News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days. Parent comment

Re:CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days by gamblor956 on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @01:38PM (#34599629)
He's referring to the hundreds of houses that were knowingly built in a floodplain, because Houston does not have the kind of zoning that would have prevented that. Those houses are at high risk of flooding any time there is a storm, and many of them did flood during last year's storms.

It's easy to have cheap housing when you ignore common sense and just build wherever. (Also, part of the expense for LA and SF is that we have earthquakes, and our buildings have to be built to withstand earthquakes. For point of example: a 5.4 earthquake in 2011 caused over $300 million in damage on the East Coast. A series of CA earthquakes stronger than that in 2019 only caused a few thousand in damage near the epicenter. A 5.1 earthquake earlier this year in SoCal caused so little damage that most people slept through it and only know it happened because the news reported it.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days by bluGill on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @02:45PM (#34600781)
I'm not sure what codes are in Texas, but I can tell you in MN the housing codes are designed nationally to cover CA earthquakes and Florida Hurricanes even though both are not factors. Of course those codes also cover insulation which the other two states don't really need as much of..
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days by gamblor956 on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @07:36PM (#34604561)
Housing codes are adopted at the municipal or state level. There is no mandatory "national" building code in the U.S., though there is a "model" building code at the national level upon which the state and local building codes are based. (https://localhousingsolutions.org/housing-policy-library/hou...)

Specifically, Texas just uses the ICC's IRC, while California has the California Building Standards Code, which has additional requirements to account for our many earthquakes (https://peer.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/peer2019-05_ss...).

[ Parent | on HN ]