Safety mandates also help drive obsolescence, which helps car manufacturers sell more cars, which in turn keeps the used car market well supplied. (It's basical

Safety mandates also help drive obsolescence, which helps car manufacturers sell more cars, which in turn keeps the used car market well supplied. (It's basically a very progressive tax that mostly falls upon the wealthier.) Most safety mandates seem to be largely voluntary, AFAICT--literally, or with deadlines that go unchallenged by the industry--as the regulatory agencies hash out timelines with manufacturers so they can maximize return and minimize cost inflation by letting the features trickle down from luxury models over the course of 5-10 years. IIRC, backup cameras are a great example of this, with companies like Toyota preemptively committing to adding them to all cars across their lineup before (or at least very early during) the industry and regulatory agency negotiations. I think the most costly safety "taxes" (e.g. impact resistance) effectively just translate to heavier cars. Fuel mileage requirements also had the perverse second order effect of increasing car sizes. These are the closest analog for housing. There was recently a lot of noise about California requiring sprinkler systems in new single-family homes, but that just ends up increasing costs by like 1% or less. It's de minimis to begin with, and should drop as builders adjust their processes. (I realize these things add up, and I'm not trying to defend the sprinkler mandate, but there are also counterveiling forces--like standardization--which push back in the other direction.) But minimum square footage requirements for units, maximum height requirements for buildings, etc... those go straight to the bottom line of primary costs (property, raw material, and labor) similar to car size and weight. But unlike cars, the health & safety benefit of modern unit size requirements (i.e. the marginal increase over, say, mid-century requirements) is basically non-existent and were in many cases quite literally crafted in the first instance to limit housing supply.