine. You can just put an elevator and do nothing else. If you have four townhomes attached to each other, that triggers something where suddenly that one townhouse, you're putting an elevator and you have to make the entire townhouse accessible because there's four or more townhouse together. And just from a, so people understand the consequence of that, making a townhouse accessible, especially if you're building smaller footprints, 1500 square foot townhouses, 2000 square foot townhouses, the elevator already takes up a lot of room. But then if you're having to make room for a wheelchair in the bathrooms and all kinds of stuff, It completely destroys the floor plan. I am not saying we should not have accessible units, but to make this random arbitrary rule that, okay, three houses fine. Once you hit four, it creates all these different rules. And then guess what? It makes us be like, well, fine, we're not going to put an elevator in anything. And on top of that, the actual elevators and granted, I mean, in residential, we've got some residential elevators, which is an interesting nuance that you helped me understand.

Speaker 1

In other countries, there's not even really such a thing as commercial versus residential elevators sometimes because of how our commercial elevators are just so insanely large and expensive that it makes it very hard to make a lot of commercial buildings work. So I'm to kind of toss that over to you because that's actually how I got in touch with you. was complaining on X about some of these rules and elevators and then stumbled across you again that I had quite a while ago and just anyway, made me reach out. Yeah. So my, our, you know, my organization's first research report, was about elevators. I, I was speaking to an Italian architect. Well, I'll tell you how it started. Actually, it all started on, I guess what at the time was Twitter. there was a, architect, sorry, excuse me, a developer in Minneapolis. He, he posted a picture of a three story walkup that he built, Sean Sweeney. Yes. Yes. Yes. He, he posted a picture of a three story walkup that he built and he was Sean Sweeney

Speaker 2

He's talking about how was relatively affordable by the standards of coastal housing prices. The rent was very affordable. And he said, three stories, single stair, no elevator, just sort of showing how you built lower cost housing. there was just, it escaped the world of real estate Twitter. And all these people were commenting, oh, there's no elevator. You must hate disabled people, a bunch of curse words, blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking like, I've got my own health problems and... I would really like an elevator in my own building, which is a lot taller than three stories and doesn't have one. Um, but I was thinking like, had these people ever been in an apartment building before three story buildings don't have elevators in America. And then I thought, you know, three story buildings do have elevators in Western Europe. And like, you know, America's much wealthier than pretty much every country in Western Europe. Why, why do we not have elevators? Um, and I asked an Italian architect, you know, I know that in the United States for a three story building and a low cost market, like Minneapolis and elevator, know, just the elevator. Let's ignore the shaft and the, you know, whatever else, but you know, just what you're paying Schindler Otis Kone to install the elevator and the shaft is, uh, it'll be north of about a hundred thousand dollars, probably between the hundred 150, um, for three stories. And I asked an Italian architect and he was like, Oh, that'd be about 20 or 30,000 euros in Italy. Um, and, uh, he was right that that is a difference. So, you know, our elevators are substantially more expensive. So Trying to understand why, and it got me to write this report is about 122 pages long, and it gets into a lot of different things. And there's a lot of themes in it that I've noticed, and you can see in other parts of the construction industry. Actually, let's take them. I'll take three of them. So they're going to be a lack of harmonization of codes and standards is one, over-dimensioning is another, and then labor is the third. for the lack of harmonization of codes and standards, when you build, there's a building code. And this governs relatively general things about the building, how wide the hallway needs to be, whether you need to build the building out of concrete and steel or wood, how many stairs you need, et cetera. But then there's this whole web of what are called reference standards. So every part of the building, whether it's

Speaker 2

smoke detector or a self-closer on a door or an elevator has to then Meet another set of rules and this is this is like this everywhere in the world That's that's never gonna change, you know, people really want their things to work So they're these these sort of subsets of rules that are called standards reference standards. They're referenced by the building code their standards and There is a general movement to Harmonize these globally so that every country has the same standard So, you know, even if different countries say, you The elevator has to be this size or it has to be you know installed in this case or not that case that once you do install the elevator at least you can buy the same elevator ever in the world from you know, Malaysia to Germany you can buy the same elevator and so the rest of the world has sort of settled on what a really European elevator rules because that's that's traditionally been the center of the elevator industry so, know a small country a large country, you know China or Switzerland, you can pretty much sell the same elevator in these countries. And it creates a really competitive market. I know that trade is not always the most politically popular thing now, but it really does do a good job at lowering prices. One of the reasons it's maybe not so popular. You can move production to lower wage places. You can really spend a lot of time optimizing your devices, doing a lot of R &D to drive down the cost of this or that, make it just a little more efficient to install this or that. And you get these real benefits of scale. And we see this in the elevator industry. It's a really finely tuned device. And the United States sits outside of all of that. The United States and Canada are two of the only countries in the world that decided we're not going to adopt these rules. We're going to have our own. And this is a theme you find in building codes and standards, which is the United States does not interact with the rest of the world in a deep way. They do not trust things that come out of the rest of the world. And in a lot of ways we can afford it because we're such a wealthy society. Although at times we run up against the limits of this because we still have resource constraints. So in the elevator industry, for example, you we have when you, when you build an elevator, the really technical details, let's not even, not even the size of the elevator, but you know, things like how long the tow guard needs to be, or, you know, what kind of communication device you need inside of it or where the machine sits.

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Is governed by a stand set of standards written by the American Society for mechanical engineers It's called the a 17.1 standard and the whole rest of the world essentially follows these European standards So there's really two major markets in the United in the world for elevators ones the United States and one is rest of the world And you know, the United States has many fewer elevators in the rest of the world. So when you make a part You know some little 20 $500 part whatever that goes into an elevator You're not likely to spend the money first to get it approved for the US market. You're going to get it approved for the global market first because it's going to open up a much larger market for you, much more larger, more competitive market. And so the United States sort of gets left with, you know, a less competitive market. New technologies don't come to the elevator industry as quickly in the US as they do in Europe or China. So that's, that's one thing. And you find this all throughout. building codes and standards. I was speaking with a, architect who was working with a development group in New York city and they wanted to make affordable housing and they were, they were doing a panelized construction where you, you build the walls and the floors off site and then you assemble them with a crane. So it's not full modular construction where you've got a whole room sitting on a flatbed truck, but you had the two dimensional parts, you know, the, the, floors and the walls essentially. And they were, doing, you they were putting them all together, somewhere in Europe, somewhere actually outside of the European union, but in a place that's still generally governed by European union codes and standards. and they were having a really hard time sourcing. think it was gypsum board that complied with the U S standard for gypsum board. And it wasn't because we have stricter standards or different, even different really standards. It was because it costs a lot of money to get a part certified that it meets the standard. And the truth is gypsum board is the same in Europe as is in United States. But if you have to jump to a whole different set of hoops to sell it in the United States, you know, you're located in Europe, all of your clients are in Europe. And then, you know, if you're selling slightly outside of Europe, they'll probably accept European standards. Cause I think generally everyone in the world recognizes that Europe has some of the best construction standards. you're not going to spend them, you know, $500,000 or whatever it is to do the fire testing for this gypsum board for your one client in the United States.

Speaker 2

So you hard time sourcing this really basic thing, gypsum board, you know, to put in these panels. So anyway, that's codes and standards. Sorry, excuse me. That's standards and a lack of harmonization. You find it everywhere and not just elevators. The second thing is over-dimensioning. America is a place with a lot of land and a lot of wealth. And it's often really easy to solve problems by just making something bigger, thicker, bigger, stronger, whatever. In elevators, there's things you want to fit in the elevator. You want an elevator, but also you want it to be big enough. And two of the major things that someone might want in an elevator are accessibility, especially wheelchairs, which tend to be the largest sort of mobility devices, or actually scooters or even larger, to fit in an elevator. And then the second one is stretchers. And most of the world, well, all of the world has determined, All of the world, pretty much all of the world outside of the United States and Canada have decided that, you know, for the accessibility part, the way to thread this needle is to have every elevator be large enough for a wheelchair and one person standing behind it. So, you know, the wheelchair can wheel in and, you know, person on the wheelchair, obviously, and then one person can stand behind them. You know, if the person can't move on their own or needs help or whatever, you know, you can have someone stand behind them. The United States decided in, it's a little unclear to me when it was decided, I think in the 1980s, that there should be room for a wheelchair to turn so that you can enter the elevator face forward and then leave the elevator face forward. When the decision was made, I'm not sure that there was a lot of thought that went into it. In the 80s, this was sort of like the age of Ralph Nader. There's a great book about it called Public Citizens. you know, these these sort of lawyers getting involved in government and they essentially encoded this into law in what you mentioned the FHA, the Fair Housing Act, specifically the Fair Housing Amendments Act, which then applied disability regulation to the Fair Housing Act. And it requires that every

Speaker 2

I shouldn't say every elevator, certainly every new elevator, every, most new elevators have to accommodate a wheelchair that can turn, turn all the way around. and then the second dimensioning thing that we do that other people do not is we require that the, that the elevator accommodate a fully extended stretcher. a seven foot stretch, seven foot long stretcher in other countries. They'll often require that it accommodate a structure, but only above a certain height. Whereas in the United States, it's, well, it's also above a certain height, but it's a lower height, essentially. So what this means is that our elevators are twice as large as elevators. Most elevators installed in the United States are twice as large as most elevators installed in Europe. And, you know, to have a turning radius for a wheelchair is a good thing to fit a structure is a good thing, but they're not free. Good things. They cost money. And. This money means, first of all, the elevator will be a bit more expensive. But it also means you might not get the elevator at all. So I live in a five-story walk-up building. It has no elevator. One of the weird quirks of United States accessibility law is that federal accessibility law does not require an elevator at any height whatsoever. You can technically build a 20-story building without an elevator if you want. It's up to the developer to decide. But if you do include an elevator, then you trigger this cascade of accessibility requirements, both in the elevator and, as you've discovered, in the bathrooms as well. And it has a perverse incentive, which is that it disincentivizes you from installing elevators. And as a result, the United States has fewer elevators per capita than any first world country I could find, and even more than countries that are just as suburban as we do. So something you notice in codes and standards is there's not a good analysis of costs and benefits and costs in dollar terms, but also in the thing you're actually looking for. So when new fire safety regulations come in, they don't consider, we making it harder to build a new building at all? And new buildings are always more fire safe than old buildings. New buildings are always more accessible than old buildings. So it creates, there's a ratchet effect. And the way that codes and standards are written, which we can get into in a moment, is not

Speaker 2

as rigorous as I would like to see it with the evaluation of these costs and benefits. And I think as a result, we often overshoot and make things not just unaffordable, but the actual thing that we're trying to encourage, we discourage it in various ways. So it's over dimensioning. the third thing I'm going to mention, I'm not going to talk at length about it, but it's the labor situation, the United States. Every country relies a lot on immigrants for construction. The United States has a let's say a bifurcation of the construction labor force, where single family houses in the places that build a lot of single family, so Texas for example, if you're building in Texas, if you're doing plumbing, you do not need a permit to install plumbing in a single family home. As a result, single family houses in Texas have a lot of plumbing done by frankly on undocumented immigrants. Whereas if you're building a multifamily building in Texas, you do need a, a, what's called a license. Technically, you don't need to be a citizen to get the license, but in practice, you need to be a citizen to get the license. So in single family houses, you know, in these sprawling areas where you're building, you know, 500 tract homes on quarter acre lots, it's, there's going to be a, the workforce is going to be dominated by undocumented immigrants. You can pay them less. There's a lot more of them. In cities, when you're building denser housing, you're going to be limited to a more documented workforce. You're going to have less labor available. In Europe, they've opened the borders to Eastern Europe. So all 27 European Union countries, plus a couple, get thrown in in various ways, have an open borders regime within them. As a result, it's a lot easier to hire construction labor. So in the elevator industry, you see this intensely. It's extremely well paid, but even more importantly than that for the costs, there have been negotiated a bunch of union contracts whereby pre-assembly and prefabrication of parts is not allowed. So holes have to be drilled on site, not in the factory. In some cases, you actually need to drill the hole in the factory for alignment purposes.

Speaker 2

So they just drill the hole twice. The contract states, we're just going to drill the hole twice. You drill a small hole in the factory and then the larger hole on site. And you see this in the plumbing thing that I mentioned. Plumbing codes in the United States have all sorts of whatever the opposite of labor saving is, things in them that require a lot more work. So anyway, so these are the three things you see in elevators, but you see them everywhere, which is a lack of harmonization of codes and standards, over-dimensioning, and then just very, very thorny labor problems often tied up around immigration. If you want to show your support for this podcast and also have the chance to win a really cool hat, like what I'm wearing, if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube, you can leave a five star review, screenshot it and send it to playbook at building culture.com. When we hit a hundred reviews on Spotify and Apple respectively, I'll do a raffle, select 10 people and send out hats. You've got a 10 % chance of winning. It's pretty good. Leave a five star view, take a screenshot and send to playbook at building culture.com would really appreciate it. Thanks so much. helpful little summary there. And I want to give one example of like how on the dimensioning in particular, you know, not only are the elevators substantially more expensive, like you said, a hundred to $150,000 here versus, you know, say 30,000. So there's already this huge Delta there, but also they literally take up more space in a building and people are like, Hey, that's no big deal. If you're thinking about it in the context of a big multifamily building. Now here's why I really have a problem with this is I don't have a problem with multifamily buildings or big buildings, but I and many people would like to build more human scaled kind of like gentle density buildings where there are two and three story, you know, buildings, maybe it's a two, you know, a three story, 4,000 square foot building, you know, so each floor per, you know, floor plate is about 1300 square feet. If you have to put an American and imagine a whole street of these, if you're a developer and you're trying to put a bunch of

Speaker 1

bunch of small office buildings that individuals, businesses could literally buy and own. Well, you actually have to put, because it's commercial and you've got office upstairs, you actually have to put an elevator in each one of those. So imagine each one of these buildings cost about a million dollars to build and you're having to put $120,000 elevator in each one while eating up a bunch of square footage. It makes it untenable. It doesn't work. It's over 10 % of the budget just to put the elevator in. And you can't build the building without putting an elevator in. So you're just kind of stuck. So it's like, well, let's, you know, that's why there's just big office buildings and things like that. And I think that's really unfortunate because we should be serving, disabilities and stuff. And I think you mentioned something for yourself, but I mean, I am too. I can't really walk very well. I can get upstairs actually fairly well. If I had to walk up five flights every day, I just wouldn't be able to do that. Cause I've got a bad foot from an injury. So it's not like I'm not sympathetic to it. It's more that I think there's other ways to thread the needle as you kind of hinted about how it happens in Europe. It's like, hey, as long as we have offices downstairs, do we have to have $150,000 commercial elevator to a second floor? And I know there's some rules around if it's under a 3000 square foot footprint maybe, then if it's... has retail on the bottom and then there's a shopping center and there's four or more of those and everything has to be an elevator. So it's just once again, so convoluted and that makes things extremely expensive where you just can't do small scale urban density or makes it very, very difficult and expensive. Yeah, they really the rules really bite for small buildings. you know, except for the office part, you've actually described my building very well, which is it was a three storey was it was two apartments over a store and the developer added two stories to it. So it's now five stories. Each one is about 1200 square feet, two units per floor. and, New York city actually does have a rule requiring an elevator. If the building is five stories, the rest of the country does not, they just leave it up to the developer, but

Speaker 2

Since it was an older building and they used an older building code, they extended the building under an older building code, they weren't required to install an elevator and they didn't. So it's a five story walk up building, fairly luxurious. You can see my ceilings are almost 10 feet tall. The sales price was, I don't know, 1200 bucks a foot, like really expensive. It doesn't have an elevator, it's a five story walk up. And... you do that NEW? 2015. I didn't think you could do that new. thought if it was commercial, even office upstairs. Well, it's no longer, it's now there's retail on the ground. yeah. Well, good question. I don't know how they made it work with the fair housing act. anyway, with some modifications, it's definitely legal. If the ground floor had an apartment on it, that would be legal in every city in the country. And you starting to see more and more of them in Seattle, especially really tall walk-up buildings.

Speaker 2

No, the, the loss that the federal accessibility law says that as long as the ground floor has an accessible apartment and the upper floors do not need to be accessible. And if it's residential, yes. Yeah. Offices, a commercial is a different story. The American with disabilities act governs there and yeah, that's more stricter. But anyway, the point is that there's always ways around. If something gets too expensive, there's ways around it. You just don't build it. If it's residential,

Speaker 2

You build townhouses instead of a small condo building. You build a walk-up building. Or like I said, you just don't build the thing at all. Increase, you know, in the United States. There's a lot of urban buildings that we just don't build. We build a lot of sprawl and that's it. And I think our codes do not do a, our codes and standards and, you know, federal regulations do not do a very good job of weighing the costs and the benefits and considering it. And sometimes it's really hard to weigh these things. And frankly, I don't think that Every single rule needs to go through a rigorous cost benefit analysis, you know, it costs a lot of money actually. But the way that I approach these things is I would like to see what is done in other places. Like if everywhere in the world is doing things one way, I don't need to study it. I'm just going to do it. I think we should just do it that way. And that's how it is for elevators. You know, like I don't, you know, does the tow guard need to be this long or that long? Can the machine room have this much clearance or that much clearance? I don't know. But if the whole world outside of the United States, Canada, has decided to do it one way, I'm happy with that way. And I think that is the approach that we should probably be taking for lot of denser buildings in particular. So anyway. I really think building codes need to be justified. Like once they happen, they still need to be reviewed. I don't know, five years later say, is it doing the thing we want it to do? And is it causing any externalities that we were not expecting? And it actually has to be renewed to keep going. And I'll give you like a small example, because we've been talking about elevators. There's a new electrical requirements where you have to have this, what's called an arc fault breaker. on a lot of things. And the interesting thing about arc fault breakers is they're, I don't know, 10 times more expensive than a normal breaker, which granted that's not a huge expense, but that's just one tiny example. And this was in the most recent building code. We're having to arc fault breakers in on behind fridges. Well, guess what? The fridges actually trip the breaker because when anything with like a motor, the machine turns on and often trips it. So what's happening is I've never met an electrician that likes it. They hate

Speaker 1

them. So what do people do? They have to put the arc fault in to pass code. And then what happens? They take it out. And I found out about it because I had some homeowners call me. They got back from vacation and they just bought this very nice house from us and their fridge was spoiled because it was off. And this is how I found out about it. And the electrician is like, well, we're having to install these arc fault breakers now. And then I can't even take it out because I don't want to expose myself to liability. So it's like I can tell the homeowner what's going on. And it's just an absurd It's just an absurdity and like, what is it even protecting against? And that's kind of this thing about the in, in, there is no such thing as like infinite safety or like perfect safety. And so many rules come out of some random thing that happened once. And then you make a bunch of rules about it. And we were just looking at some fire code stuff and I can't remember the details. but, but one of the architects on team Matt was looking into this and he found out, well, because he was doing an AIA thing, it's like, This code actually came from 100 something years ago because there was a Christmas tree in a building that had candles with fire on them. And then the whole tree was sprayed and I, my gosh, I'm forgetting some kind of petroleum product. And then, you know, it caught fire and the building burned down. And then they make a bunch of building codes around it that are frankly kind of stupid. And you're going, that was not the problem with the building. The problem is you have a Christmas tree with, you know, fire, prone. paint on it with candles. And so I just find stuff like that so frustrating and that the bureaucracy, I'm really starting to refer to it as tyrannical bureaucracy because it has gotten insidious and to the point where it serves itself and is actively opposed to good building, affordable building, the kind of places that people want. to see. I'm not saying all codes are bad. I'm just saying it is well past the line now for me in certain areas.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, When there's a major fire, there's a very interesting paper called, by some fire engineers, think, I don't know, Australian or New Zealand. Anyway, it's called, Golden Rules and Magic Numbers, or Magic Rules and Golden Numbers. what they say is, after a major event, especially a mass casualty fire, which most fires are not mass casualty fires, they're, you frankly, like one or two elderly people dies at a time, but the mass casualty fires are the ones that grab people's attention. And so what happens after it, you enumerate all of the things that went wrong, any of which, if you would fix them, would have fixed the problem. And it's a long list. It's always a long list. You know, during COVID, people might remember that Swiss cheese analogy where, you know, nothing is going to be foolproof, but if you layer a bunch of things on top of each other, eventually you'll get a good enough result. And so you pick all of the things that could have been different that would have prevented the fire, and then you change them all. And that's overkill. And it leads to overkill, and it can lead to not achieving your end goal of reducing fire deaths. So one of the best recent examples of that is Grenfell in London. There was that high-rise fire, and it killed I don't remember how many people, dozens of people. And it really upended the construction industry and fire production industry in the UK. And the primary problem with that building was that the facade was flammable. It wasn't supposed to be flammable and it was. And so a small fire that started, was a malfunctioning refrigerator actually. sparked, created a spark. lit something, you know, I think it's, set on fire in an apartment that led a window, you know, a vinyl window frame to set on fire. And that put, you know, the whole facade on fire. And then eventually you have this, the whole outer, you know, the whole outer face of this building is on fire. And so they went through and they found, you know, everything that could have been different, everything that you could have changed to fix it. And they changed them all. And so now you can't build out of, you

Speaker 2

essentially cannot build out of mass timber above, I don't know, something like six stories, I think in the UK anymore. And the building didn't have any timber in it at all. They now require a second stair for all buildings above roughly six stories. They require sprinklers and all buildings above something like four stories. Anyway, to an American, that all sounds like, well, we don't allow any of these things either. But there's a British fire engineer who pointed out, really gone too far here and you've politicized the whole thing. Instead of a bunch of fire engineers doing sort of a careful analysis of it, you just have these politicians who of run wild with the thing. And another point, think there's often in the fire engineering world, in the code world, there's this sort of taboo against thinking about cost and costs and benefits and weighing these things. And the problem is that it's counterproductive because even in the richest society on earth, which is, I don't know, the United States or Norway or Luxembourg, whatever. The money is not infinite. There are an infinite number of things you could do to a building to make it safe. We have a sprinkler system, but if the sprinkler system goes off, then you have to turn it off. And then two days later, what if there's another fire? So why don't we have a second sprinkler system? In elevators, you press a button and it alerts that someone's trapped in the thing, but then there's also communication that goes on. you know, so that they can tell you we're on our way or you're having a heart attack or whatever. Um, and you know, recently in the United States and pretty much nowhere else, they've decided, now we need a two way visual communication device. Cause what if someone is hard of hearing? Okay. But like, what if the person doesn't speak English? Why isn't there a requirement that it be simultaneous interpretation in Spanish? And you know, my grandma doesn't speak Spanish, speaks Romanian. Why not Romanian too? Like there's an infinite number of these things you can do. And in order to pick between them, You need to know what the costs and benefits of each one of them are so that you can pick the most effective things. Because if you don't, you're just reacting to whatever, you know, some person who happened to meet their way to the hearing had the idea to do. And you're leaving on the table things that frankly might be better. So I'll just give an example. I saw some fire engineers and there's currently fires raging within the city of LA and you someone posted on LinkedIn essentially that there should be greater separation between buildings.

Speaker 2

And someone said, well, what about ADUs? They're allowing all these accessory dwelling units in the back. Specifically, it was about sheds. You have a wood shed in the backyard and it can set on fire and it can contribute embers, which then can set the main house on fire. And they're like, well, we should have greater separation of buildings was the conclusion. Maybe we should rethink ADUs. Okay, well, you could also build the buildings out of brick and stone. But if you spent all your money forcing people to buy lots that are twice the size and put their shed 50 feet away instead of 20 feet away, and they can't build an ADU, then you don't have money to require bricks and concrete. And maybe bricks and concrete aren't the solution. Maybe it's sprinklers. Maybe it's clearing areas outside of it. I don't know what it is. But the point is, there's an infinite number of things you can do to prevent these fires from happening in the first place or mitigate them if they do. And we don't have infinite amount of money. So we have to choose between them. So if you're not considering the cost, then you're not even going to pick the most effective solution, nevermind, you know, one that, you know, people are happy to pay for. so anyway, that is just, are many, many issues I see with the codes. And like I said, the codes have become so complicated that it's not really realistic to do a in-depth analysis for every single item. But at the very least we should aspire to it and, know, at least think about these things a little more and. you know, at the very least write down the cost and, know, try to, try to get the benefit, which we don't, we don't do today. Like a lot of these, a lot of these code changes, you know, at the body that writes them, which we can talk about in a minute, you're supposed to write the cost of the change, but most people don't, most people sort of fudge it and say, you know, it's an editorial change. Doesn't, it's not going to affect cost. know, often that's not true. there's a great paper by Emily Hamilton for the Cato Institute about you know, how these costs benefit analysis, excuse me, how the cost impact, because they don't even claim to do a benefit analysis, how the cost impact is determined. It's pretty subpar. And I've seen it. I've seen a lot of code changes where, you know, someone, for example, only takes into account the price of the part and not the labor, even though the labor is like most of it. So we don't really think that much about costs. And it's of taboo in the industry to think that much about cost. Yeah.

Speaker 1

want to share a little trick we use at Building Culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations. Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than kind of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the window is open, this is almost like a door hinge. And so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a 2040 window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. so check out Sierra Pacific windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source windows and doors. We at building culture use both of them regularly. Yeah. Though I, I want to jump in next into kind of the ICC and how codes are made. Cause that was part of what was so interesting to me that I hadn't understood before. I do want to say one more thing about in addition to evaluating the cost with these things is really not making codes and isolation as in. We've become because buildings are so complicated these days. We've got all entire industry of all these different specialists. And then those specialists all advocate for their little area of expertise to change codes. And then no one can really argue with them because they're saying this is going to make the fire whatever it's going to make it safer in terms of fire. And everyone's like, okay, well we want safer buildings. And so there's not real consideration. I'll give an example of like I was recently in a meeting with a local fire department. I won't say which one, but somewhere in Oklahoma. And they were talking about how they ordered new fire trucks for the city. said, Hey, you know, has there ever been any conversation about ordering smaller fire trucks, especially for these downtown areas where, you know, people are complaining that it's tough to maneuver and stuff. And they just, he wasn't rude, very, very nice gentleman. think he, wanted the best, right? It's not like I looked at this person like, man, this guy's a jerk, very nice person, but he just looks so confused. And he said, what, you know, well, we, need the

Speaker 1

this fire trucks a week and you know, and I don't understand that he rattled off a bunch of technical stuff that then I can't respond to because I'm like, I don't even know what you just said about gallons per minute. And I just said, well, the rest of the world, we use that. have the biggest fire trucks in the entire world. Everywhere else has smaller fire trucks and they seem to manage pretty well. So why couldn't we? And but that was just he's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Like we need these fire trucks for blah, blah, blah, blah. And once again, I'm not an expert, so can't argue. And it made me just really think it stuck with me because I'm like, man, we can't just have specialists advocating for their little piece of the pie because that doesn't lead to good outcomes. We really need kind of a more holistic approach of like, I know the ICC has different people at the table, but I don't know, that doesn't seem to work very well, but where there's actual people talking about, okay, how does this work in real life? How much is it going to cost? What other externalities are there going to be? Does this make sense as a whole? And with that, let's jump into... The ICC, the International Code Council, which as you pointed out is anything but international. Yeah, yeah. you know, the overarching question is how are building codes and standards written? And at the end of the day, these become laws. you know, the thing that says you need a sprinkler, you know, the elevator has to be this size, it's written into the municipal code or the state codes. But the way that they are really written is not by government. Because the codes have become so complicated, the codes and standards, If you added them up, like all, you know, all of the codes and standards, I, I, sometimes I ask people in the field this and they like, Oh, I you know, I don't even know. mean, the code itself is, know, the quote unquote building code itself is, I don't know. I think more than a thousand pages, but then it references all of these standards. Like I said, for the smoke detector and the self-closing door and the elevator and whatever. And if you added up all of the numbers of these pages, you'd end up at least in the hundreds of thousands.

Speaker 2

Possibly more so, you know in in Texas for example, every municipality writes its own building or sorry every Municipality adopts its own building code. Obviously don't write their own building code Obviously, you know a town of three thousand people is not writing hundreds of thousands of pages What they do is they adopt what are called model codes? Model codes and standards which are you know, someone else has written them and said, you know, this is not the law but I suggest to be the law and the States and localities. Okay. This is the law. We're, just going to copy and paste this. We're going to, you know, either we're to copy and paste it or, you know, in the, in the legislation, we'll just say, you know, just look at the model code. That's your, that's your law. Um, and the bodies they're right. They, they used to be multiple bodies that wrote different building codes. And remember the building code is the most, the sort of top one, you know, that the master code we can think about is, and then it references all these codes and standards. But let's just talk about the building code. For example, You know, it's written by there was there was consolidation in the United States I've actually heard that it was sort of in In reaction to things that were happening abroad where you know, they were consolidating codes internationally And so there were these three bodies that wrote regional model codes. There was one for the Northeast There was one for the southeast and there was one for the West Coast and I don't know they kind of came together in Missouri or something like that and So they merge and they create one model code. And the idea is, and they were successful, is that every jurisdiction in United States, maybe they modify it a little, but this is the basis of their code. And so this organization is called the International Code Council. I think they had aspirations and still do have aspirations of being an international organization whose codes are adopted not just in the United States but also abroad. In practice, It's not really adopted abroad. The World Series, think there's one Canadian team that plays in it. There's no Canadian jurisdiction that plays in the International Building Code, or at least that adopts it. There may be a couple jurisdictions in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf, due to the American military presence, that have adopted, or at least allow as an option, some of the ICC codes. But in general, it is the United States Building Code. It's called the International Building Code. It's not international.

Speaker 2

You know, on the committees, I've never seen somebody from another country participate. Um, I mean, maybe from another country, but, know, living in the United States, but there's, there's nobody, you know, living outside the United States who I've seen who participates at a high level, um, in the writing of the codes. And it's a non-governmental organization. think technically it's a, it's organized as a 501 C six, which is a, it's called a business league. Um, and they have a process for writing the codes. But since it's not a governmental organization, it's not subject to the same rules that a government would be. So for example, they don't perform the same cost benefit analyses that governments have to perform. They don't. When you contribute to it, the sort of main event, is every essentially one or two times a year, You go and you make your proposals and you can debate them. It has to be done in person, which is quite expensive. it costs a lot of money to participate because you got to fly somewhere twice a year and stay in a hotel. it's pretty much have to stay there for a week because they don't give you a great time about when your item will be heard. at the end of the process, people vote on it. And the people who vote are only what are called the government members, which are mostly excuse me, mostly code officials and I think partly some firefighters. But it's not a governmental organization. It's fundamentally a non-governmental organization. so governments have sort of outsourced it to this organization. And it's not an organization that anyone outside of the code and fire world and the materials manufacturers participates in. for example, mayors who might be concerned about housing affordability or planning departments who have to live with their rules and have to say things like, there's no sense in us up zoning a 25 foot wide lot because it doesn't really work. They don't have any say in it. They don't participate in it. The employees of the mayors in the building departments and in the fire departments have votes that they can use, they're not like the mayors

Speaker 2

aren't looking at how they're voting. So it's a rule writing by bureaucrats, but outside of the bureaucracy, if that makes sense, is how I would put it. And as a result, it's a sort of very insular world. It's not a world that is well-intuned with, especially, affordability challenges. I often find myself explaining to people what EMB, yes, in my backyard, stands for. because they just haven't heard it. The process is also heavily tilted towards smaller jurisdictions. So at the end of the process, there's a large vote that happens and you get X amount of votes if you're from a municipal, if well, each jurisdiction, if the jurisdiction has less than 50,000 residents, they get X number of votes. If they have between 50 and 150 residents, thousand residents, they get two X votes, you know, twice. And then If they have more than 150,000 residents, they get three X votes. And what this means is that, you know, New York city, a city of nearly 9 million people. And then I don't know, whatever large suburb of 150,000 people get the same number of votes. and then, you know, three very tiny jurisdictions get the same number of votes as New York city or Oklahoma city or wherever. and as a result, the larger cities often do not participate as, as much. on in the process, like New York city and Chicago are almost totally absent. don't, they don't really, they don't really speak up very much. and. You know, whether that, you know, I don't know what the causes or what the effect is, but it's a code that does not work well in my opinion for cities and for cities, especially they want to encourage a lot of infill infill development. And I think this stems from the way that the whole process is organized. in other countries. the building code is written by governments, like not just government officials, but actual governments themselves. there's often, well, it can speak kind of negatively about politicians involving themselves in these things, but the whole sort of conceit of democratic government is that the people vote for people and then those people carry out the will of the people. it's a sort of world and industry that tries to keep

Speaker 2

politicians out of it as much as possible. And I think this divorces it a bit from some of the most pressing concerns in society, to be honest, especially affordability, environmentalism, density, these sort of things. So anyway, that's the structure of who writes the codes and how I think it, the structure of all organizations I think ultimately determines the content of the rules that they write. I think that this structure is geared towards smaller jurisdictions and heavily geared towards building officials and fire officials with little to no involvement for anybody else. And as a result, I think it's a code that think building officials and fire officials like a lot. increasingly, think other people find things lacking with it. It's really, you know, I think when we first talked to you, I can't remember exactly how you said it. You said when I, when I really started looking into it, I'm not saying I thought it was just, what it was like completely terribly corrupt, a good big corrupted, you know, I can't remember how you said it. And it was something about kind of this idea of, you know, once again, not necessarily bad actors, although there might be some of those, but also this open kind of door between the people creating the regulations and industry and even talking about how lot of previous fire firemen and fire marshals and stuff end up in the fire industry creating sprinkler systems and stuff. And so, is there really a lot of incentive in the US to say, hey, maybe for masonry buildings, we could have different fire sprinkler codes than for wood frame buildings that are highly flammable? No, there's actually no distinction made whatsoever, from my understanding. Could you talk a little bit more about, and it reminds me of even what's kind of going on in the US right now with We've got all our healthcare and FDA and we're like, hold on, our regulators, people saying what's healthy, blah, blah, end up making millions and millions of dollars over here on the private side. This doesn't seem right. And a lot of people are getting mad about it. And I think it's for very, very good reason. The FDA seems completely untrustworthy to me at this point because of the revolving door with pharmaceutical and stuff like that.

Speaker 1

Can you talk a little bit more about that in relation to the ICC and what you've seen? Yeah, there's, you know, there's a lot of interests and industries and sometimes the line between government and private industry is not that, is not that clear. Um, you know, I, you know, there's the fire protection industry and I would say that the firefighters often sort of fall within that because, you know, in a lot of places, the firefighters are, for example, inspecting the sprinkler systems, doing the plan reviews for the sprinkler systems. And therefore they have sort of similar interests to the sprinkler. the sprinkler industry and then often, you know firefighters can retire fairly early so it's pretty common for them to actually go into the sprinkler industry and become Contractors or consultants or you know something like that And then you have you know, the process costs a lot of money to participate in First of all, you have to show up in person, but it's also just it's very complicated You kind of it kind of needs to be your full-time job in order to you know, make an impact there and the materials manufacturers You know, it's quite common if you look at the hearings that, you know, some of the most common, the most vocal commenters are, you know, the concrete, the ready mix concrete industry, the timber industry, the steel, you know, steel industry. you know, there's like interest that you would not realize exist, you know, who, who speak here. and. You know, in any regulatory environment, the manufacturers or, people who are in the industry or, you know, in government that have this sort of their own interests are going to speak up. But if you don't have the politicians who are the, you know, the representatives of the people, um, you know, in the mix, then. Sort of all you have is the particular intro. I'm not going to call them special interests, but you know, these particular interests with particular perspectives, and there aren't people who are, um, taking, there aren't as many people who are taking like a big Speaker 2 (01:01:11.168) a big picture approach. And then another way I should say the ICC is organized is that there's various committees that deal with various things. And the National Association of Home Builders has negotiated a certain amount of seats on different committees. And they have more seats on what are called the residential committees, which are the single family, the ones that govern single family codes. Yeah, the IRC, then the multifamily code, which is the international build or the the international building code, which regulates multifamily buildings. And so the international residential code is way easier to work with. In a lot of countries, they would actually look at our single family houses and say, wow, this isn't safe. You built the thing out of light wood frame. This is not allowed elsewhere. But then on the other hand, they look at our multifamily buildings and are like, whoa, this is really overkill. You have things in your six story buildings that we don't even have in our skyscrapers. So what you're saying is the NHB, the National Association of Home Builders is literally an association of people building homes. And so people building homes have a say on the IRC. So that code looks a lot different than the IBC, which doesn't have that kind of like actual, you could say builders with the same kind of level of voice and power on the IBC. Yeah, there's some on them, but well, there's one. They get one vote on the IBC committee and four votes on the IRC committees. And also, know, National Association of Home Builders mostly does single family houses. even though they're on the IBC, know, it's not of as much interest to their members as the multifamily stuff. And surprisingly, the multifamily developers do not have the presence that I would have expected there. It often feels like The IRC is sort of, the International Residential Code governs single family, is sort of watched like a hawk for cost issues by the NIHB. And then the multifamily, the IBC, which governs multifamily and commercial construction, sometimes it feels like no one's watching the hen house. so, specific interests, whether it's private sector fire production industry or firefighters or whatever, Speaker 2 (01:03:28.006) their perspective tends to win out on the IBC, in the IBC more so than in the IRC. And as a result, there's anyone involved in the real estate industry in the United States knows that a single family house is per square foot the cheapest thing to build, at least for the same level of quality. You can have some really luxurious single family homes, for a given level of quality, it's always going to be cheaper to build a single family house detached than a townhouse. It's always going to be cheaper to build a townhouse than a low rise apartment. complex and it's always going to be cheaper to build a lower rise apartment complex than a mid rise apartment complex. And I always knew this and I always thought, well, that makes sense. What I did not realize is this is not true in other countries. In other countries, the cost is the same. When you go from single family detached to multi family, excuse me, to mid rise multi family, the cost per square footer per square meter is going to be the same. And, you know, I know that's, I know part of that is that their multifamily buildings are cheaper than ours. They suspect also in the rest of the world, their single family houses are more expensive than ours because they build them out of concrete and masonry. But once you learn about the incentives within the ICC and other codes and standards and the way that smaller jurisdictions that have primarily single family houses are overrepresented and larger ones are underrepresented and that the home builders have more of a say on the single family committees than the multifamily ones. You start to see why it's emerged this way. Um, and I think this is, you know, this is really the challenge of anyone who wants to build multifamily housing and wants to, you know, change these codes to make it easier to build denser forms of housing in denser places is, you know, not only the content of the code, but also these, uh, institutional incentives that go to write it. So, you know, that is, I guess that's, that's my, that's my problem. Or my fight. It's ever a problem, but it's, I guess it's my fight. Yeah. And I want to talk here next about just, uh, you know, there's a lot more to unpack here, but, I want to kind of jump to what, you know, people can do about it. Um, but first I also want to make a comment on it's interesting. I hadn't struck me the last time you said it, talking about the ICC being, you know, uh, a nonprofit, uh, an NGO, so to say a non-government entity. And that's come up recently, um, just in kind of us. Speaker 1 (01:05:52.91) and I don't really mean this politically, but that the government outsourcing regulation to quote unquote NGOs, non-government entities, then making them actual enforceable regulation is really not an NGO. Like it completely defeats the purpose of an NGO. And the way it's come up in the US is around free speech stuff. Basically, the government can't actually actively censor speech, so they've given money to NGOs and nonprofits who then go and censor speech and work towards those kinds of things. And really saying that's a pretty sinister dynamic. And I don't think it's necessarily the same here with the ICC to that extent. But it does bother me because once there's really no one to hold accountable. And it's funny because I think I'm increasingly just over time running business and having to deal with government regulation every day of my life with what we do, whether it's financial stuff or building or zoning or city stuff or state stuff or national stuff. I'm more libertarian, becoming more libertarian. So I'm kind of laughing that I'm saying, man, I kind of wonder if the government is getting more involved with with building codes or something like that. But it does really bother me that there's just no one who are you going to get mad at? Who can you fire about this? No one. And that's part of what's kind of broken about all of this, I think. Yeah, you've landed on something very important, I think, which is if we're going to have building codes and I think we're going to have building codes. Speaker 1 (01:07:26.398) for building codes to be clear to everyone listening. Who's going to write the building code? yeah, mean, if you, if you, you know, the government is hard to deal with, but if the government is throwing up its hands and deferring to another group, you've added another layer there. And, you know, to your question of what to do about it, if I, you know, my, my, my, way that I approach research is that I always just, I always just want to know what we do in the United States first. And then I want to know what they do in other places. And, you know, eventually I'd like to go to the point where I'm comparing the merits of them. But the basics are just like understand the lay of the land, understand what the options are. And in the rest of the world, the governments tend to write the building codes. And specifically, they tend to be written by higher levels of governments. So in the United States, it's often very local. In Texas, for example, or Colorado, it's adopted by localities. In other states, it's done at the state level. But states in the United States can be quite small. And so, you know, if I look, how would we make our codes more like those in other places? You can probably guess where I come down on this, but I won't say that this is what we should do. you know, it would be more federal involvement in writing the building code. The feds are involved in writing one building code, which is the what's called the HUD code, stands for Housing and Urban Development. It's the Manufactured Housing Code, otherwise known as trailer houses. which also happened to be the most affordable kind of housing in the United States. So, you know, there was a, in the seventies, Ronald Reagan really slash the, you know, the bureaucracies budgets and any kind of desire to get more federal involvement in building codes, not just writing them, but also like doing research about them. There was a lot of research, for example, about efficiencies and plumbing codes just ended. And, you know, everything sort of got outsourced. Speaker 2 (01:09:26.094) to somebody else because somebody had to write the building code because there wasn't the appetite to not have building codes. So, you know, it strengthened the hand of these, you know, and these non-governmental nonprofits. And so, you know, to answer the question I think you were about to ask, which is what do you, you know, how do you get involved in this? It's really difficult to get involved in it because the government has outsourced it to this nonprofit, the nonprofit. It's difficult and expensive to participate in the process. If you really want to have a literal voice and speak at the hearings, you're probably in for one or $2,000, twice a year to go fly and show up and sit around for a week until the item you want to comment comes up. But I think it's important that, I think reasonable people can disagree about how these things should be written. And I have a perspective and I'm sure everyone in the code world vehemently disagrees with it. But I think it is important for legislators and for government entities to actually understand how these codes are written. And I don't think most legislators understand how the building codes come about. think they tend to be surprised when I mention that it's pretty much all outsourced. And that the people they employer, at the end of the day, participate in the process, but not in a way that's accountable. The votes that happen at the ICC, for example, It's government employees taking these votes, know, participating in these votes, but it's not, you know, it's not public who voted or how they voted, even though they are, you know, it's at the U S Senate, you know, every Senator's vote is public. that's not the case in building codes. So I think, you know, there, there are more intense ways to get involved, you know, follow the local adoption process, get involved that way, certainly get involved at the ICC, but the, of the most basic things to do would be just like write your you know, your city council member or state legislator or executive and say, you know, want you to, I want you to pay more attention to the building code. think it has a big impact on affordability, livability, environmentalism, fire safety, accessibility, all of these things. And, you know, I don't think that it should be, you know, it's within the purview of the government and you you as a government actor should pay attention to it. so that's, that's my, that's, guess the most basic thing is like, you know, Speaker 2 (01:11:48.214) We have a system of government that is democratic. if the people you elect are not getting involved in something, then it doesn't have a ton of the popular will. doesn't have a big impact in it. Yeah, I will say, which we talked about last time, we haven't really had time to talk about today, but some positive momentum really has been made around the country with the whole single stair debate. And for anyone listening, just a lot of our buildings in the US, essentially, in the IBC and multifamily buildings require two staircases, and that doesn't sound like a big deal, but it completely changes the shape of a building and how a building can function and all over the world, all over Europe, you can have single stair apartment buildings, which really increase affordability, typology, all sorts of positive things. And because like you're saying, things are adopted either at the state or local level, and I'll use Oklahoma as an example, it's adopted at the state level. And then at the local level, they have to at minimum do that, but the local level can also be more strict. And unfortunately, a lot of local levels still more strict. But there really are people that are kind of making some headway around some of these things like the single stair elevators is a harder one. You know, I'll kind of touch on one of the reasons I do think I actually do think I probably agree with you. And it's not something I've thought about a whole lot, but just that maybe it really would make sense for this stuff to be coming from the federal government. because yes, there's dangers to that. Yes, things can go wrong. Yes, it can be bureaucratic or it will be bureaucratic. It's, you know, a giant government entity, but at least you can have an organization with a vision. And that's saying, Hey, we need to balance health. We need to balance safety. We need to balance costs. We need to balance beauty. And here's the kinds of cities and the kinds of housing that we want. So let's then back into the rules. Speaker 1 (01:13:47.67) about how to make that, you know, and at least there's the potential of that. You know, when someone new takes over HUD or someone new takes over the FDA, you know, you can get swings in either way, depending on who's kind of in charge of that. But in some ways, at least someone can implement a coherent vision versus when it's kind of outsourced through the ICC like this. It just seems like a nightmare to me and it's only going to get worse. That's really not, I'm not really commenting on what to do about it. I'm just commenting on, hope over time as as housing is going to increasingly be a big deal in this country with affordability and things like that kind of at the very one of the most important issues of our time, you know, there's several really important issues, but housing is definitely one of them. And so I hope people, you know, it's going to take several decades, but I'm hoping over time, maybe we really can shift how, how codes are actually made. But to begin with, I agree that the local level, state, your state representatives who are electing to adopt these codes and then also the localities. And then of course, most states have some kind of body that evaluates, hey, we're gonna adopt 90 % of the IRC 2024, but we're gonna leave out these few sections. So multiple ways to get involved there. And then Steven, like how can people, I mean, this is a pretty big mission for you. know you've got this organization. You've got at least a website. How can people support you and your work and what you're doing contribute? Yeah, so the website is centerforbuilding.org. That's spelled out centerforbuilding.org. There'll be a new website in a couple of weeks, which should have an email list, which I don't currently have, but there will be one. There's a donate page there. But I think the most important thing to do is just, you know, pay attention to building codes in whatever way you have the capacity for, you know, if it's just, you know, following me on social media, you can find that on the website or, you know, reading about it, sending a, email to your Speaker 2 (01:15:48.418) Politicians whatever it is or if you really want to get involved, know if you're especially if you're in the industry You know, you want to get involved in the ICC or something. That would be great But you know if all you have is money, I'll take your money, too Well, what are you on? What's your ex or? I'm not on X anymore. I've ascended to a higher plane. I'm on blue sky. Okay. Steven Jacob Smith's that's T E P H E N J A C O B last name Smith. You can probably spell that. dot com. That's the, like, that's the, that's the handle. and yeah, I used to be on Twitter or X at, at market urbanism, but I found the, the, the user experience has been a bit degraded. So I'm not on there anymore. but you can also email me at steven, S-T-E-P-H-E-N at centerforbuilding.org. And then the website, the website's the best place. Cool. Well, Stephen, really appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge. I'm really glad for all the research you've done. You're one of the people that understands how this stuff works more than anyone I've ever talked to. So I'm really thankful for the work you're doing. Speaker 2 (01:16:55.854) I hope one day you can get an elevator in one of your townhouses, or better yet, maybe build a small condo building with an elevator. Yeah, exactly. All right, Stephen, I'll talk to you again, maybe have you on another year or two and catch up on some updates. Certainly. Thanks so much, Austin. Good luck out there. All right, bye. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review and take a screenshot, send it to playbook at building culture.com. And when we reach a hundred reviews, I'm going to send out 10 building culture hats, like up there behind my head. If you're watching video and I'll send it to your house. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.