Building Poverty, One Rule at a Time

Time for another installment of the History of the Poor!

Poverty, or poorhood, is usually thought of as a state of moneylessness. But it can also be a poverty of options, or a combination of the two.

For example, suppose the guy down the street is doing some renovations to his house and he's clearing out a lot of paneling. I can buy his paneling because he'd rather sell cheap than have to pay the dump to take it. Now I go to a vacant lot, let's say to some little clearing on the public property side of Beacon Hill or wherever, and nail my panels together to build a shack. Voilà! I have a house! I'm a house owner! Pretty soon, I'm thinking about equity, add-ons, subdividing for rentals, and voting Republican.

Two factors work against this plan. For one, "public property" doesn't mean "property for public use." This point is being made repeatedly by the Nickels Administration, as it goes about destroying anything from shacks to sleeping bags found on public property. Whereas "private property" means property the owner (the private person) can use, "public property" means property the owner (the public) can't use. In fact, the city is currently operating under the principle that the public has no inherent right to use any public property, including streets and sidewalks.

We'll talk more about that factor some other time. Today, I want to talk about the other factor: Even if I had the right to use the land, the government wouldn't let me build the shack, because it would violate building codes.

It turns out that building codes have been with us for thousands of years, but it's only been in the last 150 years that they've gotten so stringent that they have prevented poor people from housing themselves. Let's review the history.

The earliest known building codes date back to Hammurabi. The Building Code of Hammurabi, as it's called, required no permits and never prevented any building. All the rules did was provide for penalties in the event that a building was found to be substandard after the fact. So a typical building rule goes: "If a building collapses and kills its owner, the builder of the building shall be put to death; but if the collapsed building only kills a slave of the owner, then a slave of the builder shall be put to death."

At the time of Jesus, building a house on a foundation of sand was considered foolish but was not illegal.

It wasn't until the 19th Century that building codes as we know them took off. Many of these laws were promoted by progressives. For example, as cities became crowded, poor factory workers were so desperate for housing they'd pay to live ten or more stories up. Progressives called for height restrictions on apartments, so renters wouldn't collapse from exhaustion getting to their rooms.

Beginning in 1871, there was a long string of Great [Insert City Name Here] Fires. At first made possible by too many wooden buildings too close together, later Great Fires were blamed on bad wiring. To protect us all from being burnt crispy, governments restricted materials and density, and set workmanship standards.

Today's building codes would prohibit the rebuilding for residential use of most of the structures that our ancestors commonly lived in from the Stone Age until sometime last century.

These codes have a life of their own. Every year some genius creates a design for cheap prefab housing that could be used to house all the homeless people in the world. That genius then finds out that about the only places on this planet where his brilliant unconventional designs don't violate building codes are at the ocean floor in international waters. Waivers don't happen because the construction industry protests.

For our own safety's sake governments take housing options away, create homelessness, and put people in danger.

Usually, when someone breaks something, even out of good intentions, we expect them to fix it.