When safety becomes exclusion: The hidden cost of building codes
We tend to think of building codes as settled, technical matters best left to engineers and inspectors: they exist to keep buildings from burning down and falling over. For the most part, that is exactly what they do. But a closer look at the International Code Council (ICC)—the monopoly over U.S. building industry standards—reveals a more complicated story.
The ICC is a hundred million-dollar organization whose core product is built by volunteers and funded through conferences and sponsorships, not independent research. Over the past century, the ICC has become one of the most powerful and least transparent institutions in housing policy, wielding outsized influence over code changes with heavy input from special interest groups.
The entire process operates with an implicit risk tolerance of zero: any plausible safety benefit, however small, is treated as sufficient reason to add a new rule. The result is a code that accumulates requirements indefinitely, with little accounting for what those requirements cost or whom they burden.
That asymmetry shows up directly in the codes. The ICC allows relatively permissive rules for single-family homes and duplexes, but imposes a much stricter code for everything with three or more units. The stricter multifamily code is dominated by material manufacturers and trade unions whose interests run against cost containment.
The result is a sharp, avoidable increase in per-square-foot construction costs as buildings get denser. Mid-rise apartments cost dramatically more per square foot than detached houses in Hawaiʻi—a premium that reflects regulatory choices rather than any natural diseconomy of scale, even as denser housing remains cheaper to build in many other countries. Requirements like dual staircases force more square footage of each building into hallways and stairwells, and less into living space.
The code that claims to make buildings safer also quietly makes the densest, most affordable housing types the hardest and most expensive to build. These same dynamics show up in Hawaiʻi’s building code as well.
In 2007, the Hawaiʻi State Legislature created the State Building Code Council to create a uniform statewide code. Every three years, the council is supposed to update the code, adapting ICC suggestions to Hawaiʻi’s unique physical environment. But the council’s executive director and staff positions went unfunded, leaving a volunteer board of county officials and industry representatives to keep pace on its own.
After the August 2023 Maui wildfires, Governor Green’s emergency housing proclamations inadvertently put the council on hiatus. Hawaiʻi defaulted to an unamended national code written for snow loads, not hurricanes. The administration has since tried to fast-track adoption of an update, while lawmakers and industry groups spar over whether to slow the update cycle or restructure the council altogether.
Yet, for all this deliberation, Hawaiʻi’s existing housing stock undercuts the premise. Census data show that about 49 percent of the state’s housing units were built before 1980—many under codes with a fraction of today’s requirements. Nobody has proposed condemning them; they have not lost value; and no one treats their occupants as living in a more dangerous class of housing.
If these homes—built decades before modern hurricane, electrical, and fire codes existed—are still considered perfectly fit to live in, it’s hard to argue that each new round of regulations is truly creating a safety floor. Rather, they function as just another ratchet in an increasingly restrictive process that fails to weigh the cost of these new requirements against the housing left unbuilt because of them.
Premonitions from 1919
In 1919, Edith Elmer Wood published The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner. Wood, a novelist turned housing reformer, supported the tenement reform laws of her era. Early tenement laws—prompted by deadly fires and epidemics, and by reformers like Jacob Riis—genuinely improved health and safety by mandating plumbing, windows, fire escapes, and reduced lot coverage. But a paternalistic streak ran through the movement from the start. Reformers worried not only about physical health, but also about moral character, blaming shared walls and crowded buildings for vice and disorder.
Wood’s motivations were noble: she wanted every home to have light, fresh air, and a bathroom. But she also foresaw a trap that her fellow reformers missed: raising minimum standards, on its own, removes cheap housing from the market without replacing it. The improved, code-compliant tenements were priced beyond what unskilled workers could pay. By tightening the rules further, low-income families were left to crowd into a shrinking stock of substandard units, or pile multiple families into a single apartment.
Wood’s solution was for the government to step in directly and build high-quality homes for the poor—treating housing as a public responsibility on par with schools and hospitals, much as European social housing programs were beginning to do (which now make up around 11 percent of the housing stock across Europe).
A century later, the United States has yet to build the kind of public housing she called for at anything near the necessary scale. Minimum standards continue to expand far past health and safety, and into questions of taste, status, and social control:
Apartments—condemned by the Supreme Court as “parasites” in 1926—were regulated toward extinction through height limits and setback rules couched in the language of safety.
Single-room-occupancy hotels, which housed seasonal workers and people on the economic margin, were zoned out of existence and demolished en masse under urban renewal.
Single-family zoning functioned as its own kind of minimum standard: narrow “family” definitions and off-street parking mandates were used explicitly to block homeowners from subdividing large houses into smaller, cheaper units—a tactic promoted by the American Planning Association in 1957.
Similar efforts are reflected in Honolulu’s land use ordinance, which regulates who can live in a home based on blood relation.
More recently, the Honolulu City Council used language echoing the Supreme Court’s 1926 rhetoric in condemning Senate Bill 3202 (2024). The council adopted Resolution 24-65, which labeled the state legislation a risk to public health that would “lead to a complex patchwork or slum of small zoning lots within close proximity to each other, increasing the chances of conflict among neighbors, the spread of fire, and the proliferation of disease vectors.”
Building codes do necessary work: people are alive today because of fire escapes and structural standards. No serious reformer wants to return to the deadly tenements of the 19th Century. But the institutions that produce our codes have no mechanism for weighing safety against affordability, livability, or availability. They add and rarely subtract; they answer to organized interests rather than the general public; and they cloak deeply political tradeoffs in the language of technical neutrality.
The result is a housing stock tilted toward the expensive and the exclusive, with the costs falling hardest on renters and low-income households. National experts suggest subjecting proposed code changes to honest cost-benefit analysis, separating genuine minimum safety standards from the aspirational extras that have piled up around them, and moving toward performance-based codes common in Europe.
We should remember Wood’s wisdom: restrictive rules alone, however justified by safety claims, will never produce affordable housing. That requires governments willing to build, fund, or enable such housing. Wood’s work reminds us that making every building a little safer, one rule at a time, without weighing the costs, has left many people with nowhere safe to live at all.
