Complaints about regulations always ring hollow to me, because they always seem to imagine that regulations spring into being ex nihilo. Regulations are practically always written in response to something going wrong -- frequently, involving somebody ending up dead.
So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
That doesn't mean that the regulations were well designed, or even if they were, that the reasons remain the same. But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them, and they don't get into place lightly, either. So if you want a regulation removed, you need to figure out what caused it to be created in the first place. Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
> So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
Given that the rules are nominally in place to benefit occupants, I don't see where you're getting a conflict of interest. It's offering to suffer the alleged harm yourself in exchange for not having to pay significantly higher housing costs.
> But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them
The problem is that they're not. As you say they're often imposed following some fatality. But even if the new rule is ineffective garbage, it's unlikely to be traceable to any specific deaths. The way regulations kill people is much more indirect, e.g. by making housing more expensive so that people who can no longer afford it freeze to death on the streets, or die in car crashes because they have to live somewhere with a longer commute and the additional vehicle miles turned them into a statistic.
What that means is that there is a process for getting individual rules added in practice but no equivalent process for getting individual rules removed, so they accumulate over time.
> Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.
A huge part of the issue is that some problems don't have cost-effective solutions. If you can prevent one death every ten years by raising housing costs by $1/month, notice that in a city with a million homes you've just spent $120M to save one life. If the value of a statistical life is something like $10M, well, we just overpaid by >1000%. And we may not know of any way to prevent that death for the less than $0.10/month cost increase it would take to make it cost effective. (You also need to verify that the rule is actually effective and not just speculate that it might work when it might not.)
But local zoning boards are hardly doing that kind of cost benefit analysis every time they add a new rule to their thick book of rules, so consequently huge swathes of the existing rules come out on the wrong side of it.
And since nothing ever really gets people excited about any given individual minor regulatory inefficiency until they stack up to be killing thousands of people on net, fixing that problem characteristically comes in the form of a mass culling of existing rules.
So often it just seems callous: this regulation is inconveniencing me, so let's remove it. If that harms other people, that's their problem.
That doesn't mean that the regulations were well designed, or even if they were, that the reasons remain the same. But that's the point: regulations are removed by the same processes that create them, and they don't get into place lightly, either. So if you want a regulation removed, you need to figure out what caused it to be created in the first place. Only then can you create a better regulation that solves the problems that need to be solved.