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People can't have locks on their doors if their home isn't built up to Western building codes? The OP was talking about "I'm beginning to see a case for loosen

People can't have locks on their doors if their home isn't built up to Western building codes? The OP was talking about "I'm beginning to see a case for loosening some construction rules to make true low-cost housing available to more people". My actual real world experience living in a developing country that doesn't have US- or European-level building codes (which you dismissed from your comfortable arm chair in a rich country) agreed with the OP. Building codes are nice but they are, to a large extent, a luxury good. Rich people/countries can afford them. Poor people can't. They act a barrier to entry for having a home by increasing the cost. Take GFCI electrical outlets. A GFCI outlet costs about $10 at Walmart, whereas a non-GFCI outlet costs about $5 at Walmart. For the average American that's a trivial difference. For the lady down the street from me, that's an entire day's income. Upgrading all of the outlets in her small house would take a week's pay. The introduction of GFCI outlet's saved ~600 lives a year in the US (population 300,000,000). Would you give up a week's pay to avoid something that only has about a 0.002% chance of happening in your lifetime? I guarantee you that not having GFCI outlets doesn't increase the chance of burglary or rape.....

DoreenMichele 8y ago
The Great Fire of London occurred largely because thatched roofs and other building practices that worked fine in less dense living conditions spread the fire. Afterwards, they outlawed thatched roofs in city limits. You can still have them in the countryside in England. The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person. I think we very much need to pursue some means to lower our expectations in the US in some metrics. At the same time, I would like to see some safety and health standards upheld. I did a paper once on wells causing arsenic poisoning in, I think, Bangladesh. The wells were dug by non profits from rich countries to resolve the issue of high rates of disease and death from consuming unsanitary surface waters. The wells were successful in terms of reducing death and short term acute disease. But some wells were also poisoning people. They ultimately found that the poison wells went to a particular depth. Wells that were less deep or more deep did not contain arsenic. Having arsenic-free wells was not a matter of cost per se. It was a matter of knowledge of the bedrock. I'm interested in finding those answers that are the equivalent of drilling wells to the right depth so people can have disease-free water that also is not poisoned. I'm not interested in agreeing that either we can die quickly due to disease-ridden surface waters or die slowly to arsenic poisoning and, obviously, poor people would rather die slow than fast.
- kylehotchkiss 8y ago
  > The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person. We tend to expect a bed for nearly every person too! Many people around the world share a single bed in a single room with no complaints.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

The Great Fire of London occurred largely because thatched roofs and other building practices that worked fine in less dense living conditions spread the fire. Afterwards, they outlawed thatched roofs in city limits. You can still have them in the countryside in England. The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person. I think we very much need to pursue some means to lower our expectations in the US in some metrics. At the same time, I would like to see some safety and health standards upheld. I did a paper once on wells causing arsenic poisoning in, I think, Bangladesh. The wells were dug by non profits from rich countries to resolve the issue of high rates of disease and death from consuming unsanitary surface waters. The wells were successful in terms of reducing death and short term acute disease. But some wells were also poisoning people. They ultimately found that the poison wells went to a particular depth. Wells that were less deep or more deep did not contain arsenic. Having arsenic-free wells was not a matter of cost per se. It was a matter of knowledge of the bedrock. I'm interested in finding those answers that are the equivalent of drilling wells to the right depth so people can have disease-free water that also is not poisoned. I'm not interested in agreeing that either we can die quickly due to disease-ridden surface waters or die slowly to arsenic poisoning and, obviously, poor people would rather die slow than fast.

kylehotchkiss 8y ago
> The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person. We tend to expect a bed for nearly every person too! Many people around the world share a single bed in a single room with no complaints.