I hate, hate, hate the phrase “housing reform”. It’s not the housing that needs reforming you fucks. We don’t need to gut safety standards to the bone and kill even more people so the poor landleeches can make more money and escape responsibility, we don’t need micro-homes made out of shipping containers, we don’t need special home loans for minority business owners who own and operate a successful business for 3 years in an underprivileged community.
It’s a way of smuggling in lowering the quality of life with ridiculously small living spaces that aren’t adequately insulated or connected to utilities, lowering safety standards as in here, lowering already low accountability for slumlords. Anyone who utters this is an enemy of humanity.
Housing reform
Land reformHonestly. Who tf honestly believes “developers” would take the savings from a single stairwell per building and turn it into more housing? Anyone who’s rented an apartment can tell you they’ll just line their fat fucking pockets
It’s not about cost savings, it has to do with the architecture and floorplanning that can be severely limited by these standards. It’s a large enough effect that is worth discussing, but I am not well read enough to outline the whole situation here.
Not to be that guy but there is some validity to this. Having multiple staircases makes it almost impossible to have units that are more than 1 bed 1 bath or studios, keeping families from moving into higher density housing. Here is a very good video on this.
(Vox journalists are still the most annoying people)
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Why has the US ended up with such strict fire safety rules? Like I’m not necessarily opposed, just surprised if anything.
Before these codes, in the late 19th/early 20th centuries there were several high profile fires that caused a lot of death and damage, such as the San Francisco fires in 1906, Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and a few others.
Just a guess, but I wonder if the way our houses are built makes them more flammable then houses elsewhere.
Possibly. Building codes come about often when enough people die so it’s possible that not having easy access to a stairwell in an emergency killed a lot of people at some point
Other countries enacted codes relating to building materials to combat urban fires, like requiring buildings to be made of stone. The US was expanding rapidly at the time and so kept using timber construction but compensated but requiring more shit like extra means of egress.
Europe solved the problem by requiring buildings to be made out of fire resistant materials. Amerikkka was growing rapidly at the time and used timber to build housing because it was cheaper and quicker so they had to implement other ways to keep people from burning alive.
I want to add on top of what everyone else said that in most of North America you don’t want to build houses out of stone/brick/concrete.
North America has more tornadoes than anywhere else on earth, by a lot. Tornadoes do not give a fuck what you made your house out of, they will pick it up and throw it at you. And if you’re gonna have to dig yourself out from under what used to be your house, you’d rather it be pretty light.
A good chunk of the area where tornadoes don’t happen, the west coast, earthquakes happen regularly and again, you do not want to build houses out of hard materials, you want buildings that can shake and sway and not fall down.
Cost is certainly a factor too, historically the US has had more access to cheap lumber than Europe has because the Roman’s didn’t chop down all our trees 2000 years ago.
Taking all that into account wood frame construction totally makes sense here, but does have the problem of making things more flammable, and so we have to take other precautions for that. Looking up some stats right now, the US does have more building fires than most other countries, but how likely you are to die in one of those fires is far lower, and it evens out to the US being right in the middle as far as fire deaths go.
probably some combination of tall buildings, stupid electrification standards, and dangerous weather (#1 tornado capital of the world baby!) making house fires worse and more common
I looked at some stats because I was curious after this, more common yes, worse no. The US has a very high number of house fires, but a very low number of deaths per fire, and ends up pretty average on fire deaths per capita.
Presumably this is because we’ve taken these measures to make sure people can get out when fires do happen.
I was literally going to respond with that MildCuthbert tweet and you beat me to it! But it’s true, I hate the neoliberal dumbasses at Vox so much.
Pictured: Two developers talk about housing reform as a fire marshall looks on
They’re unnecessary.
