Why does the USA, The Land of the Free and The Land of Opportunity, have so much bureaucracy? Look, I know fire codes are important, and you don't want a building to crumble in around you, but... Seems the building codes in the US are unnecessarily strict. Is it power hungry bureaucrats or exploitation from contractors that has lead to it? And how can the people be given more liberty to build the way they want?
Actually the reverse, building codes for most of the US are a joke. We continue to build horribly inefficient and uncomfortable homes because every extra penny is spent on square footage and extra McMansion features. When houses become financial instruments there is no incentive to make houses into good homes, despite building science folks jumping up and down for decades.
Houses are complicated systems that need to control heat, moisture, water, and power while removing waste. This whole thing needs to be structurally sound while burning slowly enough so that you have time to react and escape in case of a fire. These are the most important investments most people ever make, and for the most part we are all served the cheapest legally permissible house that consumes as much space as possible.
Don't get me started on sound insulation. The condo I rent is two units in four stories and if the room on the fourth floor is playing music at a decent volume you can still hear from the garage. The whole thing is five million dollars. Retrofitting proper sound insulation on the whole building is north of 180k.
> Why does the USA, The Land of the Free and The Land of Opportunity, have so much bureaucracy? Look, I know fire codes are important, and you don't want a building to crumble in around you, but...
Yep, we should leave that to the market. You happen to live in a building that collapses, well, then you can have The Choice(TM) to never inhabit a building made by the same company again (if you're lucky). Eventually they'll be driven out of the market, unless people choose to risk it after assessing all available information, in which case there's nothing we can really do about it.
There is some really interesting history here. When we started moving into the prairies after the civil war, we also invented the modern timber-frame house which was shipped via railroads.
We soon learned that a simple timber frame with paneling on both sides meant the whole house was a collection of chimneys, which meant any fire would very quickly overwhelm the entire house.
So we came up with some building codes which said that the timber frame needed more side-trusses to act as firebreaks.
Note that this applies mostly to single and duplex home owners.
Single family homeowners still don’t want to live in collapsing fire traps with railing short enough that their toddler can climb over. The building codes are also different for different building types. Not all hazards in a building will be obviously apparent to a layman.
There's a general expectation that if you own a house, even a single or duplex house, it's not going to fall apart and put lives at risk with a moderate storm or kitchen fire.
I'd agree with you that there is a lot of unnecessary and unproductive bureaucracy in the process, but I do not mind the status quo.
I bought 20 acres in the hills around SE Oklahoma and am planning on a cabin next year. You can pretty much do whatever you want in Oklahoma. I was asking around about building permits and other regulations and the response was always a confused look and "it's your land, you can do what you want".
It's not that way everywhere in the U.S. It's mostly cities and varies from one county to the next. It can be anywhere from extremely strict all the way to zero regulation whatsoever.
If you call that bureaucracy wait till you see Europe. The reasons are diverse but one main factor is reading less news about people dying in misconstructed buildings.
