The point of building codes and code inspection is so that people don't put others in danger. And in the places that there is a shortage of housing, it is hardly fire code that is limiting supply. It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap. The limiting factors of building housing are not this.
It's not as if we could leave out sprinklers and fire escapes from buildings, and all of a sudden, housing would be cheap.
There's a lot more to fire codes than just sprinklers and fire escapes. If you could ignore all fire codes (and related requirements) then it would definitely be possible to build both more and cheaper apartments than you can now. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, and they almost certainly wouldn't be nice places to live. But a lot of people would take unsafe, uncomfortable and affordable over safe, comfortable and completely unaffordable.
They absolutely are. Building to code costs a lot of extra money, and for good reason, because we don't want people to die. If we didn't have codes one could build a capsule hotel style lodging and easily fix the housing situation.
Have you ever built a house? It would not even be possible for me to build one with inspections, I would lose my day job. And my house was 40k to diy, do you have any idea how burdensome an up to code contractor installed sprinkler system would be against such frugal costs.
Having built my house the price and accessibility absolutely spirals out of control with code inspections. Remove this madness and let the masses do what I've done.
No US codes are going to require sprinklers in your single family home. But if someone is building a new medium-rise apartment building with hundreds of people sleeping in it, sprinklers are not a limiting factor in construction, and it is too much of a risk to build it without.
Our regulations often treat different structures in different places differently because they have different risks. That's okay. Your custom tiny home shouldn't be treated the same as an urban high rise.
