Re: Not always joking, it seems

David Friedman <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> ... laws making new houses expensive might effectively segregate
> poorer people into older areas.

Here in Virginia, older neighborhoods tend to be more expensive.
Maybe that's because they're closer to transportation, employment,
shopping, etc., and maybe that's because older houses tend to be
better built.  New houses seem to be built mostly out of heavy-duty
cardboard tacked together with heavy-duty staples.

> In the U.S., another use of building code was to keep up employment
> in the relevant craft unions--requiring copper piping instead of
> plastic, for example, so as to maintain the demand for plumbers.

My understanding is that there's good reason for copper pipe
-- it fails gracefully, with pinhole leaks.  PVC pipe fails
catastrophically, causing floods that may destroy everything
in the house.

That's another advantage of older houses -- they were built with
copper pipe.  New ones around here are all built with PVC pipe.
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
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