3 ms·
This is the first I've heard that houses here are made of wood due to some kind of conspiracy.
by chmod600 3y ago
This is the first I've heard that houses here are made of wood due to some kind of conspiracy.
- astrange 3y agoWouldn't call the building trades union influence on laws a conspiracy. It's their job and they do it in public. We used to have factory-built Sears houses though. And now we don't.
- loeg 3y agoThere is a wood construction lobby. It's not a conspiracy theory, just the ordinary kind of political self-interest advocacy by lumber sellers. There are also steel and cement lobbies.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIs the wood lobby so much stronger that somehow ordinary American families are punished in some obscure way for daring to have a house made out of steel or concrete?
- loeg 3y agoNo. American houses are built of wood for straightforward economic reasons.
- astrange 3y agoThere's some endogeneity though (sorry for the big word). Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal. For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else. Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".