3 ms·

Allow anyone to build a shack and shit into a hole on any postage stamp size of land they could get, and it would be far more affordable.

rogerrogerr 5mo ago
Yep, building codes are a double edged sword. Yes, they make life better for housed people and avoid streets looking like an India-esque mess of exposed wiring and open sewers. But they also establish a minimum bar to _be_ housed. If you can’t afford a (by global standards) very nice home, you will be on the streets.
- sidewndr46 5mo ago
  This leads to my long running joke about Austin: in Austin everyone can afford their own house. Otherwise you don't live here.
mherkender 5mo ago
You can find places like that all over the world. They're slums. Maybe regulations put too much burden on homeownership but slums create huge issues as well. Basic plumbing shouldn't be taken for granted.
- mothballed 5mo ago
  Built my house for 60k (post-COVID dollars). A couple turns of 3" pipe into a tank. Up into a toilet. Not much more than that. It dumps into a big concrete tank and then from that the effluent goes out a couple pipes with holes drilled along it and into the soil. Quite clean and very cheap. I think the 'plumbing' for sewage took me 2 days and $300 in pipe. The septic system was maybe $2000 in materials, you could easily replicate it with a shovel and a couple months of doing day labor on the weekends. I take it for granted because it is extremely cheap, extremely easy, quite sanitary, and basically a footnote on building the shack. This ain't the 60s anymore, any tom/dick/harry can plumb a whole house using extremely forgiving pvc and pex with minimal cost or thought, though they're usually stopped by asinine licensing rules and the dumbass notion you need building plans (I had none).
  - mherkender 5mo ago
    Personally I would wish for streamlined regulatory processes rather than being okay with any Tom/Dick/Harry creating health hazards next door because they overestimated their ability to dispose of their own poop.
    - mothballed 5mo ago
      I understand the reasoning here, though people of your persuasion have been run out of my county because they are scared shitless of what will happen with what will happen under such deregulation. In reality what happened, was basically nothing. People that could afford decent sanitation continued to buy it, while the people shitting in the streets could now at least shit in a hole on a piece of land they could buy. We deregulated housing 20 years ago and eliminated inspections, and none of the apocalyptical worries by the nay-sayers came true. The main results we saw was it's cheaper to build a house, and we ran bureaucratic bootlickers out of town because of their irrational fear of what turned out to be a nothing-burger (which might have been the more valuable of the two effects).

rogerrogerr 5mo ago

Yep, building codes are a double edged sword. Yes, they make life better for housed people and avoid streets looking like an India-esque mess of exposed wiring and open sewers. But they also establish a minimum bar to _be_ housed. If you can’t afford a (by global standards) very nice home, you will be on the streets.

sidewndr46 5mo ago
This leads to my long running joke about Austin: in Austin everyone can afford their own house. Otherwise you don't live here.

mherkender 5mo ago

You can find places like that all over the world. They're slums. Maybe regulations put too much burden on homeownership but slums create huge issues as well. Basic plumbing shouldn't be taken for granted.

mothballed 5mo ago
Built my house for 60k (post-COVID dollars). A couple turns of 3" pipe into a tank. Up into a toilet. Not much more than that. It dumps into a big concrete tank and then from that the effluent goes out a couple pipes with holes drilled along it and into the soil. Quite clean and very cheap. I think the 'plumbing' for sewage took me 2 days and $300 in pipe. The septic system was maybe $2000 in materials, you could easily replicate it with a shovel and a couple months of doing day labor on the weekends. I take it for granted because it is extremely cheap, extremely easy, quite sanitary, and basically a footnote on building the shack. This ain't the 60s anymore, any tom/dick/harry can plumb a whole house using extremely forgiving pvc and pex with minimal cost or thought, though they're usually stopped by asinine licensing rules and the dumbass notion you need building plans (I had none).
- mherkender 5mo ago
  Personally I would wish for streamlined regulatory processes rather than being okay with any Tom/Dick/Harry creating health hazards next door because they overestimated their ability to dispose of their own poop.
  - mothballed 5mo ago
    I understand the reasoning here, though people of your persuasion have been run out of my county because they are scared shitless of what will happen with what will happen under such deregulation. In reality what happened, was basically nothing. People that could afford decent sanitation continued to buy it, while the people shitting in the streets could now at least shit in a hole on a piece of land they could buy. We deregulated housing 20 years ago and eliminated inspections, and none of the apocalyptical worries by the nay-sayers came true. The main results we saw was it's cheaper to build a house, and we ran bureaucratic bootlickers out of town because of their irrational fear of what turned out to be a nothing-burger (which might have been the more valuable of the two effects).