At least in the US, zoning and construction ordinances are incredible barriers to innovation and are part of the reason why the real estate market is out of control. These were systems put in place decades ago, often due to class warfare to keep the "riff-raff" out of desirable neighborhoods, that punish innovation and progress towards sustainable and affordable housing.
I cannot help but feel like a lot of the problems in the over-regulation of construction and real estate is due to public ignorance and apathy. If people cared more about how well built their homes were, we would not have needed tremendous government regulation to force builders to build safe houses. My father works construction and between the UCC being dozens of chapters long and every municipality having its own grandfathered in or exceptional bullshit make breaking ground a minefield of bureaucratic nightmare.
In hindsight, I wish we could have produced third party unaffiliated review boards for new construction so that builders could get their blueprints and finish products certified. We could have had an industry of competitive certification processes directed towards homebuilding, and the most trustworthy and reliable certifications would have gained name recognition builders would desire for well built property. Then we could avoid this entire trainwreck of bureaucracy, but understandably volunteer certification doesn't help the poverty stricken when being offered a "cannot be beat" deal on a derelict unsafe house, which is the root problem in all this. It is just generally a mess and as someone coming from a software background who has a father in construction to hear all the disasters from, wish there were a more obvious solution other than "try deregulating and hope you don't get the poor killed or screwed over in the process".
> due to class warfare to keep the "riff-raff" out of desirable neighborhoods
Actually, the exact opposite is the case: US zoning laws were created by the 1910s/1920s era "progressive" movement as a leftist social improvement project. The goal was to legally require that poor people would thenceforth all live in such conditions as the (mostly bourgeois) progressives deemed correct and "proper" according to middle class mores of the day, by making other conditions illegal.
I wonder if this is a North American thing. I noticed in Sweden and the Netherlands the newly-built houses tend to have a more "solid feel" and sensible arrangements. Though I can't speak for their structural integrity since I'm no expert. They also seems to be less attached to faux-period styles and more readily embrace contemporary designs.
It is probably very American. A lot of zoning regulation emerged from racist white flight ideology where, as the middle class white families fled urban settings, they pushed new suburban townships and urban sprawl they caused to adopt extremely tight building regulations to push the cost of construction so high the "inferior" races couldn't afford to tarnish their beautiful communities.
And this isn't some long ago historical thing. This was the 50s and 60s.
