Re:Vaccines and our return to office plans
by PaulDavisThe1st on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @03:09PM
(#27988269)
The rural areas still without building codes represent a vanishingly small fraction of the US population.
Here in New Mexico, where there was no building code until the 1980s, we now have a tasty legacy of houses built not to code that are being sold to 2nd, 3rd and even 4th owners-after-building, and the stories are not great. People calling out contractors to fix this and that to be told that the entire plumbing/electrical system needs replacing to meet code. I own a copy of "The Owner Builder and the Code" and several other books from the heyday of the owner-builder "movement". I want people to be able to construct their own dwellings in ways that liberate their creativity and imagination. Decades on, however, I have to concede that this does have some downsides that need to be addressed.
Speed limits and building codes pretty much are "personal preference" in wide swaths of the US. Prior to some federal shenanigans many states had highways with no particular speed limit. Many rural areas do not enforce any building code for noncommercial non-dwelling structures and many exempt dwellings if they are being constructed by the property owner for themselves. And beyond this there are even more areas where laws are on the books but you're free to disregard them and enforcement will ignore you unless you do something so unreasonable they can't justify ignoring you.