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Episode 99: The 'International' Code Council with Jesse Zwick (Incentives Series pt. 3)

Zwick, "Out of Code: The Hidden Costs of US Building Standards"

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Episode Summary: North American buildings are built different — literally. Councilmember Jesse Zwick explains how the organization behind our unusual standards is built to fail, and he makes the case for a new approach. This is part 3 of our series on misaligned incentives in housing policy.

  • “In recent years, building codes in the United States have come under greater scrutiny for their role in enabling or—more often—obstructing the creation of affordable and livable housing (Smith & Mendoza 2024; Eliason 2024; Grabar 2025; Hamilton 2024). In a manner akin to longer-standing efforts to liberalize zoning regimes, housing advocates have begun to question the rational basis of building code regulations, a lack of proper accounting for the inherent tradeoffs between safety, affordability, livability, sustainability, and other goals contained therein, and a failure to prioritize broad public interests within the current deliberative process.”
  • “While zoning and building codes have many commonalities, building codes differ in several key aspects: 1) they are exponentially more technical and complex; 2) they are grounded in real-world fire protection and life safety concerns; and 3) they are developed outside the traditional legislative and rulemaking processes of government. Instead, building codes in the United States are in large part formulated under the auspices of model code nonprofit organizations, a process which today is largely consolidated under one entity, the International Code Council (ICC).”
  • “In the case of building codes, the outsourcing of this rulemaking process to private third-party standards organizations has not reduced the role of political influence but rather redirected it in favor of narrower special interests while simultaneously stripping away basic government standards of accountability and transparency. A close analysis reveals a system rife with capture by both industry and government interests, in which the costs and benefits of regulations are improperly weighed (if weighed at all), special interests enjoy outsize influence and minimal scrutiny, and elected officials have largely abdicated their role of weighing tradeoffs and representing the public interest.”
  • “The current system by which building codes are developed in the US reveals the drawbacks of a diminished state capacity for doing this crucial work “in-house,” as well as belies the common assumption that highly technical rulemaking should be the exclusive domain of “experts,” not politicians. The complex tradeoffs entailed within building codes between safety, affordability, livability, and sustainability are inherently political. The mantle of technocratic neutrality claimed by the current process serves simply to obscure this basic fact, further removing the inherent balancing of societal costs and benefits from public view.”
  • “Whereas a combination of law, custom, and economics led Europe to largely move away from combustible building materials by the 19th century, abundant forests in the US ensured that wood remained a common material in construction, fostering a distinctly American approach to building safety that prioritized active over passive protections, methodically layering on new requirements to offset the inherent dangers of wood-frame construction (Smith & Mendoza 2024).”
  • “Throughout their modern history, the process by which codes were developed has been more heuristic than scientific, codifying urban forms and building practices that appeared to work and reacting to tragedies that revealed their insufficiency … Indeed, high-profile building failures or severe fires have often driven changes to existing codes—but inciting events have also included geopolitical shocks, like the 1973 energy crisis, the growing influence of emerging industries, like mass timber, and sustained advocacy efforts, such as those by disability rights advocates culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act (Potter 2022; Chubb 2025).”
  • “In place of any federal mandates there exists a regulatory patchwork of more than 20,000 Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs), the agency or organization responsible for enforcing building codes (Potter 2022). In the 20th century, these jurisdictions have looked to a competing assortment of standards-setting nonprofits for guidance, adopting either wholesale or in-part their various code recommendations into law. In the 1990s, the three largest regional model code organizations consolidated into a single body known as the International Code Council (ICC), which continues to play a preeminent role in the development of US building codes to this day (Hamilton 2024).”
  • “As in past code development efforts in the US, the ICC’s approach adheres more closely to the instincts of local code enforcement professionals than the rigors of fire engineering and data analysis. “The ICC is a $100-million-a-year organization but their main product is a volunteer effort,” notes Stephen Smith, housing advocate and director of the Center for Building in North America. “They don’t fund research. They fund conferences” (Smith 2025). And while it has the word “International” in its name, the organization is a largely American affair that deliberates with little consideration of global trends (Grabar 2025).”
  • “Amendments to the code are proposed on a triennial cycle via committees comprised of industry stakeholders and local building code officials, whose recommendations are then approved by a vote of the body’s entire public sector membership (Code Development Process 2016). While committee hearings are open to the public, the makeup of committees is the purview of ICC leadership, and the process by which various interests are selected and represented is a proverbial black box—one replete with secret side-agreements with industry stakeholders (Flavelle 2019).”
  • “Only public employees are allowed to vote in the ultimate model code adoption process, but the sheer volume of changes ensures that individual members are not equipped to meaningfully evaluate them: In the 2019 code cycle, nearly 2,300 members cast close to 370,000 votes—the ICC’s remaining approximately 13,000 members did not vote at all (Hamilton 2024). These model codes are ultimately adopted into law by state and local elected officials, who defer by custom to the ICC.”
  • “Within committees, the process of US building code development has changed only minimally since its origins: heuristic anchoring takes precedence over performance-based standards, numbers are seldom employed in analysis, and ICC staff do not apply independent scrutiny to the results produced in committees (Grabar 2025; Smith 2025; Chubb 2025). The risk tolerance of the process is implicitly zero: any plausible safety benefit is considered sufficient justification to propose a code change. Indeed, “improve life safety” is commonly included in reason statements without any accompanying quantification of deaths and injuries that might be prevented by the proposed change (Hamilton 2024).”
  • “Deprived of meaningful, quantified inputs regarding the effects of proposed changes, the result is a deliberative process that privileges well-organized stakeholders over any kind of rigorous analysis of the costs and benefits imposed upon the general public … Nor, either, do advancements in mandated safety technology formally prompt any process of consideration of existing requirements that may be rendered extraneous, causing a continual accumulation of rules within the code. “Nobody wants to say we got what we wanted, let’s give something in return” notes Chubb. We never take stuff out, we just add” (Chubb 2025).”
  • “Estimates of the additional cost to construction that results from the International Building Code (IBC), the ICC’s main work product for commercial and multifamily buildings, range wildly and in-line with the interests of various industries that commission them (Estimated Costs of Building Code Changes; Codes Save). But one fact stands out: While in much of the world construction costs remain roughly constant as buildings scale from single-family to low-rise and mid-rise typologies (reflecting competing economies and diseconomies of scale within the industry), per-square-foot costs in the US rise sharply as buildings densify (Horowitz 2025). That this large cost premium—in which mid-rise buildings cost on average 55 percent more per square foot than single family homes—is not seen in most countries indicates it does not reflect a typical diseconomy of scale, but is rather a result of US building code regulations, which “draw a number of hard and expensive lines between low- and high-density forms of development that are not found abroad” (Horowitz 2025).”
  • “Beyond direct costs to construction, homebuilders, advocates, and academics note that many additional indirect costs accrue from building codes but are rarely incorporated into any public form of accounting. First, because codes are updated as often as every 18 months, builders regularly complain that they sow confusion and require constant relearning from trades (AB 306 Analysis). Additionally, because this timeline is shorter than the length of many individual construction projects, codes are regularly made more stringent before the effects of the current iteration are fully known or calculable (AB 306 Analysis).”
  • “When it comes to the liveability of available multifamily homes, double-loaded corridors mandated by egress requirements in US codes come with an additional and separate cost as well. Dual staircase requirements make for buildings with more space that must be devoted to circulation and less to livable space, and similar efficiency issues occur within units as well (Eliason 2024; Smith 2025).”
  • “Indeed, most homes were built before modern building and energy codes existed. Because there is no requirement that these buildings meet modern standards, stringent codes incentivize their preservation over redevelopment, consigning people to less safe and efficient buildings (Hammit et al. 1999; Horowitz 2025). The specific safety risks of old buildings are many, including increased exposure to contaminants like lead and decreased protection against natural disasters and home fires. And older less efficient homes that consume more energy are responsible for greater pollutant emissions, both from local combustion sources and regional power plants.”
  • “While they are difficult to quantify, researchers estimate the combined income and stock effects of a code change that raises costs by $150 to be between 2 and 60 premature fatalities, or between 20 and 800 lost quality adjusted life years each year the code provision remains in effect (Hammit et al. 1999). To provide a net benefit, it is reasoned, code changes must increase health and human safety by at least this amount. Automotive, pharmaceutical, and energy industries all incorporate these kinds of risk-tradeoff tools into their analyses (Hammit et al. 1999). Building code officials—and the regulatory process that guides them—do not.”
  • “On the issue of climate change, Stanford University’s Pathways to Carbon Neutrality in California report notes that there are diminishing returns to further ratcheting up energy efficiency code requirements on new residential buildings (Neutel et al. 2022).”
  • “Higher construction and housing costs as a result of code changes also contain important distributional implications as well, benefiting homeowners while disproportionately burdening renter and low-income households (McFarlane, Li, & Hollar 2021). Because shelter is a necessary good, increases to housing costs will cause low-income families to either sacrifice other goods or seek less expensive housing elsewhere, denying them access to the economic and educational opportunities of higher housing cost, high-resource neighborhoods.”
  • “Finally, it is posited that US building codes are a hidden impediment to innovation in the construction industry, precluding declining production cost-curves that are common across other industries. Highly prescriptive standards, the logic goes, discourage the adoption of newer, more efficient materials, technologies, or processes (Kelly 1996) … Other notable, more recent construction innovations have tended to originate outside the US—and many still fight for adoption stateside … “I always say, if we had a great idea today that was a better mousetrap and you submitted it into the ICC process, it wouldn’t become law for at least eight years,” says Chubb. “And that’s the best case scenario. Some of these things take forever” (Chubb 2025).”
  • “A review of the ICC as an institution—as well as the trade groups, corporations, unions, and government officials who participate within the code development process it leads—reveals the many ways in which participants benefit from and work to maintain the status quo…”
  • “The ICC is a nonprofit 501(c)(6) standards development organization that reports annual revenues in excess of $100 million and chief executive compensation north of $1 million (Suozzo et al.). Its model building codes—from which the ICC’s stature and revenue streams flow—are developed at conferences by industry and government volunteers. Those conferences are supported by sponsorships from corporations and trade groups … The ICC is explicit about the ways in which its conference presents a unique occasion to influence government decision makers … Because it profits from selling copies of its codes, the ICC has regularly sued to block individuals and organizations who make them available for free on the internet (Potter 2022). And yet the codes the ICC develops ultimately become laws, and case law has established that laws cannot be copyrighted—therefore handing a series of legal losses to the organization (Potter 2022).”
  • “Exhibit A of hidden bias within the ICC, from the perspective of housing affordability advocates, are the separate codes through which the organization regulates single-family and multi-family home construction—as well as the process by which individuals and interests are selected to serve on the committees that govern them. The International Residential Code (IRC) regulates single-family homes and duplexes with one set of codes, while the International Building Code (IBC) offers a much stricter set of regulations for all commercial and 3+ unit residential buildings, regardless of their size. While the ICC briefly considered the possibility of one building code as part of its code consolidation process during the 1990s, pushback from the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB), the body that represents single-family home developers across the US, quickly scuttled the effort (Chubb 2025).”
  • “Instead, single-family homes were bestowed their own building code, as well as an undisclosed side-agreement that promised the NAHB the right to select four of the eleven seats on all committees convened to consider future changes to it (Flavelle 2019). Due to the sheer volume of code changes proposed each cycle, the final recommendations made by committees are the most influential determinant of what amendments are ultimately adopted, but the process by which the ICC selects members and industry interests to serve on each committee is performed behind closed doors.”
  • “If the NAHB’s outsized role within the single-family code development process represents a classic case of regulatory capture, the stature of multifamily developers within the ICC is decidedly weaker. John Zeanah, Chief of Development and Infrastructure for the city of Memphis, understands this as part of the same historical context in which multifamily housing typologies have always been disfavored by most US cities. “The mindset in the 1920s progressive era when the professional bureaucracy was being established was that multifamily housing was a blight on cities and that single family housing was the answer,” he says (Zeneah 2025).”
  • “As a result, materials manufacturers and organized labor—entities with incentives that run decidedly counter to cost containment within the construction process—have come to dominate the IBC development process: concrete and steel suppliers lobbied for years against the legalization of tall mass timber buildings, the natural gas industry has fought new electrification standards, unique requirements for US elevators have created a bespoke manufacturing process and prices to match, plumbers unions have successfully limited the adoption of PVC pipes, while sprinkler contractors have succeeded in blocking plumbers from installing commercial sprinkler systems in Tennessee and other states (Potter 2022; Hanley 2024; Smith 2024; Kelly 1996; Zeneah 2025).”
  • “The large majority of code officials who serve as voting members are not trained as architects or engineers, nor do they work for jurisdictions with budgets that support testing on different code standards, which makes them highly susceptible to industry interests that do (Zaneah 2025; Chubb 2025). Moreover, the fact that building codes are regulated on the local level ensures that the average code official in the US does not represent a densely populated jurisdiction, while even those who do in many cases choose to live elsewhere.”
  • “While lacking the same financial incentives of materials manufacturers and trade unions, public officials responsible for ensuring public health and safety often find themselves aligned when it comes to their orientation towards risk in the code development process. Quite naturally, government agencies “pay the most attention to risks that could erode their political capital,” and tend to evaluate risk management efforts without regard for opportunity cost (Mitra et al. 2023). Due to the narrow mandates of code and fire officials, any laxity in the building code that endangers public safety is a potential unforced error. Any negative externalities of overregulation are, quite literally, someone else’s problem.”
  • “When electeds have passed laws liberalizing building standards and advocates have taken their case directly to the ICC, many code officials perceive an unwelcome encroachment on their area of expertise—or worse. Smith, who attended recent ICC committee hearings on the issue of single-staircase reform, recalls how one committee member who voted against the changes remarked, “I don’t think we should act like we’re under attack.” To which someone in the audience screamed in reply, “We are under attack!” (Smith 2025). Ultimately, the committee voted for modest changes, recommending the ICC legalize 4-story single-staircase buildings that adopt additional fire life safety mitigations. The reason, stated in the published report, appeared to speak as much to politics as objective analysis: “It is hoped that this additional option will discourage legislative bodies attempting to over ride the code to allow for taller single story buildings” (2024 Report of the Committee Action Hearing).”
  • “With the introduction of new voices whose advocacy is not directly linked to their bottom line comes new moral authority … A newer and greater challenge, however, is the fact that unlike in past fights, housing advocates seek to strip away rules from a process that typically only ever adds new ones, in an area with a tangible connection, however hotly debated around the margins, to public safety. “It’s not like zoning, which is somewhat arbitrary,” admits Zeanah. “There are real risks and costs associated with materials and methods” (Zeanah 2025).”
  • “Indeed, the building code’s highly technical nature and connection to life safety has likely been cause enough for most legislators to accept what is essentially an odd arrangement—if they are even aware of it—in which code officials and industry stakeholders craft laws with a narrow perspective on their ultimate effects and elected officials generally adopt them wholesale, despite their responsibility to weigh the benefits of new laws and regulations against all manner of competing public policy objectives (Hamilton 2024).”
  • “And yet legislators regularly adjudicate issues of great technical complexity and with direct implications for public health, safety, and welfare, including roadway safety design, public safety agency staffing levels, atomic energy production, and most recently health regulations regarding vaccines, mask mandates and stay-at-home orders, to name a few. The effective outsourcing of this self-same responsibility in the realm of the built environment has immediate and negative effects on the general public, who are not afforded the same rights regarding transparency as they would within typical government decisionmaking processes, not exposed to public debate about inherent tradeoffs within the process, and not offered a meaningful opportunity to decide for themselves how much safety they would like “consume” vis a vis competing priorities like housing affordability.”
  • “As it stands, elected officials interested in reinserting themselves into the process often find themselves in highly contested territory. “Code officials kind of act like as lawmakers you don’t have the right to change it,” says Smith. “They’re right that you don’t have the technical skills, wrong that you don’t have the right” (Smith 2025). Without a strong commitment to developing better institutions, which take a broad view of the public good and shine appropriate analytic light on the full spectrum of costs and benefits, one can reasonably expect such confrontations to escalate.”
  • “Proposals to reform the US building code development process vary in scope and ambition. First, and most immediately, rigorous cost-benefit analysis could be fully incorporated into the current code adoption process in order to adequately represent the public interest in all proceedings. The ICC could restore public confidence by building up its internal capacity and courage to perform this analysis first on all newly proposed code amendments, then retrospectively on the entirety of its existing code requirements (Hamilton 2024).”
  • “Second, the building code could strive to separate out true minimum safety standards from the many portions of the code that have become “aspirational” in nature (McFarlane, Li, & Hollar 2021). In doing so, codes could continue to serve their primary function of ensuring basic health and safety for all users at minimal cost, while establishing voluntary building standards that form the basis of a market for interested buyers and sellers.”
  • “Those with grander ambitions point to Europe as a model for reform for two main reasons. First, building standards are commonly centralized at either the national or supranational level, where sufficient state capacity exists to conduct scientific research, perform impartial analysis, and offer guidance (Mendoza 2025) … Equally important, European standards on the whole are less prescriptive and more performance or outcome-based. Whereas the Eurocodes might mandate a certain level of greenhouse gas reductions, “here it’s all ‘three centimeters to the left and one to the right,’” notes Mendoza. While generally more challenging to successfully implement, the reward is a greater regulatory flexibility credited as among the reasons Europe has been a consistent innovator in environmentally sustainable building design and technology (Mendoza 2025).”
  • “Chubb, who spent a decade studying performance-based codes in New Zealand, found them liberating. “What it does is allow people to step back to first principles and say, ‘What I really want is housing that is energy efficient, accessible, stable during an earthquake, safe enough that people can get out in the event of a fire, and live comfortably close together without acoustic conflicts, etcetera” (Chubb 2025). Rather than predetermining the outcome by anchoring it to what has come before, in the best case scenario we’d welcome in a world where the possibilities are limitless.”

Shane Phillips 0:05
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is the third episode in our ongoing Incentive series, which we're able to do with the support of UCLA's Center for Incentive Design. Throughout this series, we'll be exploring the misalignment between what we say we want our policies and processes to achieve, and the behaviors and outcomes they actually incentivize. In every episode, we'll also talk about how to solve these problems. The first section of this series is a deep dive into the world of building codes and standards, and our guest this time is Santa Monica Councilmember and UCLA Urban Planning Master's student, Jesse Zwick. In this conversation, we're zooming out from specific code issues like egress requirements and elevator standards to consider the organization responsible for writing the code here in the US, the ambitiously and improperly named International Code Council. This series is about incentives, and in this episode, we're going to be talking about how the ICC is structured such that bad outcomes are all but guaranteed. One element of that structure is the absence, in most cases, of any kind of meaningful cost-benefit analysis when new or revised codes are proposed. The implied thinking behind this approach is that more safety is always worth the cost, but as Jesse and Pavo both articulate at different points in this interview, that's not at all how people live their lives in the real world. Many fewer people would be seriously injured or killed in cars if everyone wore helmets and six-point seatbelts, but virtually no one does because we've decided the additional safety is not worth the inconvenience. We design many roads for travel at 50 or 60 mph instead of 20 or 30 because we also value speed, not just safety. We allow restaurants to serve sushi and beef tartare because a lot of people really like those foods and they accept a higher risk of food poisoning because, all things considered, having those foods in their life is worth the cost. That is not how our building code works, particularly for multifamily housing. In that world, we mandate gold-plated safety standards for everyone, even if many people would happily exchange whatever miniscule risk accompanies a smaller elevator or a single stairwell for a few hundred bucks off their rent every month, or a floor plan that cross-ventilates and lets light in from multiple sides and protects their bedrooms from street noise, or any number of other things people value in the buildings where they live and they might have to give up in exchange for these higher level safety standards. What I just said takes for granted that people can even get into these super safe buildings, but one consequence of these codes and standards is that we build fewer new buildings so that more of us are stuck in homes that are older and much less safe and sanitary. It also takes for granted that all these codes actually do make us safer, which our last few episodes showed to be untrue in very important and costly ways. This all comes back to the organization responsible for our model building code, so we were excited to take a deeper dive and to get the perspective of an elected official on this inherently political issue. The Housing Voice Podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, and Tiffany Lieu. Send your questions and feedback to shanephilips@ucla.edu, and if you like the show, give us a five-star rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. With that, let's get to our conversation with Council Member Jesse Zwick.

Shane Phillips 4:13
Jesse Zwick is a Council Member for the City of Santa Monica and, more importantly, a current UCLA student in our Master of Urban and Regional Planning program, a MURP, as they are affectionately known. He's joining us for a special episode to talk about the International Code Council, helping shed some light on the institution most directly responsible for the building code problems that we've been talking about in the last few episodes. Jesse, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice Podcast.

Jesse Zwick 4:42
Thanks so much, Shane. Really excited to be here.

Shane Phillips 4:44
And my co-host for this one is Paavo. Hey, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen 4:48
Hey, Shane. How you doing? Thanks for joining us, Jesse. I look forward to talking about the ICC.

Shane Phillips 4:53
Yes. So, Jesse, you know the deal pretty well here, I think. Before we talk research, we get a tour. Where are you taking us? I feel like there's only one answer as an elected official.

Paavo Monkkonen 5:02
Yeah. The best city in all of California.

Jesse Zwick 5:05
I've got to take you to where I grew up and where I now serve on the city council, which is the city of Santa Monica, very exotic, only all of a few miles from UCLA, an increasingly popular destination for professors there to seek shelter, Paavo being the latest. It's a rather compact little city. It's eight square miles, surrounded on three sides by the city of LA and on the last side by the Pacific Ocean. It's kind of unique in that it's 70% renter, and it's all a lot of low-rise multifamily development from the 50s through the 80s, and then that basically stopped, which, much like the rest of LA, wasn't an accident. It's bisected by the 10 freeway. It's also where the 10 freeway ends at the beach, and that is sort of one of the original sort of scars in the community that we're still contending with. The freeway was routed straight through the neighborhoods that traditionally boasted really robust Black and Latino populations in the city, while at one point in Santa Monica each represented around 25% of the population. Today our Black population is only 4%, and our Latino population is maybe 14%. And lastly, it's very flat with a sort of nearly perfect grid-like street layout, which combined with good weather and bike infrastructure has really made it one of the most walkable bikable cities, if not the most walkable bikable cities in LA County, and that's something that we're very proud of over here.

Shane Phillips 6:38
Not a high bar, unfortunately, but yeah, it's one of the few places when people ask me, like, is LA nice to bike in? I'm like, maybe Santa Monica, and that's really about it, even though the whole area should be amazing. It would be one of the best places to bike on the planet if we just built a little connected infrastructure for it.

Jesse Zwick 5:55
Yeah, I traded in my car a couple years ago for an e-bike, and obviously it helps that I don't have to leave Santa Monica too much, but it serves me totally fine here. It's been really great to lose the car once I move back to Santa Monica.

Shane Phillips 7:08
Envious. So as I said, this is a special episode. At different points throughout the series on misaligned incentives, we're going to take some detours to have shorter conversations that relate to our main topics in one way or another. And I don't know how much shorter this one's actually going to be based on the number of questions I wrote down, but we're going to see how it works out. In this case, we're getting into the International Code Council and its signature products, the International Building Code and International Residential Code. This year, Jesse wrote a report for his MERP program about the ICC titled, Out of Code, The Hidden Costs of US Building Standards, which packs a lot of great history and insights and quotes into a compact 12 pages. And this report is forthcoming. We're hoping to have it published by the time this episode is out so people can take a look if they're interested. As we've talked about in previous episodes, the ICC writes the model building code, which US states and cities then adopt, often with their own additional locally relevant provisions, and which then determines exactly how buildings are designed, constructed, and how they can be used. It's a mostly volunteer run organization, as we'll talk about, with a massive influence shaping the ways that millions of buildings are designed and constructed. Projects that I think probably have a total value that reaches into at least the tens of billions of dollars every year. After zoning, building code is definitely one of the next big hurdles on the horizon for housing reformers. And so it's rightly been getting more attention, including on our show. Jesse, you say something in the report that really captures why we wanted to have this conversation with you. In describing the role of the ICC, you say, quote, code officials and industry stakeholders craft laws with a narrow perspective on their ultimate effects, and elected officials generally adopt them wholesale, despite their responsibility to weigh the benefits of new laws and regulations against all manner of competing public policy objectives. Two parts of that sentence stood out to me. First is the narrow perspective of the code officials and industry stakeholders who tend to be focused mostly on safety and fire protection, really to the exclusion of all else. And the second part is the competing public policy objectives that often get ignored. So those things that are not really considered like affordability, accessibility, livability, et cetera. So let's start with you here. What got you interested in this topic? You're part of a pro-housing contingent on the Santa Monica City Council, so I'm guessing it started with some reform efforts there.

Jesse Zwick 9:47
Yeah, that's mainly right. You know, you start with zoning, that's sort of the gateway drug, and then you realize the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper when it comes to getting affordable and livable housing built. And as someone who cares about that a lot, you do end up running up against elements of the building code quite a lot. Egress requirements are definitely the hot topic these days, otherwise known as single-stair reform, and for good reason due to its ability to unlock smaller sites and create more livable family-size housing units. But there are a lot of examples of where the code presents an issue, and we don't have the most efficient European heat pumps, they're not allowed in the U.S., we have these super unique elevators that cost four to five times what they cost in the rest of the world, and the list really goes on and on. And I figured rather than dive into any one of these problems, I became curious about what I'd call the political economy of how these rules all get made in the first place.

Shane Phillips 10:44
Yeah, and I think that's also part of why we're interested in this, because we've talked about in some episodes that you haven't heard yet, because they're not out, but topics you're very familiar with on single-stair reform with Mike Eliasson and on the elevator standards and costs with Stephen Smith. And yeah, I think it's helpful to kind of step back a little bit and consider how we got here more broadly, not just with those specific regulations and their consequences. Before we get into some more of this politics and the history of the ICC, one question we just want to touch on at a high level here is how our buildings perform here in the U.S. in terms of construction costs and accessibility and livability and safety compared to other wealthy countries that do not use the international building code or an international residential code. I also want to skip over an opportunity to point out that the ICC is not at all international and their codes really are not used outside the United States. So how are we doing compared to other countries?

Jesse Zwick 11:51
Yeah, the biggest thing, apart from all the peculiarities and specific problems that the code presents, is just that taken on aggregate, it makes it a lot more expensive to build here than in other places. And I think there's been some really good work done on this that shows two big things. First, in most of the developed world, you don't see a lot of difference in the per-square-foot construction costs across different housing typologies. So basically, a single-family home and a mid-rise building on a per-square-foot basis cost around the same. But in the U.S., it's really stark. Mid-rise buildings cost, on average, around 55% more per square foot than single-family homes in the U.S. And I think in California, that number is closer to 100%. And then when you get to high-rises, the costs really just explode here. And the most plausible explanation for that is this really stark line that we draw in U.S. building codes between different typologies, where the requirements start to ratchet up very quickly at buildings as small as just three units. And then on the flip side, despite all of this, we don't have a noticeably better safety record than most of these other countries. And at times, actually, it's worse. So there's a good case to be made at a high level that we're not getting a lot of bang for our buck with all these added regulations, and we're actually making it a lot harder for us to build the kind of housing that we want to see.

Shane Phillips 13:14
Yeah, that point about how costs escalate as building height increases here in the U.S. And this is on a per-square-foot basis, not just because it's a bigger building, I think is really important in that comparison to other countries. Because I think in our episode with Anthony Orlando talking about this, I don't think we really talked about how in other countries this is not the norm and it's important context that this is not necessarily some inevitable outcome that you just have to work around. This is in some ways a result of the way we've put together our codes and policies. So really important context. Let's go through some of the history here, though. It may surprise some people to learn that the ICC was only formed in the 1990s and before that, there wasn't really a national standard setting organization here. The ICC consolidated three of the largest regional model code organizations. And so in that sense, it seems like it's probably an improvement over what came before. Share a little bit about how it came together and how the ICC operates today. A couple of things I want to make sure we touch on are how it produces these two different codes and some of the shady dealings, maybe, with the National Association of Home Builders. These two facts are probably related to each other.

Jesse Zwick 14:31
Yeah. Yeah. A lot to unpack here. You could say, I think rightly, that the effort to create this single national standards organization was a good one and that it aimed to create a more rational, uniform regulatory environment. But on a more fundamental level, I'd say that it kind of just replicated many of the issues of code development and promulgation of the past. And by that, I mean it retained the same somewhat strange process by which the laws for buildings in our country are essentially outsourced to this third-party organization that's made up of building officials and also the representatives of different industries and trades. And they all get together at these conferences to propose updates to the building code, which are mainly released on a triennial cycle. So every three years. And then the state and local governments kind of adopt them without a lot of scrutiny. And I think inherent in that setup is this issue whereby the unique qualities of the people who attend these conferences end up playing a kind of outsized role in determining a lot of things around how our buildings are designed, how much they cost, and what goals they ultimately serve. So on one hand, you have various interests like the sprinkler industry or the concrete industry or the plumbers union, and their interests are fairly obvious and they're fine and good. They bring their perspective to this issue. But on the other side, you don't tend to get a lot of pushback from public officials in part because they're not necessarily trained as architects or engineers and therefore lack the basic knowledge that's often supplied by industry representatives. And also in part because of their own cultural disposition and public safety professional mandate lends them their own natural biases often towards single family homes over multifamily buildings and especially towards any regulation or requirement that might improve life safety however vaguely because that's ultimately how these officials are going to be judged. The fire marshal or the building official is going to feel pretty bad and be judged pretty harshly if he allows a building to get built that isn't safe in some way.

Shane Phillips 16:41
We saw this with the Grenfell building fire in the UK where I forgot the 18 story or so building and it was very harshly criticized for I think many people died in that fire. And so there is you know there are real risks here which we don't want to be dismissive of and bad design or retrofits or whatever the cause is can be a real problem. And as you say like it's natural for officials in these kinds of positions to be fairly risk averse.

Jesse Zwick 17:10
Yeah I mean because ultimately there's anyone there going to get in trouble if new buildings in their town become prohibitively expensive to build you know that's not their mandate that seems unlikely.

Shane Phillips 17:22
You get yelled at for that.

Jesse Zwick 17:23
Yeah I get yelled at for that but I think that is the sort of problem in my mind with this process is that you know despite that fact there isn't typically a large role in the political process for what are essentially laws that are nonetheless sort of being written outside of the normal political process. To speak to the other part of the question the biggest and most problematic bias the one that's been decried the most by housing advocates is the bright line that the ICC draws between single-family and multi-family homes. They put out two separate codes the international residential code which actually governs single family and duplexes.

Shane Phillips 18:01
And town homes yeah.

Jesse Zwick 18:02
And then the international building code which essentially governs everything else. And it seems pretty clear that the IRC code is often pretty focused on keeping building costs low while the IBC is often very much about loading on as many regulations as possible. And as Stephen Smith told me the IRC is for homes for Americans to live in the IBC is for sprinkler contractors to make their money. Obviously that's not actually true.

Shane Phillips 18:31
Stylistically. Yes.

Jesse Zwick 18:33
Yeah it gets at the way in which there is a broader cultural bias that's reflected here against multi-family housing as well as the relative strength of the single-family home building lobby that you referenced earlier. When the ICC was being formed there was some idea of creating just one code. And the National Association of Home Builders was very much against that. And so not only did they end up having to create two separate codes but what's been revealed since is that the National Association of Home Builders was given a secret side deal with the ICC that said that on any committee that would propose changes to the IRC they get a guaranteed number of seats. And these committees are essentially the most important parts of the code development process because it's really where the sausage gets made and later there's a bunch of votes taken by the whole membership but essentially at that point it's more of a pro forma ratification most of the time. So it's a major influential thing that they have and there isn't really an equivalent on the multi-family side when it comes to a lobby for keeping costs low.

Shane Phillips 19:34
Yeah.

Paavo Monkkonen 19:36
I just want to reiterate the point for the listeners how much this tracks with kind of city planning practices in general, right? If you look at the vast majority of general plans of cities they start off with our goal is to protect residential neighborhoods by which we mean single-family neighborhoods and then the rest of the city, well, whatever, right? They kind of just leave it to be dealt with on its own. Additionally, kind of the point you make about the lobby, the importance of the lobby of the National Association of Home Builders which are building single-family homes. I mean I think the political economy of that has really been seen in California over the last decade or so with reforms and at the state level and everyone wondering like where are the developers in this reform process like people assume developers of multi-family are pushing zoning reforms but in fact they're not because they don't have an organized lobby in the same way that the single-family home builders do. So it's really interesting as we dig into this kind of new topic related to the debates over zoning reform how much parallel there is.

Jesse Zwick 20:34
In some way it's a replication of all the same forces and there's specific financial interests at play here but there is also just that broader bias that we see throughout the planning and zoning world.

Shane Phillips 20:46
Yeah. And on that note I've mentioned this in a recent announcement on the podcast about trying to maybe do a book club coming up but one of the books I recently read that I really liked was Yoni Applebaum's Stuck and it was there that I first read about Lawrence Valor who was really way ahead of his time when it came to this apparent American cultural aversion to density and to multi-family housing and the legislating around that. Way back in 1913 at a National Housing Association conference he was telling people how fire safety regulations could be used not primarily for the purpose of improving safety but to stop the construction of multi-family homes. I'm going to read the full quote here because it's just too good, too on the nose. He said we should quote, do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type and penalize so far as we can in our statute the multiple dwelling of any kind. If we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof and thus increase the cost of construction, if we require stairs to be fireproofed even when there are only three families, if we require fire escapes and a host of other things all dealing with fire protection we are in safe grounds because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power. In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever. He couldn't make it more plain there I don't think and it sounds like someone was listening.

Jesse Zwick 22:22
It's really striking. I wish I'd come across that when I was writing my paper and it really speaks to the double-edged nature of building codes because on the surface as we discussed it's supposed to be this technocratic process focused on safety when in reality there are all sorts of values and biases sort of embedded within them and most of the time this process of developing them is so far removed from public view quite literally at these conferences that aren't the same as public government meetings that we don't even understand how many important trade-offs are contained within these rules and we don't really have great visibility into that at all.

Paavo Monkkonen 22:59
Yeah and maybe you could talk more about the public officials who make up this body of decision makers on the ICC. When we were working on this paper when we were writing it, we tried to think a lot about other industries that were regulated in similar ways kind of in a non-governmental way and we couldn't really get an exact parallel but we thought maybe like the banking regulations under LIBOR was this kind of very dangerous way to regulate interest rates or whatever but in this case, I think obviously there were these kind of more conspiratorial minded people throughout the U.S. history on this topic but I don't imagine most building code employees of cities across America are purposefully making multifamily housing more expensive.

Jesse Zwick 23:44
Yeah, definitely not. I think as I mentioned on one hand you have industries that are clearly trying to just put their materials and products into new buildings and then on the other hand you have public officials who are just trying to make them safe and I think there's a bit of an asymmetry whereby these public officials represent towns and cities across all of America and they're not equipped with either the specific background education or just simply the resources within their communities to actually test all these products or determine what performs the best so they rely a lot upon these industries to supply them with this information and data and other things and I think that combined with a natural risk aversion as mentioned prior by Shane just lends itself to sort of more is always better mentality within the process and very few natural checks on sort of weighing broader costs and benefits within the process and I also think the way that any national body is made up because America is so full of smaller localities, smaller towns, sparsely populated counties and things like that. It's kind of like the Senate or something where you're going to have an overrepresentation of officials representing communities that maybe don't even have multifamily buildings or if they do, very few. So you don't have the perspective of even the officials that work in big cities very broadly represented on this body.

Paavo Monkkonen 25:11
Yeah, and you can guess that like with so much in American life there's a high correlation between building type and incomes and probably very few fire department chiefs live in multifamily buildings so they don't care if they're less pleasant places to live.

Shane Phillips 25:27
Yeah, I'm thinking about some of the politics around crime right now and always and just how people in the suburbs think cities are on fire and these crime infested madhouses and it's easy to imagine a bunch of suburban code officials sort of imagining the same thing about multifamily housing and it's so dangerous and we have to do all these things to protect it. If you don't have these perspectives represented, those positions and opinions go unchecked.

Jesse Zwick 25:55
You could say it goes even further in the sense that even in cities like mine or others, a lot of the times both for economic and cultural reasons, a lot of the officials across public safety and other departments actually tend to live well outside of them. I think in LA you have a broad percentage of the police force that live up in Simi Valley or Santa Clarita or other places and so even in cities, you might not have officials that actually live within them. They might live in the periphery and for various sort of economic or cultural reasons so it even expands to those that represent cities.

Shane Phillips 26:27
Yeah, that's a really good point. So one of your big critiques in the paper is that there's often no balancing of costs and benefits in these ICC code updates or if there is, it's at least a very perfunctory effort. Just a heads up to listeners, in this quote I'm going to share, you referenced reason statements, which I understand are just basically the justifications for creating or modifying code. You write, quote, indeed, improve life safety is commonly included in reason statements without any accompanying quantification of deaths and injuries that might be prevented by the proposed change. What's an example of that maybe and how do you propose that we change things?

Jesse Zwick 27:07
So I may again be treading ground you've already covered, but the most famous example I think is the one that Stephen Smith unearthed and Henry Graybar wrote about more recently in Slate, which has to do with the mandated size of elevators in the US. The notion was that it'd be better if longer stretchers could fit completely flat in them and the estimated cost was none. And that really turned out to be true if you follow the trajectory of the cost of elevators in this country. But, you know, the same applies to most code updates made through the process. One example is a new requirement to have a firewatch overnight at most construction sites. Maybe that's a good idea. You know, that could be worth the cost, but we don't really know because no one really bothered to study it. Another is the requirement for sprinkler systems in all new homes.

Shane Phillips 27:53
And that's not going to be required in the International Residential Code for single family homes. Like there's no there's no question that's ever going to be mandated.

Paavo Monkkonen 28:28
Super exciting field.

Jesse Zwick 28:30
Yeah. To government rulemaking.

Shane Phillips 28:33
I mean, it sort of is it's, you know, people really debating the value of a life, you know, or a year of quality life, as I'm sure you'll touch on.

Jesse Zwick 28:00
Yeah. And I think, you know, similarly, there was a requirement to place sprinklers in all new homes, including single family homes. And the few studies that are out there on this topic have indicated that the cost outpaces any potential benefits that come when you do this with really small structures. And I think, broadly speaking, this took me down a rabbit hole into the history and philosophy of what's known as cost benefit analysis, which is a kind of hotly debated but increasingly popular approach.

Shane Phillips 28:33
it sort of is its you know, people really debating the value of a life, you know, or a year of quality life, as I'm sure you'll touch on,

Jesse Zwick 28:43
Yeah. And I think the critique in some people's minds is that it attempts to render these very tough decisions into these objective math problems where these models aren't always are always going to be flawed approximations of reality. And maybe sometimes it's a Trojan horse for deregulation or something like that. But I do think the benefit, and this part I find very compelling, is that normally in these government rulemaking processes, you have all these special interests weighing in during these common periods. And the average Joe in no way would be expected or would want to be able to follow this process. And as such, you don't really have anyone whose job it is to stand in for the public. And I think the best case scenario, a cost benefit analysis is one that takes this really technical and complicated process and sort of distills it into a basic question of saying, well, on the whole, does the public benefit? And it's a really common practice across a lot of different industries. But the building world has been sort of stubbornly resistant to it. And I think the easiest place to start with rehabbing maybe the ICC's reputation and rationalizing the process would be to start implementing a more rigorous version of cost benefit analysis within the process. Hire people whose job it is to perform these really rigorous analyses on newly proposed rules and ideally go back and study the ones you already have on the books too and see which are really delivering value and which aren't.

Paavo Monkkonen 30:03
Yeah, my dad was always really into a requirement for a six-point seatbelt in cars and also that every driver and passenger should be wearing a helmet like they do in the Formula One. So I think that would improve safety a lot. But it's this kind of thing where the public, you can imagine a public debate on that, that people would just say, no, I don't want to do that. It's too much work to put on my six-point seatbelt. But in this case, there's just no pushback. And so we're getting the equivalent in buildings. But maybe without the benefit.

Jesse Zwick 30:30
Yeah, I think that's kind of hidden from people, right? We make these trade-offs all the time between our convenience and safety and so many avenues of society and rulemaking. But I think they're kind of hidden within buildings and you just see it in these costs. But people aren't actually willfully deciding how much safety they want to consume versus other benefits they might get out of a building. They're just sort of being presented with one option and the process behind it is quite opaque.

Shane Phillips 30:56
So I think it makes tons of sense to have some kind of benefit-cost analysis. Even if you're a little uncomfortable with putting numbers to these things, it seems clearly better than just asserting that there is no cost and not doing any kind of analysis. So that seems like obviously a step forward. Beyond that, what else needs to change? The ICC is not alone in this, but it doesn't seem to do a very good job of revisiting old regulations as you talked about when new technologies or new approaches are developed so the code naturally gets more complicated and weighed down over time. Those kinds of cleanup revisions are, I guess, sort of analogous to the idea of refactoring computer code and we could probably pay more attention to them across a lot of different policy areas. So that seems like a maybe straightforward idea, if not an easy one to implement in practice. Stephen Smith has advocated for adopting EU standards for elevators. Is that something we should be doing for our building code more broadly?

Jesse Zwick 31:58
Yeah, I think in general when you talk to advocates and people with knowledge of this space who are kind of deep in the weeds of building code, they get kind of dreamy-eyed when we start to get to the way Europe does most of this. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. First is because they centralize the process at the national or even supranational level where these bodies actually have the resources available to really study these things in a rigorous fashion.

Shane Phillips 32:24
These are people who are hired and paid to develop the codes, not just operating as volunteers essentially.

Jesse Zwick 32:32
Yeah, I forgot to mention, and this is something that Stephen and I talked about for my paper, the ICC is a large body with over $100 million in revenues, but essentially their main function is putting on these all-volunteer conferences to establish the code. They're not rigorously sort of studying it in the same way that I think they often do at sort of the national and supranational level in Europe. And I think the second thing that people really tend to give credit to the European codes for is that they tend to be more performance-based and less prescriptive. They kind of start more with a standard around energy efficiency and are a little more flexible in allowing sort of multiple pathways to getting there. And that's another thing that's much easier said than done. There's been attempts at doing this in the ICC that have never really stuck, but the benefit I think is greater flexibility, more innovation, and the potential to drive down costs without sacrificing safety or any of the other goals that we're seeking within this process.

Shane Phillips 33:32
And thinking about if we were to have a national code that seems not really in the cards right now, I'm not sure we can expect much from our federal government. We could still call it an international code chain.

Paavo Monkkonen 33:44
We could still call it an international code chain,

Shane Phillips 33:46
Yes. Well, of course. That's fine. But just thinking about who would take responsibility for this. One thing I've been wondering is this something that California could really try to do? We among other states have passed a law around single-stair reform, I think really just mandating that it be studied and kind of move forward, but not changing the code directly. Whereas other states have just changed it directly. But is there a role for California or other individual states to develop this capacity more broadly for the entire code process and not just picking it one thing at a time as it becomes politically salient?

Jesse Zwick 34:28
I think so. There's multiple bites of the apple here where the ICC develops these model codes, but they're adopted at the state and local level. And as I mentioned, generally, it's a sort of rather unquestioning adoption process that doesn't have legislators weighing in very substantively. But that doesn't have to be the case. And I think increasingly, you're seeing legislators realize the importance of this due to the role of advocates. I know Steven, to me, somewhat goadingly said, these are laws. Isn't it weird that you're not the one weighing in and writing them? And essentially, it is. And I think you've started to see states look at this a little differently. I think Vermont initiated some sort of comprehensive process of looking at its entire code with an eye towards improving affordability. And I think California could certainly do something similar. And it wasn't that long ago, I think, that certain cities and states did write their own codes. And we could come back to that again. I'm sure it would be fraught with some of the same issues, but at least it might be subjected to a more transparent and democratic process that different interests, not just the building materials or labor unions or others, but actual interest groups that are looking to improve our housing affordability, its quality, its livability, could play a larger and more prominent role. And as you mentioned, we're studying this now in relation to our standards around egresses and single-stair at the state level. And I know there's a bill in the legislature this session, also from Chris Ward, I think, to look at whether or not we could look more broadly at building code standards for what's known colloquially as missing middle housing to do something that would make projects between three and 10 units more feasible and not treat a three-unit building essentially the same as we would treat a six- or seven-story mid-rise apartment building.

Paavo Monkkonen 36:17
Yeah. I'd be curious to hear your perspective as a local elected about a bit more on the politics of changing building codes. I mean, if you have any thoughts on that already, you haven't really done it yet in Santa Monica, but thinking about it. And whether there's influence from affordable development community, I mean, I think in Europe one of the things they have going for them on the politics of this is that social housing landlords have huge unions and lobbies and they're an important player in the real estate development world. And so, you know, the sympathy towards re-regulating codes right now is probably not high given what's happening at the national level with Doge and everything. So I think, you know, the politics of doing this must be complicated in a place like Santa Monica and, you know, getting the affordable developers to say they want it probably would be helpful.

Shane Phillips 37:03
Yeah. And just to tack onto that, something I was thinking, which I think fits here, which maybe you can respond to as well, Jesse, is just I wonder if the system we have is kind of bad, but a solution to the risk aversion of politicians and not wanting to be directly responsible for, you know, if they reject some four foot wider elevator standard and someone gets stuck in an elevator and dies by some fluke, even though those kinds of things are extremely rare. If all of this work is done by the International Code Council and we just kind of take their expertise and usually just approve what they recommend, then you have a level of remove that shields you from some some culpability or responsibility. How we get over that is a question I have.

Jesse Zwick 37:51
Yeah. These are all these are all good questions. And I think, you know, I wouldn't say that we're doing a great job now, so I guess it could always get worse if we were to change it. I would say that to the first question from Pavo, you know, we actually are now taking up the building code in Santa Monica in a few different ways. In addition to single stair, the biggest thing we're looking at is the state, sorry, is the city's high rise standard, which is oddly lower, as many municipalities decided, than the state does at 75 feet. A lot of cities, including Santa Monica, just decided that high rises are 55 feet. And this has implications for a lot of additional safety things that kind of kick in, requirements that kick in after you go above five stories. And you have seen a lot of projects, especially affordable development, stop at five stories, even when they could go up to six or seven, in part because of the way we define high rises in Santa Monica. I think in general, what I find so far is that the code process doesn't have nearly as much of the traditional political interests weighing this way or that. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why traditionally it was just sort of adopted without much fanfare. Now that housing advocates are getting interested in it and realizing its nexus to affordability, you are seeing people weigh in politically that typically would not have in the past. And we're rushing to make changes to our local code, both the high rise standard and our egress standards before the code freeze that the state has implemented on October 1st. So I guess we'll see how those politics play out locally. I would say that it involves a lot of collaboration with our building officials and fire officials and others who have been really great and collaborative. And I think you need that because what I agree with is that if you were to go politically to propose a change to this and your fire marshal or your building official or both came up and said, I don't think this is safe, I don't think you'd probably get a majority of people on the body to say, let's go for it anyway. So I think it really does have to be a collaborative process. As far as the broader thing about what role electives should play in this, I do believe that at the end of the day, building codes like all other laws have a lot of political dimensions to them. And to sort of pretend like that isn't embedded in the process now, I think is a fallacy. And I think it's better to daylight this as much as possible that we are making trade-offs. And as we talked about in the past, it's weird and kind of maybe makes us squeamish to choose between some desirable public goal like housing affordability in a scenario where there's perhaps a minuscule elevated risk of death in a building. But we do do it every day in countless arenas. We do it in air travel and in road design. We weigh trade-offs between speed and safety. We do it in medicine where we talk about the benefits of an intervention versus the chance of an adverse reaction. And I think we do need to realize that buildings aren't special in this regard and we need elected officials who are willing to do the tough job of weighing these trade-offs rather than just sort of punting on them to a supposed higher power that is removed from bias when in fact bias goes throughout the whole process no matter what level in which you work on these.

Paavo Monkkonen 41:02
Absolutely. And I mean, now that housing crisis has led to affordability being connected to premature death by people living on the streets, I mean, it's not a safety-free outcome on the other side either.

Shane Phillips 41:14
Yeah, 100%. That was something I wanted to underline as well, just the indirect effects on safety of if you're building less housing in a transit-oriented community in Santa Monica, that is probably having safety consequences for people who have to live somewhere where they're going to commute to work every day five times the distance and on a freeway going 80 miles an hour and living in a more polluted community. All these things that also affect safety and health and we just kind of, they get swept under the rug.

Jesse Zwick 41:42
Yeah, what I learned when studying this topic was that there are kind of a number of indirect costs that are commonly associated that aren't just the direct costs that building codes due to construction, but rather I think they're mainly grouped under income and stock effects. The first being that as the price of housing becomes more expensive, you will see people then because it's an essential good, either you'll see people who, as Pavo mentioned, can't afford it at all and that comes with the major health risks, or you'll see people who maybe have to substitute other essential things like food and medicine or things like that in order to pay for it. Or they'll just simply live further away and deal with decreases in opportunity or increases in driving and all the things you just mentioned. So those are some of the income effects, I guess. And then when it comes to the stock effects, you see an irony whereby the stricter you make the code, because we don't really apply the same standards, we don't apply the same standards at all to older buildings, you often see a disincentive to redevelop old buildings, which actually, because there are no standards for them, are often quite unsafe. There's lead, there's asbestos, there's other chemicals that we used to use that we don't use anymore. They're also really horribly energy inefficient. And paradoxically, sometimes there are these indirect effects as well on our building stock by which we're essentially incentivizing people to live in very old and very unsafe and very energy inefficient buildings by mandating that our new ones be so much exponentially more so.

Shane Phillips 43:10
All right, I think we're going to close it out there. This is a slightly shorter episode and we're going to stick to that. Jesse Zwick, thank you for joining us on the Housing Voice Podcast. This was great.

Jesse Zwick 43:21
Thanks so much for having me. I've been a faithful listener and it's exciting to get to be on the show.

Shane Phillips 43:31
You can find a link to Jesse's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Blue Sky @ShaneDPhillips and Paavo is @ElPaavo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

About the Guest Speaker(s)

Jesse Zwick

Jesse Zwick is the Southern California Director of the Housing Action Coalition and a city councilmember for the City of Santa Monica. He worked as a journalist in Washington, D.C. before returning home to write for film and television in Los Angeles. He helped found and lead SELAH, a neighborhood homeless services nonprofit, which inspired him to enter local politics, serving as Director of Communications to Los Angeles City Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin. He is currently pursuing his master's in urban and regional planning at UCLA.
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