Beyond life safety

The earliest building codes, and indeed all building codes until the last half a century or so, focused exclusively on the safety of a structure. Will it fall down, will it burn down, will it electrocute you, will it allow you to preventably fall to your death. Those were the metrics. Later some more expansive but still reasonable codes were added largely as a measure of consumer protection against unscrupulous builders. Plumbing needs to be done in such a way that drains drain and effluent doesn’t flow where we don’t want it. It needs heat. It needs hot water. It needs at least a minimum amount of electrical outlets in specified locations. It needs a certain amount of glazing for natural light. It needs provisions for a minimum amount of electric lights. As new appliances became common and our way of living in a home changed, the codes changed with them to reflect the minimum we expect of a home.

The 1973 oil embargo and resulting energy crisis sparked a massive, still growing flame in our building codes. It became apparent that our buildings were inefficient and wasteful. There was some extremely low hanging fruit that could make a huge difference. In 1974 the California Energy Commission (CEC) was established, and in 1978 California Title 24, Part 6, the energy code, became the new law for new construction. It was simple - minimum amounts of wall, attic and floor insulation, some pipe insulation, some minimum standards for HVAC equipment. These solutions were not only extremely minimal by today’s standards, they were cheap. The cost of complying was miniscule, basically unnoticeable in the construction of a house but paid huge dividends to its occupants in comfort and energy cost savings.

The CEC has had a mandate from its inception: all new requirements must yield net savings over the lifecycle of a structure, 30 years for a house. Early requirements showed easy savings. Increased insulation, increased minimum efficiency levels for appliances. In 1980 just two years after the first codes were adopted requirements had exploded. More than triple the amount of insulation in ceilings, more than 50% more walls and under floors. The materials were cheap and added almost no time to construction. It was an undisputed benefit for homebuyers.

Honest economics

The frustrating thing about adding more insulation is that its effects scale logarithmically, not exponentially. Worse still we have all this stuff that isn’t insulation that needs to go in our walls; we can double our insulation without halving our energy use. More frustrating to the CEC’s goals is that insulation is basically a solved technology. Fiberglass batts have improved only marginally in effective insulation value per depth over the past 50 years. Cellulose techniques have improved but the effective insulation value hasn’t changed. Newer widely available materials, foams in particular, are far more expensive, requiring specialized techniques, equipment and more time to install and come with a litany of environmental concerns. By the late 1990s we were well into the era of diminishing returns on insulation. We had filled the walls and floor joists. We had filled our attics to the reasonable limit.

Windows followed a similar trajectory to insulation. Highly inefficient, drafty single pane windows were the standard prior to the 1980’s. Huge gains in efficiency could be easily garnered with minimal cost by moving to dual pane windows. Large gains were again realized when frames moved from aluminum to fiberglass or vinyl, and cheap low-e coatings became standardized across manufacturers. The returns plateaued slightly later than insulation. In the 1970s a window’s u-factor, that is the rate at which heat could transfer through the window, was 1.2. By the early to mid 2000’s that was cut by roughly 75% to 0.3 for a standard window. Today, twenty years later, an extremely high performance window has a u-factor of 0.24, but the upfront cost difference has doubled or more for that marginal gain. Still, our energy standards kept tightening.

Luckily for us just as insulation and windows plateaued in efficiency scientists and engineers had been working on other problems. By 2005 an incandescent bulb could be replaced economically with a CFL, cutting energy usage from 60 watts average to 12 watts. Across every bulb in a house this was a huge victory in energy use. The CEC did begin requiring more efficient lighting but this was a code without necessity, people switched in homes new and old, out of their own economic interest and genuine environmental concern. The regulation arrived after the revolution was complete.

Lighting had another breakthrough in widely available, naturally colored and even decorative LED’s, now using 6 watts to replace a 12 watt CFL. Again, this technology is such a boon to consumers that people switched without being prompted. Unlike CFL bulbs, however, the CEC attempted to do more than codify a natural consumer switch. Requiring LED bulbs wasn’t enough. Early code iterations required bulbs with specific state approvals to be used. Then we added the option of an unusual pin-base, and finally required lighting devices with built in, proprietary, tested and approved LED chips and drivers. Devices that cannot easily be repaired or have a burnt out component changed by a homeowner, that must be replaced instead of having a bulb changed. Devices that are emblematic of a regulatory goal now grasping for justifications to tighten.

It’s not easy being green

In 2011, just as the energy code was climbing the crest of easily justified gains by codifying LEDs and exterior light sensors, California introduced a much more nebulous set of standards. The CalGreen code has good, sensible goals. Reduce waste, make structures less toxic, improve indoor air quality, reduce water consumption and reduce the overall embodied carbon in a structure. These were not novel goals.

A private movement towards green building had started some twenty years earlier with LEED standards, a private certification process individuals or institutions could seek on their own accord, and California recognized the environmental good it did. The more indoor air quality is studied the more it becomes apparent that, in a closed house, it can indeed be unhealthy for the occupants. Every build does in fact create a tremendous amount of waste. There are some sensible, easy building practices that can negate many of the worst effects.

Sealing the ducts of a home during construction to keep dust out of the HVAC system is fast, smart and effective. Maintaining a constant slow changing of the air in a home using a negligible amount of electricity on a small fan is an easy way to keep people healthier. Testing the moisture of lumber prior to enclosing it in finishing materials does prevent mold. Sealing penetrations between the living space of the home and the crawlspace does prevent pest intrusion. These are all simple, easily adapted standard practices.

Unfortunately there are larger goals that are much harder to implement and nearly impossible to verify are completed as required. Construction waste diversion, that is the practice of ensuring as much waste material is recycled or reclaimed rather than sent to a landfill, is nearly impossible to verify. No inspector can, or will, sort through dumpsters on a job then follow them to their dump site to ensure that nothing recyclable is going to the landfill. The code requires it, but our only verification method is trusting that the dump receipt provided is accurate. No one is auditing the VOC (Volatile Organic Components) of adhesives and paints used on a site. In fact, just to verify what is falsifiable and physical, a new class of professionals had to be implemented in many jurisdictions across the state: the green building consultant. Their job is to do the physical checks where possible, and, where not possible, provide documentation to the jurisdiction that the contractor told them they followed the code.

The easiest way to lose your hair is to follow other people’s good intentions

There are very few people still excited about the energy and green codes in the construction industry. For the builder it represents unclear, confusing requirements that can change from job to job, consultant to consultant, code cycle to code cycle. For the inspectors and plans examiners it’s a mountain of paperwork, a combined extra 750 pages of codes (yes, the energy code and Calgreen code combined are roughly 750 pages of dense legalese), occasionally contradictory from requirements in other sections of the building codes. For the owner it represents extra labor to pay for, often from people who didn’t exist on a job a couple decades ago. It’s extra labor from the builder, the inspector, the plans examiner, the Calgreen consultant, the energy consultant and the HERS rater.

Worse than any of that is the incentive structures are backwards. Under the current energy code models home performance is calculated on a per square foot basis. A 10,000 square foot home is allowed to use a proportionally larger amount of energy relative to a 2,000 square foot home. This calculation is not based on occupant loads, bedrooms, expected usage or any other justification. Worse still in the calculations energy usage can be offset by installed solar generation. I have seen 8,000 square foot 3 bedroom homes made of concrete and glass, inherently inefficient designs, meet the energy code because they install the requisite amount of solar on the roof. Meanwhile the owners of an 800 square foot, well insulated, wood framed cottage cannot escape the expense of a small solar installation amortizing on their mortgage. This runs contrary both to the mandates of the CEC and to the statewide goals of building more, and more affordable, housing.

Market forces already recognize this incongruity. NEM3, the newly in-place rules regulating the price utility providers must purchase excess energy from a home, lowered the buyback rate substantially to the effective wholesale rate of energy on the grid. California has too much energy produced by solar during the day. Rooftop solar on a house, without an energy storage system, is virtually useless to the grid. It will offset the current usage of the house, but so do utility scale solar installations which benefit from scale in their material costs, installation and maintenance. What the solar requirement has in effect become is a get-out-of-jail free card for inefficient design disguised as a social good.

Similar market forces, created directly by the California Energy Commission, have negated the need for the mass amounts of paperwork currently required on a new build. We don’t need to verify the flow rate of plumbing fixtures, it’s virtually impossible to purchase a non-compliant fixture in California. There is virtually no chance of someone installing low-efficiency lighting, LEDs are currently the only widely available bulbs available in California for traditional Edison base fixtures.

One requirement I believe is emblematic of the dubious growth of the Energy code on our construction is CEC Chapter 7 150.0(k)(e) requiring vacancy sensors on at least one fixture in bathrooms, garages, walk-in closets and utility spaces. A vacancy sensor switch combo, which is almost exclusively what’s used in these spaces, has a roughly $20 price premium over a regular light switch. At current energy costs, assuming the required solar on the home isn’t producing electricity and offsetting the effect, AND assuming each sensor controls 20 watts worth of high efficiency light, which is the rough equivalent to 150-200 watts of incandescent light, each vacancy sensor in the home would need to prevent roughly 3,000 hours of unintended light use over its life just to pay for itself. That’s roughly an hour per day, every day, for 30 years. That’s 125 days of being on continuously. That’s millions of dollars spent every year in new construction and remodels on vacancy sensors that could, hypothetically, if the stars align, break even on cost. Eventually. Maybe.

I don’t know how much is spent on compliance with these codes in California in any given year. I don’t think anyone does. I’m sure the CEC or another research group has rough estimates somewhere. What I am sure of is that we are collectively spending, almost assuredly, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on paperwork and requirements that serve no stakeholder’s goals. That might occasionally be scrutinized in an audit to justify the costs of the regulations. Regulations can be used to justify inefficient practices but cannot be waived for a good-enough build.

I’m going to end this section with an anecdote that will be either slightly funny or horrifying depending on your position. In areas with a lot of large custom homes, contractors often keep stocked what they call “inspection sets” of fixtures. These are California compliant fixed LED lighting fixtures, vacancy sensors, thermostats, etc. They are installed prior to the final inspection process, then replaced with what the owner actually wants before they move in.

Reasonable steps forward

There is a path forward that will keep the vast majority of the benefits and goals in mind while removing a lot of the excessive burden upon builders and jurisdictions. We can choose to reform things, this is not an inevitability. In many ways rectifying the situation will be far easier than it was to build it to this point.

On the energy code many of the largest goals have already been accomplished by the market and integration into standard practices. Solar energy is so prevalent on the California grid, and is willingly being built out so quickly that the small scale benefit from a residential install is negligible. Some people, many people perhaps, will still choose to install solar as part of the build process. For those that don’t want it or don’t want to pay the upfront cost regardless of the potential payback period, that is their choice. We need a looser, fully prescriptive, easy to follow and implement path forward for average houses that meet a set of design criteria.

Similarly the green code’s most onerous requirements have been implemented either by market regulation or at the end point. Waste collection and transfer locations in California already require the separation of materials

. Buying non compliant water fixtures or non compliant finishes is nearly impossible. Unlike the energy code, the green code misses a huge opportunity for regulation that may tie the two codes closer together: a calculation and remediation system for the embodied carbon and landscape impact of structures. Like the energy code, there is no scale applied to the green code. It treats the 8,000 square foot structure identically to the 800 square foot cottage. It treats a brownfield site identically to a greenfield site.

In the next essay in this series I will be proposing an alternate path forward. I will outline my goals for an alternate type of easily understood, fully prescriptive housing that eliminates as much administrative bloat as possible while still meeting or exceeding our goals on efficiency, environmental building practices and, most importantly, safety. Smaller, simpler structures that reflect more honestly the historical norm of housing; no energy modeling, no HERS testing, no green consultants. I will also make the case that, if we cannot find a way to reform structures back to accessibility in building, maintenance and repair, our calculus is incongruent not just with societal needs, but with our economic and physical reality itself.

I’ve been a building inspector in the Bay Area for about a decade. In part one I made broad strokes arguments and observations regarding the philosophy, systems, history and financialization that dictate how housing is designed, built and regulated in California. I failed to press the importance of a few disclaimers in that essay. 

First, I was intentionally brief regarding the implications of prop 13, AB 1600 and our attempts to offset the effects of those pieces of legislation. This was an intentional omission. These are well covered, well debated, highly contentious issues. Anyone interested in the state of housing in California has read, watched, heard and thought about them. They have their own opinion, and they are intentionally outside the focus of this series.

The second disclaimer is more directly related to what follows. Being the introductory piece, I alluded to but did not explicitly state my position on building codes. It should be known that as a building inspector I have one primary goal: fire and life safety. Everything else is ancillary to those goals. If your house burns down but everyone escapes safely, the primary duties of the code are satisfied. That is the floor of all building regulations and has been, literally, since the code of Hammurabi. I am not against building codes.

Is a house a hut or a cathedral?

In the opening section of the last essay I compared two identical earthquakes involving the same structure, a 1955 ranch house, in different decades. I first described the lack of drama and oversight present in structural work in the era of that house's construction. A house was a shelter first. If it broke it was fixed. There was very little governmental oversight into its construction. This represents the primary attitude of people everywhere in the world for nearly all of human history. If the structure did not kill anyone in the disaster it was a success. No blame was assigned. If the damage could be repaired quickly and easily, all the better. 

The second scenario imagined that same damage in our modern era. The same level of damage became cripplingly expensive and stressful for an average family. As soon as damage was discovered a previously silent torrent of requirements, regulations, costs and analysis began. What was once routine and casual is now an emergency. What could once be griped about and laughed off at the bar is now a cause to lose hair and sleep over. 

Finally, I ended the section with one line: “The neighbor’s house, built in 2019 at roughly twice the cost per square foot, suffered no damage at all.” This was intended to raise the question, perhaps hyperbolically, whether the upfront cost of our modern systems is a worthwhile tradeoff for the casual repairs of the past. The answer, to me, is not obvious. What is inarguably true is that we have decided, through accumulated regulations and financial logic, to build each house as a cathedral. People who need shelter have only the logic of the monument.

Written in blood

This topic is uncomfortable for me to explore so plainly. It will likely be uncomfortable for you to read. It is this discomfort that allows code to become more stringent based on marginal gains. If we were to relax a code and someone died because of it we would hold some amount of guilt and possible culpability in their death. Our society holds each life as sacred, something to be guarded and protected. This is ingrained in each of us and is one of the most positive things we have developed as a people.

If you ask a design professional or building official what the intent of codes are, myself included, the answer will be a universal chorus of “life safety”. There is no question that this goal should be maintained. It is a tragedy any time anyone dies by fire, carbon monoxide poisoning or structural failure. It means something, somewhere, went wrong. However, no amount of forethought and systemic regulatory oversight can prevent every death.

Life is dangerous. Every choice and action has the potential for a horrible ending. This extends to our built environments. We know how to build a house that cannot, within reasonable timeframes and circumstances, collapse, burn or poison its occupants. We know that stairs are the most dangerous common obstacle we traverse every day, leading to thousands of injuries and deaths a year.  We can build ground level steel reinforced concrete boxes so durable that a literal bomb cannot cave in a wall and that a wildfire could not damage. We can even make them attractive, comfortable and functional. We don’t for two reasons: cost and mundane preference. There exists a spectrum of danger, a graph of diminishing returns, and a series of trade offs each of us participates in, most of us implicitly and unconsciously. 

Life safety, then, is not an absolute goal. It is a convenient name for the level of risk we find communally acceptable relative to cost, convenience, comfort and aesthetics. It is relative to the priorities we set against it and the events we expect to befall a structure. It is the changing solution to the calculus done after every tragedy, with the implementation of every new technology, and with every evolution in the risk tolerance of our society. It is also a convenient cudgel used to ignore counter-arguments and gild excess process and regulation.

While tragedies add requirements, a lack of tragedy removes nothing. Evolving risk tolerance tightens requirements when society becomes more risk averse. It is not my argument that we should accept excess deaths in favor of cheaper, simpler structures. It is my argument that we have passed the point of reasonable diminishing returns on structural safety with current technologies and strategies. That we can, and already do, accept danger to property without increasing danger to people. That our calculus is wrong, and we have underweighted the social costs of excess caution.

Terminological cudgel

Life safety as a calculus relies on changing conditions in our understanding of risk and mitigation strategies. Like most technological and engineering challenges faced over the 20th century, advances in data collection and statistical analysis unlocked a mountain of problems that had previously been accepted as matter of fact and solutions that had previously been hidden by standard practices. It also unlocked values based arguments involving our understanding of those risks and solutions.

When the Northridge earthquake struck Southern California in 1994 there were several high visibility tragedies. This was a turning point in our understanding of life safety. We could see directly the impacts of our engineering and standards advances over the past half a century. People died in structures that did not benefit from those advances. Soft story conditions - that is having a large, empty, unbraced space under the living space in a building, such as an apartment building constructed on top of a carport type structure - failed catastrophically. While wood framing is resilient it cannot generally survive falling 10 feet at an angle. Additionally cripple walls - short walls between a house and its foundation - that were not braced failed, and the houses atop them fell off their foundations. This led to the totalling of the houses but the people inside almost always walked out, shaken but alive. Like I said, wood framing is resilient. It might not survive a 10 foot drop but it can certainly handle a couple feet.

On top of the destruction of antiquated buildings with overlooked dangers there were shining examples of what worked. Contemporarily designed and built buildings that suffered no structural damage, no failures, that remained on their foundations. They became the gold standard for a new minimum. They had fully braced or no cripple walls at all. They had adequate fastening to their foundations. They had plywood braced wall panels instead of horizontal cross bracing. They did not have masonry chimneys. The standards that led to that safety are now antiquated themselves. They would not meet current engineering standards. The standards that saved lives and proved our progress would not be permitted to be built today, not because they failed but because standards have moved beyond them.

The hypocrisy of progress

Undue hardship. Remember that term. It has risen in prominence and importance in the calculus of danger mitigation over the past 50 years. It is the reason old buildings are not required to be torn down for not meeting our current standards. It is why every home is not reinspected, retrofitted and recertified with every code cycle. It is the implicit admission that the economics can outweigh marginal, and major, gains in safety. 

Roughly 50% of California’s housing stock was constructed prior to 1980. Continuous load path engineering was not required until the 1997 building code was adopted. Unless there is a major remodel, rebuild, or repair those buildings are never required by any authority to be retrofitted. According to current standards these buildings are unsafe. Unbuildable. Substandard. The amount of homes that have undergone voluntary retrofit for seismic safety is unknown, but estimated to be in the low teens under the most optimistic estimates. This represents literally millions of homes our current standards consider a danger to life safety.

This raises two distinct questions for us then: why do we not require the owners of these buildings to make them safe, and, more importantly, why does this not measurably impact the value of these homes? The answer to both is clear: it is considered an undue hardship to enforce seismic safety regulations on existing structures, and our life safety calculus is not as solid a line as we like to pretend. 

Load bearing professionals

For the professionals in the field, whether we think engineering and construction standards have been overtightened or not is irrelevant. Each actor in the design and regulatory chain acts rationally in their position. Engineers overdesign because the liability of getting it wrong, both moral and economic, is huge. The contractor follows, and often exceeds, the plans because the liability of not following engineered plans is huge. The building inspector will always enforce the most restrictive interpretation of code and plans for the same reason.

Return to the story about the modern foundation repair in part 1 of this series. In that case the geotechnical engineer had determined that the soil under the house was slightly expansive. Let's, for the sake of the argument, say that the investigation showed the potential risks to be minimal, unlikely to impact the structure in several decades. The engineer would still have to err on the side of caution in their recommendation. There is no space, legally or professionally, to weigh the cost-benefit of their decision or use professional experience to let the owners make an informed decision.

In fact nobody has the room to make an informed judgement call. The engineer cannot consider whether, or how much, the fix needs to exceed the scope of the original build. They have to design to current standards. The building department cannot waive soil investigations or weigh the relative risks of the findings against the other stakeholder’s input.

What we have in effect created is a system of professionals with very little agency. Where the only freedom is to make things more complicated and more expensive. Where legal and professional liability has thoroughly trounced experienced optimization. We have created a trustless system where good faith is no longer assumed. The ironic endpoint is that the elimination of subjective professional judgement has also removed professional liability. If everyone follows the rules, no one is responsible for the outcome. The engineers followed the design standards, the contractor followed the approved plans, the inspector enforced the code. The homeowner has a severely inflated bill with no path to cost savings and no one to blame for the expense.

Most wastefully the liability trap has eliminated professional judgement as a learned soft skill. No Junior today is learning when “good enough” can be compared to “too expensive”. No inspector can recommend a standard fix to a minor construction flaw or plan oversight on an engineered project. No plans examiner can weigh the age of the building and time between necessary repairs in requiring engineering. No contractor can optimize his crews performance over dozens of similar jobs when the requirements of each change. No mentor can teach these skills, no juniors can learn them. The long lineages of master-apprentice professions have ended.

Scope creep

In part one of this series I broadly outlined the state of construction in California. This essay attempted to explore some of the philosophical underpinnings and contradictions in our current system. In the next part of this series I will examine how the scope of what codes and regulations impacts has changed, from structural safety to energy efficiency to future proofing for potential hypothetical future occupants of a structure, and the contradictions therein.

Building professionals reading these essays will, almost certainly, have an impulsive reaction to some, or many, of the topics I have and will cover. Many of those reactions will take the form of specific objections to select verbiage or phrasing. To those professionals: Please note that these articles are written for the general public to illustrate the broad outlines of the systems and philosophies covered. If your objection takes the form of “yes, but” please assume something was simplified or omitted for readability or in service of a larger message. If you disagree with a fundamental premise I am more than open to feedback and arguments proving me wrong.

Foreword:

I’m a building inspector in the Bay Area. I’ve spent basically my entire adult life in the construction industry and the last decade in building regulation. In that time I’ve watched the duties and burdens of regulation grow on contractors, engineers, homeowners, and my own colleagues. I have one goal in this series: to repeat the question I’ve heard, and uttered, on hundreds of jobs, standing over the foundation for a bomb shelter being built under a bedroom addition: “What the hell are we building here?”

A Tale of Two Earthquakes

In 1955 a veteran and his family bought a brand new 1500 square foot, three bedroom ranch house in the bay area. Two years later a moderate earthquake struck the region. No one was injured. But a crack had formed in the foundation. A child’s marble rolling across the floor confirmed that one end of the house had settled a couple inches, resulting in a slight lean. The owners called their insurance agent, who recommended a local contractor. The contractor came, assessed the damage, and began work the following Monday. Three men, a few hydraulic bottle jacks, a sledge hammer, a shovel, a truckload of concrete and a week of labor later the house was level, the foundation repaired, and the job complete. In less than two weeks from the event it was impossible to tell anything had happened save some disturbed soil.

In 2025 a new young family purchased that same house. In 2028 an earthquake similar to the last will strike again. The damage will be nearly identical. Earthquake riders are no longer offered on homeowners policies, and like nearly 90% of California homeowners they elected not to purchase a separate policy. Still, they call a contractor for the repair. The contractor looks at the foundation, measures the amount of settling, and breaks the bad news: he can’t give them a price right now, first the family will have to hire an engineer to design the fix, as required by code.

The contractor recommends an engineer he’s worked with before, and the engineer gives them a price for design and drafting: $4,500. The family is shocked, but after calling a couple other firms to compare prices they agree. Four weeks later the family receives the plans from the engineer. The contractor reviews the scope and gives them an all-in price of $25,000. Again shocked, the family agrees. The contractor submits the plans to the local building department, who, being overwhelmed with response to the earthquake, promise they’ll return initial comments within a month. True to their word, three weeks later the contractor receives an email - due to evidence of expansive soils in the area where the home sits, they’re also requiring a geotechnical engineer to submit an investigation along with the foundation plans. The family is told the price, this time an additional $2,000, and they agree. The geotechnical investigation reveals that the house does indeed sit on slightly expansive soils. The geotechnical engineer, due to liability, has to recommend drilled piers in addition to the new footing. The building department, due to regulations, must enforce the recommendations of the geotechnical engineer. The structural engineer charges an additional $500 to revise the plans. The contractor tells the homeowners that the addition of the drilled piers will raise the price of the job an additional $10,000. The family, who has now pulled a HELOC to pay for the repairs and is now numb, agrees again.

Finally, months after the earthquake, repair work begins. A specialist house lifting contractor is required due to the necessity for drilling equipment under the house. An electrician is required to disconnect and reconnect the power for the lift. A plumber is required to disconnect and reconnect the plumbing. The family is forced to stay with relatives for the duration of the repairs.

5 months after the earthquake the family finally moves back into their home. The 1955 family was back in theirs in less than two weeks. The cost then, in today’s dollars, was less than $10,000. The cost now was $42,000, plus months of interest on their HELOC, plus the cost of living with relatives, plus weeks of managing the project.

The neighbor’s house, built in 2019 at roughly twice the cost per square foot, suffered no damage at all.

The Whole Job

This is not the story of one unlucky family. This is the story of what we’ve done to the simple thing that is a house, and how it impacts us all.

First we must answer a question no one asks: what is a house?

A house is not a monument. It doesn’t need to last forever. It is used, worn down, repaired, remodeled and neglected. Functionally it’s a simple thing. It keeps the weather outside and the temperature comfortable on the inside. It gives you somewhere to sleep, eat, bathe and relax. It keeps you safe from fire, storm or earthquake. That’s the whole job. These are not complicated requirements and they have not changed in the history of human shelter. What should change, what needs to change, is the idea that every change that makes a house last longer, stay more comfortable or use less energy is worth the tradeoff in complexity and expense.

There’s an unobvious truth in houses. The ranch house your grandfather bought in 1955, the cabin he built with your father over a summer in 1972, the house your father bought in 1993 and the house you bought last year are all functionally identical. On the median day they all do the same job equally well. The physics of a house haven’t changed. Functionally the basic construction is the same. Wood frame, roof, foundation, doors and windows. What has meaningfully changed is not the house. It’s what we expect of the systems that build and regulate it. The square footage, the energy efficiency and, most meaningfully, hundreds of seemingly small requirements and choices that have compounded themselves into a labyrinth of building codes, engineering requirements, zoning rules and bureaucracy; chasing marginal gains in safety and efficiency, each defensible on their own, but adding up to a more expensive thing. Not a better thing by all definitions, but a more complicated and costly thing by nature.

The DNA of a house

Your grandfather’s post war house built in 1955 and your house built in 2025 share a shocking amount of DNA. A century of light wood frame momentum. The studs are spaced at 16”. The foundation is one of only a handful of named types. The roof is asphalt shingles. Your father’s 1993 build is even more similar to your house. The walls and attic are filled with fiberglass or cellulose. The sewer lines are ABS plastic. The roof framing is built with manufactured 2x4 trusses.

There are small, often invisible changes between each generation. The mid century home will have 2x4 studs while the 1990s home and modern home may have 2x6 studs - not for strength, a single 8 foot 2x4 stud can carry more than 3,000 lbs - but for insulation room. Each new generation of home will have more electrical circuits, even as loads get more efficient, requiring more wire, more breakers and bigger panels. Foundations have gotten larger, deeper and more complex. Framing has gone from industry and prescriptive code standard using nails to engineered plans requiring expensive manufactured connectors and engineered details for each connection. Instead of one designer on a project you will usually have an architect, structural engineer, geotechnical engineer, energy consultant, special inspectors, truss engineer and a green building consultant. Instead of a 10 page set of plans relying on standard practices to put it together you have 30 plus page plans with pages of structural details, energy details and waste plans. Instead of a handful of inspections by your local building department you now need at a minimum 8-10 inspections by the local jurisdiction, a sprinkler inspection, potential observations by the geotechnical engineer and structural engineer, special third party inspections for high strength concrete and drilled piers, energy inspections, etc.

The Loop

Each of these changes came from a real place. Codes, as they say, are written in blood. The Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, studies on house fire survival rates, the 1970s energy crisis and the early 21st century green movement have all built on top of the simple thing that is a house. A modern house will use less energy per square foot. It is far more likely to come through the earthquake undamaged. Whether that justifies the cost depends on whether we want to keep houses standing or the people inside alive - those are different questions with very different price tags and are questions we no longer ask.

Our reaction to every crisis - earthquakes, fires, and energy - became a permanent addition to our housing requirements. After the crisis had passed the requirements stayed, justified but not questioned or revisited. Each in turn made a house safer, more efficient, and more expensive, which turned out to matter, because something else was happening at the same time.

Somewhere along the line, houses became our primary store of value. A more expensive house became more desirable. More expensive construction methods increased the value of the asset and made them better investments. Better investments invited more protective regulations and added to their value. The loop enforced itself over decades and houses became more complicated and more expensive, not because anyone individually wanted it, but because regulations and financialization completed a self feeding logic loop that compounded. Ultimately the people paying for this loop just need somewhere to live.

The costs

That 1955 house was built entirely with nails and a handful of foundation bolts. In the modern equivalent every place where a truss touches a top plate, a joist touches a rim, at the ends of each shear wall, at every opening in a shear wall, at every joist block, wherever a post touches a girder or beam, and wherever a header touches a stud a manufactured connector will be used as specified by an engineer that drew the plans.

Before a shovel touches dirt a long back and forth happens. The plans are amended, revised and reviewed by architects, structural engineers, energy consultants, plan checkers, planners, fire prevention departments, civil engineering and storm water management departments, truss engineers. During construction they’ll be pored over by contractors, sub contractors, field engineers, building inspectors, fire inspectors, special inspectors, HERS raters and, least importantly in our system, the owners themselves.

The costs go beyond time. They show up most obviously in what it costs to build.

In 1950 the average cost per square foot was $90 to $130 in adjusted dollars. The whole house would cost $135,000 to $195,000 to build. By 1993 costs were $175 to $220 in adjusted dollars, roughly $260,000 to $330,000. Today the average runs $200 to $400 per square foot, or $300,000 to $450,000 just in vertical construction costs. From experience I can tell you the low end of that is optimistic. That also doesn’t include soft costs, the additional 15-20% spent on engineering, energy calculations, and special inspections. These are line items only beginning to creep into homes in the early 1990s and completely absent 70 years ago.

Finally, absent from these numbers completely are impact fees. In 1955 they didn’t exist. They began to appear as the effects of Prop 13 became apparent - jurisdictions realized that they needed a new source of revenue to offset the loss of property tax income. By 1993 they were universally present but minor - maybe a few thousand per house. Today a new house in California will have an additional $30,000 to over $100,000 in impact fees. These are not permit fees or inspection fees or engineering fees. These are fees that exist purely to front load the cost of that house on the municipality: parks, schools, roads, emergency services and everything else we demand of our towns.

The prescription

There is another way. Pieces of it already exist in the code. Parts of it have already been quietly adopted in some jurisdictions. What I’m proposing isn’t tearing the system down or starting over. It’s an additional lane, a parallel path for a specific, well-defined type of house that can safely bypass the current quagmire.

The house I’m describing is not complicated. It’s small, under 1,600 square feet. It’s simple in shape, a rectangle, or close to it. It sits on a straightforward site. It’s built from the same light wood frame that has housed Americans for a century. It doesn’t need an architect. It doesn’t need a structural engineer. It doesn’t need an energy consultant or a geotechnical engineer or a HERS rater. It needs a competent contractor, a clear set of pre-engineered standard details, and a building inspector whose job is to confirm the work was done correctly and advise, not to manage a cascade of professional sign-offs.

The foundations would be prescribed based on what’s actually in the ground: a simple site investigation, a decision tree, a standard detail. The walls would be braced using tested prescriptive methods that arose after Northridge and have worked for decades. The insulation and windows would meet a fixed standard. Not modeled, not calculated, just specified and installed. A ductless heat pump and a heat pump water heater would handle mechanical and domestic hot water efficiently without requiring a specialist to design them or test them to guarantee efficiency.

It won’t be a net zero home. It won’t be engineered to survive a 9.0 earthquake without a scratch. But it will keep the weather out, keep the occupants comfortable, keep them safe from storm, fire and earthquake, and give them somewhere to sleep, eat, bathe and relax. It will do the whole job. And critically when something eventually goes wrong, as it always does, it will be simple enough that the people who own it can actually afford to fix it.

That last part is not a footnote. It is the point. A house that keeps people safe but prices them out of ownership, or that keeps them in debt maintaining it, or that strands them for five months after an earthquake waiting for engineering drawings; that house has failed its owners regardless of how well it performed on paper. Repairable by design is not a compromise. Buildable by prescription is not a lesser standard. It is a philosophy that the current system has nearly entirely abandoned.

California already proved this approach works. The ADU reforms of the last decade created a simplified by-right path for a specific building type and housing production responded immediately. Costs came down. Owner-builders re-entered the market. Inspectors became advisors rather than gatekeepers. The parallel path is not a theory. It is a proven model waiting to be extended.

Coming up

This is the first in a series. In the articles that follow I’ll go deeper on each of the threads introduced here: the history of how the code accumulated to where it is today, the real project costs I’ve seen firsthand, the specific design standards that would make the parallel path work, and the financial mechanisms that could make modest housing viable to build again.

But if you read nothing else in this series, I’d ask you to carry one question with you. The next time you drive past a construction site, or read a story about housing costs, or hear a politician talk about the housing crisis ask yourself the question that has followed me across a decade of job sites:

What is a house?

Because until we agree on the answer to that question, we will keep building the wrong one.