Home builders have used their political muscle to prevent states and cities from adopting the latest code, which would lower the climate impact of new houses
“A federal study found that North Carolina’s proposed code update would have added at most about $6,500 to the price of a newly built home, not $20,400. According to the analysis, these changes would have paid for themselves through lower power bills…”
I feel like if you’re buying a NEW house, and $6500 extra is too much, you shouldn’t be buying a house…
What’s important here is that the lower bills would have paid for the higher mortgage. But this wouldn’t benefit the homebuilders, so they fought it
If we’re building efficient homes, can we at least put ethernet ports in every room? I’m tired of having to essentially run conduit about the house.
Yes, if you have a house built, you can certainly ask for that to be included. That basically goes for anything you can afford to have added to your new house. But this is generally off-topic.
Yeah the home builders fighting these building codes don’t actually seem to care about “affordability.” With mortgages spreading out the cost of buying a home over several decades the tiny increase in cost is way more than offset by the energy savings. If I were to buy a new construction home I would expect it to be the most efficient home on the market… You can get an older home for less and then make the energy upgrades yourself otherwise
Developers have and always will be parasites. They swoop in, swoon cities to get sweet deals and tax write-offs, rezoning, whatever. Then they short term profit, cash out and run. I’ve seen so many homes over the years with random design flaws, entire neighborhoods with design flaws. Developers are long gone and the homeowners get stuck with the bill.
They play the same game as oil drillers. Form an LLC, fly in, shit all over the place, dissolve the LLC, and leave a mess behind. Laws around development of any kind should be structured so they can’t cut and run, but since the rich write the narrative, they’ll keep getting away with it, with occasional feel-good fines to make it look like the system works.