So yeah, lack of affordable housing but rigorous quantitative analyses indicate that codes increase housing costs by 5 percent or less. One of the problems that I see is that Conarb is using unvetted examples from a specific area of the country, state and region, therefore his viewpoint of all codes is based on the bubble he lives in.
I admit that, my dad had a new home built here in 1939, when WWII started there was an influx of "Oakies" that came here to work in the war industries, they homesteaded land and built tar paper shacks to live in, they somehow lived in them without dying in fires or earthquakes. We had little government land, no zoning regulations, and minimal code enforcement, there was a two lane road that was part of the "Victory Highway" system built after WWI, few cars traveled that road, now that road is a 10 lane freeway with frontage roads on each side, they are in the process now of creating toll lanes, all the raw land is now parks or some kind of public lands. A few years ago my tile setter moved to Southern Oregon, he called to say it's just like it was in the Bay Area 50 years ago, he bought a few acres and can go down town and pick up a permit to build a home in a day.
I want to make something clear, when you guys say code you mean building codes, when we on the bright side say codes and regulations we mean all codes and regulations accessed through the building department when we go in to get a permit. When we had the sprinkler fights here the coalition brought on a guy from South Carolina who could install fire sprinklers for $2 a square foot, at the time I was permitting a new home and they came in at $25 a foot, copper required, snaking it up through clearstory ceilings as high as 40 feet in the air, 20,000 gallons of water storage on site. BTW, everything we build we pay an "Affordable Housing Fee", it varies with the community but can be as much as whole homes in cheaper areas of the country. If something isn't done the rest of the country will end up in a mess just like we are, we got this way gradually and I'm talking about what I've witnessed over the last 80 years.
I don't want International codes, what's wrong with going back to something reasonable like the 1994 UBC?