Specifically, 1970.

One of the reasons it's so expensive to build a house is safety regulations. They exist for a reason, but they nevertheless add a substantial cost to building a house. If you had mandated such a cost to people living in 1870 then a lot fewer people could've afforded a house.

Just about every regulation that exists for every product or thing or way of doing something was written not even after a death, that's usually not enough, it needs to be a substantial number of deaths that can be directly linked to the thing the regulation covers and only then does it become law.

It still adds an enormous amount of cost. Despite that buildings (and even bridges) still collapse. What is often not asked is how many people lack housing because those building codes made it unaffordable for them.

Or... maybe that line of reasoning isn't super strong.

But my point was that you asserted that regulations can overcome claims of impossibility. I was just illustrating that is not always true, and therefore we can't assume it is true here.