The High Price of Fine Print

In the parable of the blind men and the elephant, a group of men who cannot see try to piece together the true nature of the pachyderm, each touching a different part of the animal’s body and confidently extrapolating from there. One man touches the tusk and says the elephant is a pole; another touches the tail and says an elephant is a rope; a third touches the leg and says the elephant is a column.

Something similar is happening with the nation’s ever-expanding affordable housing crisis, which has become a top political issue even in traditionally affordable Sun Belt sprawl towns like Charlotte and Houston. To say nothing of New York City, where the vacancy rate is 1.4% and apartment hunting is a blood sport. The median age of the first-time American homebuyer has shot up to 38 — from 31 a decade ago.

What’s to blame? The YIMBYs say it’s the zoning; the Wall Streeters say it’s the financing; the leftists say it’s the landlords. Others focus on the high cost of land or permitting delays or insurance rates or the “everything bagel problem” of political priorities like wage requirements and low-carbon design layered on every new project.

Indeed, all those features contribute to housing’s cost and scarcity. But there’s another significant, underappreciated driver of costs that deserves scrutiny, especially in a heavily regulated city like New York: building codes. New York City has its own special Building Code, and while it contains some improvements over national norms, it adds other provisions that make it even more expensive to build here.

Building codes are the complex set of documents and standards that govern how workers can put a structure together, from the strength of the concrete to the shape of the pipe beneath a toilet. There are codes for single-family homes, ventilation systems, swimming pool installation and construction in fire-prone areas. Local officials examine drawings and construction projects for compliance. Most U.S. cities place multistory buildings under a version of the International Building Code (IBC), which, notwithstanding the name, is a mostly American institution. There’s value in standardizing the rules rather than having every jurisdiction across America craft its own elaborate requirements. But a growing chorus of critics says the International Building Code, a so-called “model” document that is revised every three years at stakeholder conferences and then adopted by local jurisdictions, is antiurban and insensitive to cost.

As I wrote in Slate in February, pressure is mounting from all sides to overhaul these design guidelines. Some downtown boosters would like to change local rules to ease the way for office-to-residential conversions, where large floor plates are often incompatible with residential light and air requirements. Staring down the rebuilding challenge after the Los Angeles fires, California has frozen new energy-efficiency updates from the IBC until 2031 (these updates are also a routine gripe in red states). And companies building modular construction, heralded by some as the future of cost-effective housing development, are having trouble adapting their innovations for patchwork inspection standards.

These advocates may be on to something. A building industry study claims that 11% of total development costs since 2012 can be attributed to increasingly restrictive code changes. Mike Eriksen, a professor of economics at Purdue University who is studying the Code’s effect on safety and cost, explained that codemakers rarely undertake cost-benefit analyses of their impacts on construction: “I’m worried we’re building a world that’s too expensive to live in.”

Reformers have seized on an observation by the Seattle architect Michael Eliason, who, over the past five years, has drawn attention to the problem of the International Building Code’s two-stair rule. In plain English, every apartment in a building of four stories or more is required to be accessible from two separate stairways, ostensibly for fire safety reasons. The resulting layouts, with long rows of apartments branched off windowless hallways (think Danny riding his tricycle in “The Shining”), create apartments that have only one exposure and no cross ventilation. Large areas of interior space are wasted on hallways. On small lots where there’s no room for two stairways and a corridor, three stories becomes a hard limit.

More than 10 states (and a few cities) have passed their own “single-stair” legislation over the past three years, hoping to enable the kind of design-efficient, low-cost, small-lot apartments that flourish in places like Switzerland, where building codes are more friendly to urban growth. The reforms are too recent to have generated a meaningful sample size, but the results in cities that do permit single-stair buildings are promising.

Here, New York City is an American outlier in a good way. Since New York has long allowed buildings of six stories with one staircase, it made a good place to study the risks of having only one way out of a burning apartment. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts study released earlier this year, there was no correlation between fire deaths and single-stair buildings over a 12-year period in New York.

“There has been so much interest from policymakers,” Alex Horowitz, the director of Pew’s Housing Policy Initiative, told me. “The one question holding back authorizing single-stair construction to help make a dent in the housing shortage has been about fire safety. That’s why we wanted to do empirical work here, and we found that there’s no trade-off with safety.”

The City’s single-stair carveout is both a feature and a bug, the result of a strain of New York exceptionalism that led the City to resist the ongoing march of model codes, whose standardization otherwise appeals to manufacturers, architects and engineers. For decades, the City and State led the way on mandating their own design standards. The first City building code was adopted in 1850; the State followed with the famous Tenement House reforms that required basic amenities like fire escapes, courtyards, windows and toilets. The competition between safety and cost was often explicit: Early building code reformers hoped their requirements would crowd slum housing out of the market.

For the latter third of the 20th century, New York City built under its own 1968 code, even as most other cities adopted one of the other model codes gaining in popularity. By the turn of the millennium, the vast majority of cities outside of New York had adopted the IBC; meanwhile, the bespoke 700-page rule book dictating the rules for construction in the five boroughs was causing problems. Not only did New York have different rules from the rest of the country, but the code on its own terms was described by a mayoral reform commission as “cumbersome” and “convoluted.” “It has also become increasingly difficult for design professionals to accurately and consistently interpret code provisions,” the commission’s report read. “Ultimately, these difficulties have led to confusion, inconsistent interpretations and delays.” The flourishing business of “expediters” to help architects and developers navigate this labyrinthine process, combined with a series of Department of Buildings corruption scandals, helped make the case for the City to switch to the IBC, which it ultimately did — kind of — in 2007.

Why “kind of”? The City still wasn’t willing to live by the same rules as the rest of the country, deeming itself too dense and too different to use a model code straight off the rack. The result is that today, the City uses a heavily modified version of the IBC, different from the national model in two ways: It is more geared toward urban density, and it has more union-backed provisions. That leaves us with rules that are simpler than before, but still with their fair share of complexity. Relatedly, we still have those expediters.

Some of the City’s departures from the IBC are good, some are bad, and many are in the eye of the beholder. 

The good? In addition to permitting six-story buildings with one staircase, the New York Building Code also allows “scissor stairs” — an interlocking double staircase that takes up less room than two separate staircases. Because New York has so many high-rise buildings, the City also has special rules for standpipes and diesel generators in case of fires or blackouts. These don’t make building cheaper but do promote safety in a city with a skyline like this one.

Other provisions are more complicated to evaluate. Recognizing the potential for an urban conflagration, the State prohibits New York City from building the wood-framed “five-over-ones” that have become the dominant typology in many American cities. This anti-wood policy also discourages the use of mass timber — wood is prohibited on a building’s exterior, which means that any mass-timber construction would have to be dressed up to disguise its structural ingenuity.

And some are simply concessions to interest groups, especially building trades unions. New York requires a quarter-inch metal-bar lattice for office drop-ceilings, where the IBC allows thin wires. These only-in-New-York systems are robust and pricey, and it’s not clear whether the rest of the country’s office drones have a problem with ceilings collapsing on their cubicles.

New York’s Code (along with those of several other big cities) still has restrictive rules limiting the use of plastic PVC and PEX pipes in plumbing, which are easier to install than the metal pipes favored by plumbers’ unions. (When Philadelphia decided to permit plastic pipes in high-rise construction, a building industry consultant told PlanPhilly, “A common saying in the industry is that it takes 10 men to carry one length of cast iron pipe, but only one man to carry 10 lengths of PVC pipe.”) “The result,” Brian McDonough, a mechanical, electrical and plumbing consultant, told me, “is a reliance on more expensive materials like cast iron and copper, which significantly increases installation costs and ultimately contributes to higher housing costs, without clear evidence of improved system performance or safety.” While these larger, more expensive pipes once made some sense, they are bigger than strictly necessary for today’s buildings — the Code has not rightsized dimension requirements to accommodate modern low-flow fixtures.

Builders indulge New York’s eccentricities because the market is so large: It can support a whole ecosystem of architects and engineers who understand its special requirements. “It would be grand if the whole country had the same building code,” said the architect and real estate lawyer James P. Colgate, a former assistant commissioner at the Department of Buildings, “But New York City can have its own code — it’s bigger than some countries — and have thriving industries within it.”

While the City has sometimes influenced national building practices — glow-in-the-dark stairway markings became IBC policy following a post-9/11 task force — the City mostly lets the IBC do its business, knowing it can make changes later. “As a result, New Yorkers don’t really participate in the national process as much as I’d like,” argued Stephen Smith, founder of the code advocacy think tank the Center for Building in North America.

Not all building practices are rooted in the Building Code per se. In New York City, for example, the Code is supplemented by a number of code-adjacent local laws. One law requires those little floor plan maps to be placed by all elevators; another mandates much of the scaffolding that supplies the city with its very own sidewalk arcade. The City has banned gas hookups in new construction. Most controversially, the New York City Council passed Local Law 97 in 2019, which requires dramatic reductions in carbon emissions for all (existing) buildings over 50,000 square feet. It’s a massive expense for the city’s aging housing stock — there’s currently no efficient way to electrify a steam heating system.

But those big-ticket policies are not typical of the inefficiencies and outdated rules that pervade the codes in New York City and elsewhere. In most cases, it is much harder to tease out both the logic behind the rule (which may have been established decades ago, with no documentation) and the cost of implementing it (often less than 1% of total construction cost).

It’s only in the aggregate that these requirements create a meaningful divergence from our low-cost, high-design neighbors abroad. “There is no silver bullet,” said Smith. “The problem needs to be constantly hacked away at.”