It's related to cargo culting. People who do not understand anything of the domain or substance end up making decisions. By default, we are in a constant slide toward the dark ages. We need renewal and self questioning to prevent that.

In the long run, it's probably cheaper for almost everyone since most houses are built with the same materials and techniques. If you want to deviate, you have to get it signed off. 99% of people benefit from the increase in the review speed and the building dept not paying for everyone to be a certified eng.

As a side note, most building departments have engineers on staff, but not every plan needs to be reviewed by the engineer. If you use a stock plan, stock materials, you are good to go and the jr guys can review your plan. These are templates that can be downloaded you can send a drawing of a square to the inspector, and slap some copy pasta on the corner of the print that says, 'Walls are build with 2x4 stud with a 2 grade stamp at 16" intervals and 5/8" 1 hour burn rating sheetrock, fire blocking at 4' with a 6" concrete foundation wall with standard #4 rebar at 16" spacing. . . .' and it will get approved.

This sounds like a case of the house builder being out of his depth and the building inspector being out of his depth. How did the guy get moved in before they had inspected/denied the structural framing? At that point, he could have had an eng come and sign off on it. But after he sheet-rocked and covered everything up, there's not much anyone can do.

Let's just read the first two sentences of the original story:

> It was the fifth house that Craig Morrison built with his own hands, and the last. He had built things with his own hands for 70 years, often using lumber he produced at his own small sawmill. Now he would build a modest, single-storey house

Looks like he knew how to prepare lumber and build a house.

So, sure, he was out of his depth when it came to the regulations of houses today. But it's very understandable that the regulations were a surprise and didn't make sense to him. Because the house and the wood was fine, pretty good even...

No. There is a difference between experience and wisdom. He could have built 5 unsafe and dangerous houses, and been building stuff wrong for 70 years.

(This happened to my parents, good old tiling person who had " been doing it 20 years", when he had been doing it wrong for 20 years, and the installation catastrophically failed due to fairly basic and obviously wrong choices).

So just because he built 5 houses, doesn't mean he knows how to do it or create anything safe. (it may be he does, of course, just that the fact that he's built houses before does not tell you that one way or the other)

But according to the story, an independent expert inspected his house and concluded that it exceeded the building code standards. So while in theory he could have been building unsafe houses, the evidence in this case is that he wasn't.

That's true, but I wasn't talking about the inspector, I was responding to DannyBee's comment that he could have been building unsafe houses. We here in this thread all know about the evidence that it was sound, so we don't have the excuse the inspector had (for whatever it's worth) for not knowing the actual structural soundness of the building.

> If the house builder reached out to building engineer to have his house plans and materials approved before the inspection, there would have been no problem in the first place.

Agreed. Whether that excuses the inspector (or the government that employs him), though, depends on the rules in that particular jurisdiction. Some places require stamped plans, or at least stamped plans for anything not using standard materials, others don't. If the rules just say the building has to be structurally sound, then it should be the inspector's job to determine if it is using all reasonable evidence, not just looking for stamps. But that also means the government needs to fund and train inspectors to be able to do that.

1. You have evidence he built one house correctly :) That tells you literally nothing about the previous performance of his houses.

2. This happened after the city had already red flagged a bunch of stuff. Again, he could have fixed it all and then hired his inspector to say it was great. I've even seen this happen with some of the flippers around here :)

Now, do i believe he probably knows how to build houses? Yes. But the original comment is that "looks like he knew how to take lumber and build a house", and the story as we have it doesn't provide this data.

It basically provides "he knew how to take lumber, do something, have the city complain about it, maybe fix it all or maybe it was already good, hire an inspector, inspector says it is now all good".

That isn't quite the same as proving "guy knew how to build houses", it's closer to "guy maybe knows how to build houses, or knows how to fix mistakes once they are pointed out".

Only if you believe that his performance on the one house has no correlation whatever with his performance on other houses. That seems highly implausible to me.

> he could have fixed it all

Fixed what? The problem wasn't that the house was actually built wrong. The problem was that the inspector wasn't competent enough to make an actual engineering judgment, so all he could look for was some particular label on the lumber instead of assessing its actual structural strength. An independent inspector, who did have the competence to make an actual engineering judgment, said the house was fine (in fact he said it exceeded the building code standards).

This is a strange thing that we are starting to see in the Western world. Everyone is specializing and becoming an expert as their field gets more complex. This is what capitalism demands. Yet, we assume anyone can walk off the streets and be a functional expert. Construction is hard, science is hard, economics is hard, foreign policy is hard, computer science is hard. I think the complaint is that, anymore, if you're not an expert, you're not good enough. Building a house and getting it permitted is a complex thing because we are unwilling to build structures that put lives in danger, and someone has to take the liability for confirming a building is adequate, if you want to go out on a limb and reinvent the wheel, in any field, you should be an expert.

I'll stand by my words here and say I think he was out of his depth. As was the inspector that probably could have defused the situation and come to a amicable solution.

Out of his depth in legal knowledge. At some point people decided everybody must study Law to even step outside of home. Things didn't use to be this way, how exactly did it change? And, well, it is certainly a bad thing today, but do we want to revert as it was at some time on the past, or reform in some unprecedented way?

And yes, it's kinda crazy. I am entitled into stamping a house around here, even though I have no idea how to decide if a construction is safe or not. Yet, I do know people with perfectly good history of creating good construction that isn't.

If government was prestigious and well paid, competent people would flock there in addition to business. As it is, you have to be /very/ dedicated to go into government, and most people are not.

Same for degrees/qualifications/credentials. It seems amazing that they are such a big deal. But when you're faced with assessing a professional in a field in which you're a layman, you see how crucial their role.

The town I live in has slum lords that are linked with the powers that be (friends, etc) that get away with appalling conditions unless someone points it out.

The city also is cracking down on AirBnB/Short term rentals due to a "lack of housing", yet we have a university that has added 6000 people in the last 20 years and about 1000 beds (including converting doubles into triples). The 2-300 short term rentals aren't the problem. The process to add an ADU (we looked into it), fees were 30+% of the budget.

I'm rambling, but process has replaced safety and holds up actually adding housing stock.

Compare this to individual developers using their own syntax and coding styles across a massive codebase, some of it is inevitably adding in technical debt for the future.

In the UK for instance, health safety regulation mandates that all doors shut automatically in an apartment block. As a result doors spend their time slamming in modern flats. You'd better have good sound insulation. How can you check that unless you pay someone to make noise in every flat around yours to test it?