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They increase the cost and duration of building a new dwelling by exorbitant amounts and limit the creative freedoms of the builder into practically following cookie-cutter templates (esp in terms of materials).
On the other hand, they theoretically provide some semblance of assurance that when you buy a new property that it was built to a certain standard. Unless it was grandfathered in, or the builder "knew somebody," or work was done without a permit after the dwelling was built, or ...
As somebody fully capable of building my own house though, damn do I wish they didn't exist. It means putting off that dream for an untold number of years of further saving and wasting money on rent instead of being able to buy a piece of land, and slowly progressing from a shack to a beautiful home worthy of a family. That ship sailed long before I was born, and instead of providing their purported benefits, building codes just feel like another tool to oppress the not-wealthy.
The problem is that the process has become more important than actual safety which is supposedly the goal. From the article, it sounds like he used superior lumber and superior building techniques, but was dinged by the inspector for not having the proper 'stamp.'
I've personally seen some really silly things done because code required it and the code was applied blindly without any allowance for human judgment.
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.
As someone who's spent 15 years in construction, the sanctioned way around this is to actually pay an architect or engineer to put their stamp on your plans. The inspector is actually only there to sign off on the fact that some engineer has approved the structural integrity of the materials and installation. If you deviate from the basic products or install, you have to get an engineer or architect to put a stamp on your plans, then the inspector verifies your building is built according to the spec the engineer or architect signed off on.
In the long run, it's probably cheaper for almost everyone since most houses are built with the same materials and techniques. If you want to deviate, you have to get it signed off. 99% of people benefit from the increase in the review speed and the building dept not paying for everyone to be a certified eng.
In this case, I think the "stamp" referred to the lumber used. However, I think you are right that having an architect sign off would have gone a long way to preventing his problems.
I'm not confused about what stamp they are talking about. In this case, the stamp means the lumber mill has an eng or testing process that tests and stamps certain wood as having certain strength properties. If the lumber with confirmed strength properties is installed in a certain way, the non engineer building inspector will sign off on the structure of the property. If your lumber doesn't have a stamp, then you need an architect or engineer to signoff on the size/shape/material of the lumber to insure that it has the correct structural properties for the building you are building.
As a side note, most building departments have engineers on staff, but not every plan needs to be reviewed by the engineer. If you use a stock plan, stock materials, you are good to go and the jr guys can review your plan. These are templates that can be downloaded you can send a drawing of a square to the inspector, and slap some copy pasta on the corner of the print that says, 'Walls are build with 2x4 stud with a 2 grade stamp at 16" intervals and 5/8" 1 hour burn rating sheetrock, fire blocking at 4' with a 6" concrete foundation wall with standard #4 rebar at 16" spacing. . . .' and it will get approved.
This sounds like a case of the house builder being out of his depth and the building inspector being out of his depth. How did the guy get moved in before they had inspected/denied the structural framing? At that point, he could have had an eng come and sign off on it. But after he sheet-rocked and covered everything up, there's not much anyone can do.
> This sounds like a case of the house builder being out of his depth
Let's just read the first two sentences of the original story:
> It was the fifth house that Craig Morrison built with his own hands, and the last. He had built things with his own hands for 70 years, often using lumber he produced at his own small sawmill. Now he would build a modest, single-storey house
Looks like he knew how to prepare lumber and build a house.
So, sure, he was out of his depth when it came to the regulations of houses today. But it's very understandable that the regulations were a surprise and didn't make sense to him. Because the house and the wood was fine, pretty good even...
"Looks like he knew how to prepare lumber and build a house.
"
No.
There is a difference between experience and wisdom.
He could have built 5 unsafe and dangerous houses, and been building stuff wrong for 70 years.
(This happened to my parents, good old tiling person who had " been doing it 20 years", when he had been doing it wrong for 20 years, and the installation catastrophically failed due to fairly basic and obviously wrong choices).
So just because he built 5 houses, doesn't mean he knows how to do it or create anything safe.
(it may be he does, of course, just that the fact that he's built houses before does not tell you that one way or the other)
> He could have built 5 unsafe and dangerous houses
But according to the story, an independent expert inspected his house and concluded that it exceeded the building code standards. So while in theory he could have been building unsafe houses, the evidence in this case is that he wasn't.
Said evidence surfaced late in the process, and the inspector didn't have access to it during the inspection. If the house builder reached out to building engineer to have his house plans and materials approved before the inspection, there would have been no problem in the first place.
> Said evidence surfaced late in the process, and the inspector didn't have access to it during the inspection.
That's true, but I wasn't talking about the inspector, I was responding to DannyBee's comment that he could have been building unsafe houses. We here in this thread all know about the evidence that it was sound, so we don't have the excuse the inspector had (for whatever it's worth) for not knowing the actual structural soundness of the building.
> If the house builder reached out to building engineer to have his house plans and materials approved before the inspection, there would have been no problem in the first place.
Agreed. Whether that excuses the inspector (or the government that employs him), though, depends on the rules in that particular jurisdiction. Some places require stamped plans, or at least stamped plans for anything not using standard materials, others don't. If the rules just say the building has to be structurally sound, then it should be the inspector's job to determine if it is using all reasonable evidence, not just looking for stamps. But that also means the government needs to fund and train inspectors to be able to do that.
1. You have evidence he built one house correctly :)
That tells you literally nothing about the previous performance of his houses.
2. This happened after the city had already red flagged a bunch of stuff. Again, he could have fixed it all and then hired his inspector to say it was great. I've even seen this happen with some of the flippers around here :)
Now, do i believe he probably knows how to build houses?
Yes.
But the original comment is that "looks like he knew how to take lumber and build a house", and the story as we have it doesn't provide this data.
It basically provides "he knew how to take lumber, do something, have the city complain about it, maybe fix it all or maybe it was already good, hire an inspector, inspector says it is now all good".
That isn't quite the same as proving "guy knew how to build houses", it's closer to "guy maybe knows how to build houses, or knows how to fix mistakes once they are pointed out".
> You have evidence he built one house correctly :) That tells you literally nothing about the previous performance of his houses.
Only if you believe that his performance on the one house has no correlation whatever with his performance on other houses. That seems highly implausible to me.
> he could have fixed it all
Fixed what? The problem wasn't that the house was actually built wrong. The problem was that the inspector wasn't competent enough to make an actual engineering judgment, so all he could look for was some particular label on the lumber instead of assessing its actual structural strength. An independent inspector, who did have the competence to make an actual engineering judgment, said the house was fine (in fact he said it exceeded the building code standards).
He's built 5 houses in x number of years. It takes a pro less than 9 months to build a house, that would put you at 7500 hours, 3/4 of the way to an 'expert'. It's really easy to underestimate the complexity of someone else's job. Perhaps dunning Kruger?
This is a strange thing that we are starting to see in the Western world. Everyone is specializing and becoming an expert as their field gets more complex. This is what capitalism demands. Yet, we assume anyone can walk off the streets and be a functional expert. Construction is hard, science is hard, economics is hard, foreign policy is hard, computer science is hard. I think the complaint is that, anymore, if you're not an expert, you're not good enough. Building a house and getting it permitted is a complex thing because we are unwilling to build structures that put lives in danger, and someone has to take the liability for confirming a building is adequate, if you want to go out on a limb and reinvent the wheel, in any field, you should be an expert.
I'll stand by my words here and say I think he was out of his depth. As was the inspector that probably could have defused the situation and come to a amicable solution.
I think that you are right he was out of his depth. Only that maybe construction wise he knew what he was doing, but legally not. Maybe he built 5 houses where inspectors had good day and approved building where this time some inspector was more picky.
"This sounds like a case of the house builder being out of his depth"
Out of his depth in legal knowledge. At some point people decided everybody must study Law to even step outside of home. Things didn't use to be this way, how exactly did it change? And, well, it is certainly a bad thing today, but do we want to revert as it was at some time on the past, or reform in some unprecedented way?
And yes, it's kinda crazy. I am entitled into stamping a house around here, even though I have no idea how to decide if a construction is safe or not. Yet, I do know people with perfectly good history of creating good construction that isn't.
Government will hire rules followers who aren't experts, for as long as we think that government is inefficient and we don't want to pay taxes.
If government was prestigious and well paid, competent people would flock there in addition to business. As it is, you have to be /very/ dedicated to go into government, and most people are not.
Not sure where you live but in Canada government is well paid with job security, benefits and pension second to none. Retiring after 30 years and getting 70% of the average of your best 5 years of salary for you or your spouse until you are dead is not something I've seen in the private sector. I'm an ee.
It's the same principle as trademarks, "badge of origin" - a short-cut for assessing quality.
Same for degrees/qualifications/credentials. It seems amazing that they are such a big deal. But when you're faced with assessing a professional in a field in which you're a layman, you see how crucial their role.
But when you see the quality of lumber at the big box stores that carry the stamp and in no way should be entitled to it you start to question the game and who it is designed to help.
That is actually the crux of the matter: The standards are in place to make sure buildings don't collapse even if the materials aren't very good and the construction is shoddy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A home inspection can't tell what materials were used inside the floors and the walls, and how the pipes were installed. Particularly in a modern apartment block. And for new constructions you often buy ahead of completion.
In the UK for instance, health safety regulation mandates that all doors shut automatically in an apartment block. As a result doors spend their time slamming in modern flats. You'd better have good sound insulation. How can you check that unless you pay someone to make noise in every flat around yours to test it?
I don't think apartments have any real bearing on this conversation, I don't know of any apartments built by a single person for their own use. They should rightly be held to a higher standard than a single occupancy home.
The first is safety, and thus the liability to others. If your house is a fire hazard and you have nearby neighbors, then some compulsory standards can be imposed.
For rural areas, this justification of public welfare is often moot. In such a case, I'd much rather see inspection performed to arrive at a rating or assessment, rather than condemning a property. The top grade would be all but required for homeowners insurance, and would resemble the current code. You could have a more nebulous middle rating where no obvious dangers are present, but non-standard methods make it difficult to assess. Finally, there could a rating for buildings that are clearly a danger that may have some consequences. For instance, all occupants would have to be notified of the status, and perhaps children and animals could be forbidden to live in such structures. Or perhaps these structures could be condemned as before, but limited to extreme cases.
Basically, it would be good to have a middle ground for adults willing to take on the risk.
That's why the parent to your comment was talking about rural areas where you don't have any nearby neighbours and the main safety implications are to you and your family and for the insurance/mortgage companies.
Remodeling my own home. Found some pretty sketchy electrical, had a contractor that cut some corners. I'm grateful for modern building codes. Ignorance is bliss, but then you get a little bit of awareness, and realize how fragile everything is, and so forth.
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.
Where is that? do you have hardware stores that sell electrical parts? Do you need a license to buy from them?
I could understand needing a license to perform work for hire but stopping people doing their own work sounds unenforceable.
In Australia for example you can't do your own (unless you are an electrician). Imagine if you buy a house with faulty electric work, you can't "see" it or even reasonably check it all in a building inspection. These kinds of regulations are lifesavers.
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.
True, but on the other hand, it raises the bar. If you know your work is going to be inspected, you probably do a better job. And make sure you know the building code.
A true craftsman would always do the job perfectly, but subcontractors are often unsupervised, inexperienced, and rushing from job to job.
They may seem difficult, but one upon a time cities burned. Fire was a constant threat. Thats why new york has so many fire departments. That new buildings have been built to codes for a century or more means cities as a whole are less flammable. The concept of large-scale fire spreading across neighbourhoods has almost slipped from living memory. Thats worth the extra costs.
The curse of any effective regulation is that the day after it cures the evil it was meant to, people start questioning things. Vaccines, pasterization, not spitting in public, rabies shots for pets ... all were/are life or death rules that many now disregard because they have forgotten history.
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.
That might seem easier, but would have trouble adapting to local conditions. Not every city is in an earthquake zone. Not every city suffers huricanes. Many local initiatives would also be quashed. For instance, my city forbids doornobs while some small towns mandate them. (No joke. It's to do with disabled people and bears. It may sound silly but nobody really complains.)
Doorknobs are much harder than lever type handles for people with arthritis or similar conditions to operate (since they require gripping firmly, as opposed to just pushing). However in some areas where bears are a threat, doorknobs are mandated since bears have been reported to have learned how to open lever handles (but either haven't learned or lack the dexterity/grip strength to use doorknobs), so knobs are safer.
Also, anyone with a helper dog. You can tie a small rope to a lever, but not a nob. So the disabled can rent without having to change out all the nobs/locks.
It should be enough to have an approval that the house is structurally sound, has good fire safety etc.
If you don't have that, obviously the building can be neither sold nor insured.
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.
That said, possible problems include: should you be allowed to raise kids in a house that might collapse (while you can't legally drive those same kids in your car without seat belts, for comparison)?
Should a publicly funded fire department put out the recurring fires in your house due to your homebuilt fireplace and diy electric wiring?
There are also accessibility standards - I'm not allowed to build a house that isn't accessible (e.g I can't only have bathrooms accessible by stairs, and one ground floor bathroom door must fit a wheelchair etc). The reason being that the prices on houses that are accessible might otherwise be higher because of limited supply.
> 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.
If you fail to insulate a wooden wall from a chimney two feet away, in twenty years the wood would now be baked so dry that it could easily ignite and burn to death someone who bought the house. A building inspector stopped me from making this mistake.
> 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 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.
Building codes are not a one-sized-fits-all panacea, neither good nor bad inherently. They are both policy creation and enforcement to prevent as much harm as people can reasonably afford while balancing the tyrannies of the many and the few, the poor and the rich, the DIY and the commercial. Regulation isn't always bad such as preventing lowest bidders from building garment factories which collapse, using outdated/dangerous electrical technologies (ie, aluminum wiring, lead pipes) or lacking modern safety items to prevent classes of risks (ie hard-wired smoke detectors).
Certainly, people whom are more affluent could purchase additional safeguards (ie automatic external defibrillators, whole-house water-filtration) while those whom are elderly/poor will likely need assistance meeting minimum standards.
Also, clipboard auditing (timber stickers) shouldn't be a substitute for inspection common-sense.
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.
My 2 cents on codes. As far as I'm concerned, every new shared dwelling should be required to construct for noise control.
My understanding is that substantial improvements in this regard can be achieved for 10% or less additional cost. And the resulting livability and healthiness (stress reduction) of the the dwelling is greatly improved.
Having had more than my share of crap neighbors. Please.
> 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.
A lot of the gain can be achieved for 1% - 2% increase, if designed and engineered in from the start -- is my admittedly second-hand understanding from people who know.
Personally, I've been careful when searching for places, and I've still ended up screwed. Noise is one of the biggest complaints I've heard over the years from friends and colleagues.
People worry over "sprawl" in this country incessantly. Yet one of the simplest solutions is to make shared living spaces (apartments, condos) more comfortable.
Stress greatly, negatively impacts productivity. And unwelcome, persistent noise is one of the greatest sources in day-to-day life.
So, engineer it out.
People who don't mind noise can live in the crackerbox housing stock that became more prevalent post World War II, that still persists.
Noise is finally being designated the pollutant that it is. Building codes can and should address this, especially when remediation is available and -- my understanding -- not that expensive. Require it, and economies of scale will bring the cost down further.
In the U.S., individuals such as myself, plenty productive but requiring a quiet environment, are left to suss out individual circumstances. I've had enough, and I want to make life easier for the next person like me. So, I will continue to advocate for noise ordinances (that actually get enforced), improved building codes, and the like.
All the noisy people who want to live on the cheap while making my life miserable? Well, after 5 decades of persistently trying to be the nice guy and politely gain their cooperation: Screw them.
They can pay the cost to physically limit their noise, given that they are unwilling to cooperate in terms of polite behavior.
Travel! I wish building codes actually mattered in my country.
Seriously, just travel. I think its the easiest way to appreciate what human beings end up with without controls or even the threat of control/speedy justice.
do note that this in no way is meant to relieve your angst, just contextualize it and make it easier to bear.
In the part of Africa I am from, building inspections are a money making scheme for councils. You get charged for every single stage of the building, the footing, the foundation, window level, roof, connecting to the sewer (if there is sewer in the area). I get the need for the inspections but like many things in life it is how they are implemented that makes the difference.
This isn't about building codes. It's about stickers and permits. An independent inspector said that it was built twice as strong as a regular house. The inspector was just throwing the book at the person because it didn't follow his bureaucracy.
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.
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.
One side of the problem is that "strict rule book with concrete requirements" translate into stamps for quality certification and plenty of dumb rule following.
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.
Doesn't regulatory arbitrage mean following the regulations but taking advantage of loopholes in them? So it's not illegal. That seems a bit different from breaking them, possibly paying a fine, and still profiting anyway. The latter is what I've heard of Uber doing in some cases. It's also what shops do by trading on holidays where they're supposed to be closed.
Correct. Regulatory arbitrage is about finding and taking advantage of loopholes, and shifting business activities to other business units (or even locations) where while those actions are technically legal, they're very, very borderline.
Then you generally couple regulatory arbitrage with money spent on lawyers and lobbying to monitor the existing loopholes, in order to make sure they don't disappear.
What Uber/Lyft are doing is more equivalent to poker: a combination of betting (a large enough war chest to pay lawyers and fines) and bluffing (using marketing campaigns to garner public interest and shame/scare the establishment).
When the stakes get too high (e.g. ride sharing laws in Austin, TX), they fold.
> Purposely breaking the law in order to have a structural advantage over competitors.
Not one of the the groups you mentioned makes a habit of breaking the law. They look for opportunities to get around the excessive weight of our insanely litigious and complicated regulatory environment.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. They are helping humanity escape the productivity sink of pointless regulations, set insanely far along the diminishing returns curve.
Think about how many billions of dollars of productive output are wasted every year so some idiot pencil-pushers can make sure the correct stickers are present on building materials.
>>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.
They're pursuing self-driving tech in a shifty way - paying a driver to perform backup (in a way that Google has shown can't be done) and otherwise letting an unfinished AI have full-control of the vehicle at road speeds. When the cars make a mistake (run a red) they blame the driver so they can claim a flawless self-driving record.
If they said they were self-driving, and got the permit, they'd be required to log activations so we'd know who was supposed to be in control at the time.
Right, that's not self-driving at all, but they claim that it is. Shifty.
The problem is that they've put drivers in the car as backup; they're not supposed to drive or it ruins the experiment. So they won't be ready to take over when needed. One already missed their cue and the car ran a red light...
If that's the law, why did Tesla and every other company actually applied for and got the permit? Are you suggesting that you know better than their teams of lawyers?
You are misinformed. Tesla does not have a permit for every single "self driving" car they have on the road.
There are 10s of thousands of self driving Teslas on the road right now, in the hands of customers. You can buy one! You don't have to get a permit for them.
California Vehicle Code 38750 covers the testing of autonomous vehicles by the manufacturer. It does not cover the usage of those vehicles by customers.
Has this been confirmed? John Gruber has speculated that the "human error" was that the person sitting in the driver's seat failed to stop the self-driving system from driving through the red light:
I don't know how much more confirmation you can get than an official statement. If you want to believe speculation over an official statement that's entirely up to you.
But if you stand at that particular intersection for an hour, I'm pretty sure it's the one on 3rd street by the MOMA, you'll probably see half a dozen people blow by that light. It's entirely reasonable to think that a human driver would drive through, but it seems rather standard for software to detect the redlight. But you are free to believe what you want.
Tesla's automated cruise control would run a red light as well.
The law on this was clear. If you have a human at the wheel, you can have whatever technology you want doing "lane assist" and automated cruise control.
Yes they do. A politician that had no problem with what the private company was doing for months, became mad at the private company as soon as there were political consequences (and not a moment sooner!).
It is unsurprising to me that a politician cares about politics and doesn't give a shit about the law.
And as soon as this stuff went to court the politician would have lost, because the law is very clear on this.
But it would have delayed things for a year or 2. And Uber was perfectly able to just move to Arizona.
But it is no matter. Eventually this stuff will go to court and the politician who doesn't care about the law will lose.
The Director of the CA DMV is a position appointed by the Governor. While it's not an elected position, that certainly qualifies as a political office. The DMV itself may not be a politician, but it's made up of people that happen to have a politician as their boss.
I believe that "no permit required" is for the permit office and the legislature to decide...
Looking through your comment history, it looks like you have a very strong attachment to Uber! Strong to the point that you have to create alternate definitions of commonly-held terms in response to criticism of the company. Any reason?
> I believe that "no permit required" is for the permit office and the legislature to decide.
Yes, but importantly the legislature overrides the permit office. The permit office has the right to decide in some situations, but in others situations their decisions can be objectively correct or incorrect.
My reason is that I hate politicians who don't care about the law, and delay perfectly legal technologies that are going to save millions of lives.
Every year, a hundred thousand people in the world die in car related incidents.
Every last one of these deaths are preventable. And every year that politicians delay this technology, is 100 thousand more people dead that could have been saved.
They delay it even when it clearly doesn't break the law. The laws on lane assist and cruise control are clear. This stuff is already deployed to tens of thousands of Tesla cars, that are on the road right now.
I do not work for Uber, if that is what you are insinuating (although I have received recruiting emails, as I am a SF web developer. I don't really like their intense work environment.).
I "merely" care a lot about the 100 thousand people that politicians, ignorant of the law, are killing every year.
(Uber employee) Read the story, not the headlines. The $175 permit only required verified insurance and training for the drivers. That's it. It wasn't a safety inspection at all. They didn't ensure that the cars were safe. It was simply bureaucracy.
Plus, based on the actual law written, Uber's implementation wasn't covered under the permit. Uber has hundreds of lawyers, I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing. Why should they get a permit that they don't need to?
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.
>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.
Trees are not covered under building codes. They are covered under city ordinances. And I cut down 3 trees on my property because I wasn't going to spend $150 per tree so that city hall could get themselves a nice Christmas bonus for doing nothing except filling out paperwork.
No, they were done because of lobbying from the lumber industry. If you have any evidence that stamped lumber is superior in any way I would love to see it. Because if you've ever built a house, you'd know you have to throw away about 10% of stamped lumber because it is trash.
"No, they were done because of lobbying from the lumber industry. "
This is simply false.
Seriously. I'd love to see where this history came from?
Do you have any real source, or is this typical "lobbyists did it" bluster.
Here is the history of stamping in the US:
There were failures and complaints in ~1920's from mills/etc starting to sell substandard lumber due to the depression. Code enforcers wanted a sane way to ensure the houses being built weren't being built with substandard lumber.
Folks asked Dept of Commerce to come up with voluntary standards for grading and inspection.
NIST (well, what is now NIST) created a set of simple voluntary grading standards. They've revised it a few times.
Literally the only thing the grading agencies do is grade. They don't actually care about the end result. They don't make more or less money one way or the other.
The grading standards are also pretty simple. It's not like it's rocket science.
Note that most mills stamp their own lumber. You just have to have someone trained to do it.
In wisconsin, for example, it takes 1 day to be certified.
One of the 7 grading agencies randomly inspect, and if they find enough errors, they'll hold you up.
As for the amount of waste, most waste i've seen is from
1. later-bent studs due to wood movement. This is not structurally unsound (just nobody feels like re-straightening them), so the stamp still is doing it's job of saying it's sound.
2. damage during transit.
Your other question was "evidence stamped lumber is superior in any way".
I will strongly assert that lumber machine tested and evaluated for actual strength and stamped as such is superior to random lumber that is untested and unknown.
Visually graded lumber is usually graded based on things like knot size and slope of grain, both of which have a significant structural effect on lumber (structural strength decreases as grain deviation increases).
Assuming grading is being done properly (and again, there's a lot of checks going on), yes, the lumber is structurally better.
But maybe you don't believe the physics, and think that things like slope of grain don't impact the structural properties? If so, i guess i can't solve that problem for you. It's pretty well studied:
Interesting to hear your perspective. As someone who'd also like to buy land and build a house for my future family some day, aren't there relatively inexpensive ways to do it despite potentially overzealous building codes? Surely there are some pretty nice "cookie cutter" templates out there, right?
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.
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 was actually researching this with respect to the tiny house movement. They are out there. Definitely all rural, which can make it tough when you depend on fast internet to make a living.
All I know is what the manufacturer said about unexpected resistance to changing building codes, and the blatant make-work compromise they ended up with:
The productivity costs of excessive regulation are also written in blood, but it's a slightly more abstract relationship, so most people aren't capable of making the connection.
"Oh my god, this building collapsed during an earthquake and killed a family! Alert the national press!"
Versus
"The expected per-capita cost of this new electrical wiring legislation over the next 50 years is $12/person/year, which according to our consumption models means that the average person will spend $2.50 fewer a year on health insurance, which will result in a 0.00003% higher annual medical casualty rate. Now, moving onto expected effects on nutrition..."
Even though the regulatory costs kill a lot more people, it's not as immediate or violent, so most people don't care.
Your point is a good one, although it not at all obvious or self-evident that the regulatory burden is more "costly" on society than that of poorly built structures. Your post doesn't provide any evidence of that. I would guess that the general consensus holds the opposite to be true, at least for building codes in the U.S. today. It is certainly a difficult question to analyze in any kind of numeric detail.
Stop being overly dramatic. People need to realise that there is a happy gray area wherein regulation is most efficient. When I get into a neighbors shower I want to be nearly certain I won't be electrocuted but also the flip side of heavy regulation is the money wasted on inefficiencies when adhering to the numerous European pillow manufacturing standards, for example.
While I agree with your point, the "numerous Eurpoean pillow manufacturing standards" meme is based on a fabricated claim: https://youtu.be/iAgKHSNqxa8?t=273
Many of those rules are important, but lots of them are really insignificant from the safety viewpoint, just a pure bureaucracy. Is it really important that fire extinguishers in the hallways of buildings have to be mounted on the wall at exact prescribed height? If you just let them sit on the floor you can get yourself fined, although they will function exactly the same regardless of the position.
I can think of a lot of reasons it'd be unsafe to place fire extinguishers on the floor. Floods could corrode the casing, children could reach the trigger components of a device that emits a suffocating chemical foam, etc.
It's often easy to suggest the number of regulations are unnecessary, but most came from some sort of logic or reason... In many cases in response to a tragedy that occurred before.
I think they've served their purpose, and have now taken on a life of their own.
Thinking of fires, for example - these used to be a major hazard, but their now more or less a solved problem, and a lot has changed since the fire codes were written. Like, people don't smoke nearly as much any more, clothing and furniture is far less hazardous, and electrical appliances are lower power and safer now. These days, the only time people actually die in fires is when they are doing something hazardous and illegal anyway.
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.
"Thinking of fires, for example - these used to be a major hazard, but their now more or less a solved problem, and a lot has changed since the fire codes were written. "
We're exactly talking about fire codes. But fair, let's talk about lumber stamps. How much weight can a random hunk of wood support? Under what conditions? Do you know? Probably not, different ways wood can be treated can dramatically affect how it behaves. How it's cared for (drying, etc) can also do the same. Both of those definitely contribute to flammability. Or just "Where did the wood come from? Is it from an area likely to have borer beetles, compromising any treatment?"
I mean, sure, if you pick through codes, there's probably cruft in there. I'm not foolhardy enough to say that everything is 100% based on modern understanding of materials science. But it's quite the reach to go from there to "Nah, let's get rid of them, they're in our way! Common sense will do just fine!"
Most lumber stamping is done by machine vision. If you've spent any time at a big box store that sells lumber you will realise how shitty lumber can be while still having that magical grade stamp. I've picked up 2x4s that break when you pick them up at one end but they still have a grade stamp and could be used in a structural wall because it bears the correct grade stamp.
For most stick construction you can clearly see a 2x4 or 2x6 will or won't support the load given the checking and knot size. Code, though, requires a grade stamp.
No we're not. That poster pointed out how fire codes helped, but that most codes do not. We're talking about building codes.
>But fair, let's talk about lumber stamps. How much weight can a random hunk of wood support? Under what conditions? Do you know?
None of those things have anything at all to do with stamps. That's the point. If the code specified lumber by strength it would be fine. But it specifies lumber by "you have to buy it from an approved member of the lumber cartel" and makes absolutely no mention of strength.
>Probably not, different ways wood can be treated
Building lumber is not treated. If you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, why throw out random nonsense?
> But it's quite the reach to go from there to "Nah, let's get rid of them, they're in our way! Common sense will do just fine!"
Nobody suggested that. Responding to silly strawman arguments is not constructive.
> 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)
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.
On the other hand, following building codes is one of the major reasons why when natural disasters strike, people don't die by the thousands or millions any more.
why i think this is important and true, there is often a tendency to over-regulate things, because for the regulator it's hard to decide what is necessary and important and what does more harm due to the regulatory overhead than the increased safety/whatever.
Disclaimer: I don't think this is super bad and i am german. We love to regulate things. But i think if you spend all your live thinking about fire hazards in residential areas all you care about is fire hazards and it's hard to not do everything to prevent those (even if there is only a small possibility and it would increase panning prices quite a bit).
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 have built three houses (designed and served as my own contractor). My homes were stylish, innovative, and a delight to live in. I'm a scientist not a builder, yet I did not find the building codes to be a burden. Indeed they kept me from making dangerous mistakes. It's a complicated world and the building codes made designing and building a home practical.
Can you recommend any ways to get into house building? Books, articles, general information. The codes probably vastly vary between countries, but I assume the fundamentals remain the same. Thanks.
I'm not a big fan of this style of online journalism. Do we have anything on this other than an opinion piece heavily lacking in detail? Could anyone even explain what the opinion is exactly?
I wouldn't mind building codes and inspections so much if they actually protected consumers from corner-cutting builders, and if the cities that charge exorbitant fees for permits and inspections didn't automatically sign off on commercial builders' dismally flawed products over coffee and a pastry at the nearest Starbucks.
I've owned three homes so far and everyone of them has violated code in myriad ways, such as not having a speck of insulation in the roof, putting in little to no rebar in the foundation, not securing weight-bearing walls to the joists they're supporting, or finishing the shower surrounds with paint-on tar that breaks down and starts leaking in a couple of years; after the warranty on the home has expired, of course.
My dad was a builder when I was growing up, and the truth of the matter is that city inspectors become friends with builders, and they often times don't bother to actually inspect the homes they're signing off on, or don't inspect them frequently enough to catch when a builder is skimping on insulation, rebar, or nails.
Try to do something on your own though, and the city is there harassing you every step of the way. At least that has been my experience.
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.
The fact that a basically empty "forwards from grandma" anecdote like this is what rises to the level of notable should hopefully cause you to question the community here?
[hint: ask the question "what do we see when we look at rigorous studies of the effects of building codes", not "what can I conclude from one story with a very heavy slant, about one person in Canada", when you're trying to understand the effects of policy.]
Reminds me of when a family friend of mine (a professor of civil engineering) built his own barn on his property. He got permits and did everything the ordained way, but still got hassled over tons of details. The inspector almost couldn't grasp the idea that the tens of thousands of stainless steel screws he had bought and used significantly exceeded the specs of the nails required by code. He did manage to persevere eventually.
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. The rule might have been in to simplify inspections.
"All stainless steels may not be acceptable for use with preservative treated wood. Testing has shown that Types 304, 305 and 316 stainless steels perform very well with woods that may have excess surface chemicals. Type 316 stainless steel contains slightly more nickel than other grades, plus 2-3% molybdenum, giving it better corrosion resistance in high chloride environments prone to cause pitting such as environments exposed to sea water."
Nails have higher shear strength and screws have higher tensile strength. That's the reason nails are used for framing and those nails are typically covered in a heat activated cement to prevent pull out.
My aunt's also a civil engineer, and she has a much more mundane explanation for why nails are OK and screws are not: if you use nails, someone's already calculated how many you need to ensure the structure isn't going to fall down. The strength of the nails has been calculated, their material properties are known, etc. The engineering work has been done.
If you use screws, you could have an engineer sign off on that structure (and then the inspector would let it pass), but the engineer would need to:
1) Find a data sheet on the screws you're using,
2) Do the calculations to show that you're using enough of them, and in the right places, to ensure the structure will stay standing,
3) Be willing to then sign off on the structure.
Depending on the screw, that data sheet may or may not exist.
I'm surprised your family friend didn't know this, or left that detail out of the story. Maybe he worked in another branch of civil engineering (sidewalks, sewer, etc) from structural engineering?
tl;dr: If you can pay an engineer to do the calcs (and sign off on it) to show that your screw-based structure will stay standing, the inspector won't be any problem.
This article by far doesn't give enough information to judge the situation. We don't know which regulations he broke.
The issue isn't really the amount of regulation but if certain regulation makes sense or not. The whole deregulation crowd never actually talks about which regulations should be abolished.
Building a home with my own two hands has been a bit of a dream of mine. The government, governments in general but particularly the government in my own country, have become so overbearing, with a desire to micromanage and control and monitor every little aspect our existence. They want us to get their okay and stamp of approval before going about the ordinary course of our lives. There's something beautiful in ordinary men like Morrison who choose to stand against that.
I completely understand your point of government intrusion, but there are actually building codes in place for a reason. An example is the San Francisco fire of 1906. Building codes set safety requirements for construction for the general safety of everyone living in or around a building. Whether it's fire codes, plumbing codes, earthquake codes...etc. If there were no building codes, we would he of housing fatalities daily on the news, and LA would look like favela. You can't just construct a building however you wish, no different than you can travel down an expressway as you wish (i.e. walking in the middle of the lane).
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.
But it isn't like the health department in restaurants. Commercial kitchens could harm someone with bad food practices.
The same goes for your house. After all, you simply won't life there forever: Either you'll sell the house or die eventually. Anything you do to that house that doesn't meet codes can seriously affect the folks that live there after you.
Where did your responsibility to have a home you want to buy inspected and certified become the governments job of forcing people to build the same cookie cutter structures over and over?
Significant portions of England were built well before modern codes. Why can those be legal residences and something built in the same style and method be illegal?
Edit: So if you can downvote you've been here long enough to know you should tell me why. Shame.
A fair point. But many things get hidden behind drywall, making them very expensive for a new home buyer to get certified. Sure seems more efficient to inspect once during construction.
Home inspections really depend on the competency of the inspector, and for most people this is hit and miss. This is really where the article gets wacky: If he had had a knowledgeable city inspector, who was versed in construction practices, he might not have had so much trouble. He needed a specialty bureaucrat and he got the run-of-the-mill variety: In addition, he should have double checked the building codes before starting and could have saved himself some trouble.
Sometimes you catch something, and sometimes you don't, and sometimes the previous owner masks normal markers of problems. Most the ones I've seen check for major problems in places you can see them. Codes don't make it so you don't have the responsibility: They, in theory, make sure your electrical system is as safe as possible when you are building and other such things. The inspections help to identify known problems, especially important to older houses built to different standards.
Which is why buying a pre-existing house is slightly more risky than a new house. My parents had to treat a basement boiler for asbestos: One house the owners covered up signs of the roof leaking and the electrical was obviously not professional, even for the time of the upgrade. This house was inspected pre-purchase.
Most codes grandfather in old codes, but if you upgrade the system, you need to meet the new code for safety reasons.
I often think you should be able to rebuild in the same general visual style and size. But method? Lets face it, some of the old places were the cookie-cutter houses of the time - it isn't like every old building is of high quality. They used lead paint and asbestos, for example! But so long as the old methods meet current codes (some of which, like the number of nails, was meant to deter shoddy construction) I don't see where most folks get into trouble.
Part of your statement, the bit about style, gets to be a mix of aesthetic zoning laws and safety, the first I generally disagree with and the second usually helps folks when there is fire.
I think this discussion is way too black & white. I for one don't think all building codes are bad, but it's trivial to imagine a case of too many building codes. Now the question is, what are all the codes out there, and how much sense do they make? Is there a process of exceptions? What are the costs involved?
Because, based on the article, it sounds like absolutely no common sense is used for exceptions.
Sometimes there are too many building codes, when they are silly.
But some of those codes one doesn't have to pay attention to as much: Requiring grounded plugs with minimal construction standards. If you just buy your stuff, you won't have to worry about the construction standards of your outlet unit, merely that you buy the grounded sort.
"Absolutely no common sense is used for exceptions"
To me, this looked more like ignorance on both sides. If the inspector has no real training in construction, all he really has is the code - the stickers for the wood (for example). And the man building should have checked codes upfront to see what he needed to do to work around it.
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?
But that sticker is how you can tell that the lumber is of good enough quality. Who sets the standards? Who certifies that the lumber meets the standards? How do you get rcompense if someone lied about the quality of their lumber? That sticker says "this lumber meets quality specs. And if it doesn't, this company is responsible for the resulting catastrophe."
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").
Something else also happened in the intervening period - we got a lot better at calculating that base minimum of safety and quality. They used to overbuild stuff not because they wanted quality and were happy to pay for a bunch of extra material, but because they weren't sure exactly how much was required so they had massive safety margins.
I reject the thesis that removing building codes would RAISE the quality of buildings. I'm sure builders would love to dial down the material used a couple more steps so that it stand up just long enough for the big bad wolf to come along.
Please bear in mind that there's no actual information in this piece. The author clearly decided what the story was going to be before they had any details about it. If you want to build your own house, go ahead and do it - and research people who did it successfully and imitate what they did, instead of giving up before you start based on one thin story about some edge case.
Building regulation is there for a reason, usually a good one, sometimes involving fatalities. Blithely disregarding it in its entirety is a non-starter. It would be nice if the system were easier to work with, but picking a fight with it so you can play the hero is not really to be admired.
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.
Just food for thoughts: Software is like buildings. So, an analogy that I drew from this story is that in future it might be illegal to make your own software and let some others use it. I can imagine that you'd have to pass some sort of certification tests when rolling out your crypto code or operating system. Whether or not such tests can really work, is this the future that we really want? I have mixed feelings on this.
It seems to me like there should be exceptions in building codes if a building will never be sold and does not put others in danger (e.g., a shack in the forest)
People doing random things in the middle of the forest where they were sure they couldn't hurt anybody else had led to any number of major wildfires over the past century.
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?
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.
I 100% agree, but there are reasonable arguments against too.
Unfortunately in this case the house was sold on after the couples death. Guests, like new owners, also have a right to be save from structural issues.
"a cautionary tale of the tremendous power of the state over the individual in an age of pervasive bureaucracy. It is, indeed, a profound parable of irretrievably lost independence and casually forgotten freedoms."
I worked in construction in the UK for a good few years and hold some qualifications in this area so maybe I can add some meat to this.
1) Timber just missing a stamp...So timber used for structural work is stress graded. That is it is either bent by a machine which checked how far it deflected or it is visually graded by a qualified grader. Someone who mills their own timber could have employed a grader to do this, and it is not really a barrier. However construction timber must also be seasoned which adds strength and removes moisture which if trapped in can cause fungal rot. In the UK and for the timber we import from Canada (CLS Canadian Lumber Standard) this is normally achieved with a kiln drying process, which conveniently kills insects living in it too. It is hard to see how he achieved that. Timber in the UK used for roof members has to also be treated with wood preserver. It is rather more than just a stamp! I will add that a home mill comes with a lot of overhead and it is not clear that it wouldn't be cheaper to buy the timber, especially when you consider the better dimensional tolerance of machine regularized timber.
2) The building code is relatively strict in the UK but poorly enforced. This in the main is due to their not being enough inspections of the finished structure behind the drywall (plasterboard as we call it), especially when it comes to insulation/vapour barriers/noggins/metal straps etc. Some of the private building inspector schemes seem to be far to chummy with the builders.
3) When building something like a roof truss 'the way they used to in the 1960's' ie, not from approved plans, in general running the designs past a structural engineer will get you approval. This will cost you, but that is the cost of varying from the tried and tested. Same as if Geohot wants to build a self driving car he is going to have to demonstrate the safety himself.
4) There should be no exception for self build unless there is a covenant that the building is pulled down upon you leaving it. I would also suggest that you should have to post a bond to pay for the cleanup work. Otherwise the naive builder could be passing on a death trap. Likewise, the buildings around you rely on you doing your bit for fire prevention. The Fire-fighters who may have to go in and save people from your house should be able to rely that the fire barriers are properly in place etc...
5) Buildings are much more complex in the way they live and breath and the ergonomics they offer than what a lot of people give them credit for. You may curse that there is a regulation for the height of a light switch...until you are in a wheelchair. Keeping an insulated house dry, especially at the interface of cold warm air, is much more complex than grandpa's old log cabin.
6) The house I rent was 'done up' by DIY buy-to-let guy. He didn't see fit to run his electrical cables straight up or down from sockets so I can't even hang a picture for fear of nailing a cable. The drains block from the shower and sink as their is insufficient fall. The stair spindles are over 100mm apart and shouldn't be (this rule stops children from being strangled because they can't fit their heads in the gap). All of the doors have been hung without leading edges, so they catch when you shut them...All this stuff is stuff DIYers are not going to pick up from youtube. Personally I think the rules should be tougher and DIYers shoudl stick to painting and building sheds
This is one of the reasons the tinyhouse movement has become so popular. In Texas (and many other states), you can build your own house on a trailer and register it as a homemade travel trailer. RVs, being vehicles, are usually exempt from building codes. The main hurdle becomes finding a municipality that allows fulltime RV living which, depending on where you live, may be easier than jumping through regulation hoops building on a foundation.
the thing when you build an illegal building to live in, is that it should not be obvious that:
1. a structure is here. plants should be used to hide it.
2. it should be not obvious someone lives there. so no windows or fancy shit. it should not look like a house from the outside. nobody is going to look twice at a storage shed.
Need minor clarification, is it really that an inspector typically wants such a house torn down or is there some paperwork that needs inspector's signature and the inspector refuses to sign it?
If it's the latter then it should be straightforward. Home-owner lives in the house without a certain certificate of approval and when it's time to sell, they can't produce one, hence no one buys that house.
Isn't it more about incomplete paperwork making it difficult to sell, and if the home-owner doesn't plan to sell it, they can get on with their life without worrying about it?
(In this specific case, I'm guessing some personal issues may have occurred between the inspector and the home-owner that led to the inspector getting seriously pissed off and making it their mission to tear down the house?)
Typically what happens is you get sued in civil court by the government. If you lose you will be required to tear down the structure. If you don't comply it will then become a case where the government tears it down and files a lein on the property to recoup the costs. Failure to pay this lein will result in foreclosure and seizure by the government.
Obviously defying a court order can wind up with contempt of court where you then can serve jail time, but the general process is civil.
Building codes specify minimal acceptable standards. If you want quality, you're not going to get it through building codes adopted by government.
What I've typically seen with inspectors is that if it looks cookie cutter and they know the outfit that did the work, they rarely inspect for realsies.
I've seen 2x3 walls holding up a second story. By a known builder, in a very affluent county with a notoriously rigorous enforcement regime.
Another issue: Building codes are also put together by private groups, then adopted into model laws by various jurisdictions. Even though it is not supposed to be possible to copyright law, this practice dodges those restrictions. You end up having to pay quite a bit of money for these codes.
> Building codes are also put together by private groups, then adopted into model laws by various jurisdictions. Even though it is not supposed to be possible to copyright law, this practice dodges those restrictions. You end up having to pay quite a bit of money for these codes.
How does this work in detail? Once the law is adopted would it not be uncopyrightable?
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.
There should definitely be an exception in every code for the case when you're doing it on your own land, with your own materials, for your own consumption.
I think code writers understand that, nevertheless it is too often 'conveniently' left out.
This is the future of software development. We are reaching the limits where any DIY amateur can build their own website and collect sensitive data, for them to be leaked within months because they have never heard of SQL injection vulnerabilities.
That will be a pain to software developers, but will give some comfort to the business that the developers they hire will not fuck it up completely.
Exactly like today these bureaucratic building regulations are the only things protecting unsuspecting buyers from unscrupulous or incompetent house builders.
With aircraft, there's various certifications within weight and/or speed categories, but also experimentals, where usually some calculations and an inspector are needed. The inspector is not a bureaucrat, but someone with substance expertise, usually someone who has built aircraft themselves. That said, there are a lot of odd regulations in aircraft in aöl countries...
Haven't done it myself, but in general you need training and to pass an exam.
Training can come from 1 to 4 years of schooling, apprenticeship, or I believe job experience (e.g. general contractor for many years). Once that has been satisfied, you take the certification exam and pass to get certified.
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 think we need more regulations, laws, and building codes. Not!
Over here in the states, the Amish fight regulations all the time. The only way they win is religious freedom. And the fact that they have been building houses a certain way for 100 years.
If you would like to have a positive story this Christmas, then for Tiny Housers we had some Building Codes people formally include us into their thing. In the future it will be legal to live in Tiny Houses.
Tldr: senior citizen (88-92) builds himself a house but government inspectors find it unlawful. The citizen resists and after many court appointments he is finally given the permission to live in his house until he dies.
And it happened in Canada. And the author laments the loss of freedom from "before".
If I understand this, he built it to the building codes he knew in the 60s and couldn't understand why the building inspectors kept finding violations in what he built.
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.
It seems odd that the 'independent third party' volunteered to do it:
> ...At one point, a professional home builder, Raymond Debly, volunteered to do an independent inspection...
This guy is a 'professional home builder' which I believe is not a licensed professional, and 'volunteers' (read: do it for free) to do an inspection. In fact, when you read further:
> And the trusses were fine. ("They were built the old-fashioned way," said Mr. Debly, himself 80, "the way we did it in the '60s.")
This hardly inspires me with confidence. Someone who has been retired for 15 years volunteered to do an 'inspection' for what I presume is his friend. This is not an independent firm doing a paid-for inspection on behalf of both parties.
The building may have been fine, but the independent inspection does not sound like a verification that the building is up to modern verification codes.
Maybe it depends on location, but here, saying something was built 'the old-fashioned way' generally does mean massively over-engineered and structurally solid. I can only assume wood and concrete were a lot cheaper in the past.
It's all good until you go to do some major renovations and discover that the concrete footers you need to remove are ridiculously deep...
Professional home builders are typically required to be tested before being licensed. A license is typically required in order to build homes for other people.
Which is the part I disagree with. Existing homes built under those outdated regulations are somehow magically safe but building the same home 20 years later makes it a death trap?
Existing homes aren't magically safe. Safe isn't a binary, it's a continuum, and we're constantly improving our building techniques. We don't have the resources to knock down all the older houses and rebuild them.
The least we can do is when building new houses is to make sure that they are safer so that over time buildings get safer and safer.
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.
But they don't think of themselves that way, often because it's easy to smuggle in an indefinite number of rules under the cloak of good intentions.
"It's dangerous to allow buildings that are fire hazards, since fires spread fast in cities! People are in danger, we need rules."
"True, let's have a rule about that."
"Also some houses are unhygienic and don't have enough light and air. Let's ban all buildings that don't have enough of those."
"I guess so, if it's for health..."
"Actually, let's just ban all new housing that is not up to our extremely expensive and specific standards, arbitrarily set by unaccountable bodies, and capriciously enforced."
"Wait, but why?"
"You know, to keep people from dying in fires. Why do you hate fire safety?"
Sadly this has also happened in America. With every regulation passed that takes more money from the citizens and goes to the government, we lose our liberties one at a time.
Updates:
there's a movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Mine
and he died: http://www.inmemoriam.ca/view-announcement-348916-craig-morr...
and his wife died: http://www.inmemoriam.ca/view-announcement-380737-irene-morr...
the house was still standing (empty) as of 2014: http://www.ontariolandowners.ca/news/landowners-association-...
sold in 2015: http://crowtherrealestate.ca/properties/2020realestate/f-pri...