Shining a Light on the Black Box of Building Codes
Modern building codes are designed to ensure the safety and comfort of the residents of new buildings. By regulating issues such as building materials, fire safety, stairway design, and other common building elements, building codes help make sure that our homes and businesses can be productively occupied for many years without the threat of catastrophic failure, loss, or human injury.
But new research from UCLA has found that, in several specific cases, sections of the building code – which is written and updated by the International Code Council (ICC) – are either outdated, or are not grounded in sound building science. The result: Buildings that are both more costly to build and give builders less flexibility in the use of modern technologies and techniques.
In Cracking the Code: Reclaiming Building Standards for Public Interest, Jesse Zwick, a graduate student at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, examines how portions of the U.S. building code development process have been distorted to produce regulations that raise housing costs and stifle innovation in the sector.
Key Takeaways:
- No rigorous analysis: U.S. building codes lack rigorous cost-benefit analysis, often implementing mandates without quantifying lives saved, contributing to a framework in which mid-rise construction costs average 55% more per square foot than single-family homes.
- Industry and government capture: The ICC’s voting rules favor small towns and their committees, overrepresenting industry incumbents. Code officials, accountable for safety lapses but not for cost increases, tend to reinforce this tilt—so standards accumulate but rarely recede.
- Safety costs of higher costs: Stricter codes make new construction more expensive, slowing housing production and keeping more people in older, less safe buildings. Even minimally compliant new housing would far outperform the aging stock it could replace.
Zwick synthesizes existing academic research, investigative journalism, and original interviews with fire protection engineers, code consultants, city officials, and housing policy advocates to build a case study of the ICC’s institutional structure and incentives. By examining the organization’s revenue model, committee selection process, voting rules, and relationships with trade groups, Zwick traces how procedural design choices produce outcomes that favor narrow interests over the broader public.
The research identifies three primary areas where current building standards fail the public interest:
How costs compound. U.S. building codes respond to events rather than apply scientific first principles, creating a system in which rules accumulate but are never removed. This allows mandates to pass with little cost scrutiny—a fire marshal’s requirement for oversized elevators, for instance, was adopted with the cost impact reported as “none.” In reality, such rules help explain why a basic four-stop elevator in New York City costs about $158,000, compared to $36,000 in Switzerland.
U.S. codes also draw hard, expensive lines between low- and high-density construction not found abroad, helping drive mid-rise buildings to cost 55% more per square foot than single-family homes—a gap that other high-income countries don’t see. And the costs aren’t only financial: dual-staircase and corridor requirements force buildings to devote more space to circulation and less to living, reducing natural light and ventilation.
Who controls the process. The ICC’s committee selection is a “proverbial black box replete with industry influence”—a side agreement guarantees homebuilders four of eleven seats on residential code panels, while voting rules overweight jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 people, biasing outcomes against the housing needs of urban areas. The structure further ensures that incumbent industries, such as concrete suppliers and plumbers’ unions, can stall innovations like mass timber and cheaper piping.
But the industry captures only half. Code officials who vote at the ICC are rarely trained as engineers, lack budgets to independently test standards, and face career risk for safety lapses, but none for driving up costs. Some vote for stricter rules at the ICC that they know their own cities would reject, using the process to “insulate themselves” from local pressure.
What the process ignores. Researchers estimate that a code change raising costs by just $150 produces 2 to 60 premature fatalities annually through indirect effects alone—households with less to spend on food, healthcare, and heating, combined with delayed replacement of older, less safe buildings. These costs fall hardest on renters and low-income households, who must sacrifice other spending or move to cheaper, lower-resource neighborhoods.
The paper proposes several reforms:
- requiring the ICC and adopting agencies to integrate cost-benefit analysis into every proposed amendment;
- distinguishing true minimum safety standards from aspirational provisions that could be voluntary;
- adopting performance-based standards modeled on the Eurocodes that mandate outcomes rather than prescribe materials; and
- conditioning federal housing assistance on uniform national standards to reduce the patchwork of 20,000-plus local jurisdictions.
Housing advocates aren’t the first to challenge this system—the ADA itself followed decades of failed efforts within the code process. Meaningful reform may require going around the ICC rather than through it.