Housing Standards need to be revised

No, not ALL housing standards are intentionally racist, classist modern red lining in disguise. But it only takes one asshole not admitting his real goal saying "We should add x, y AND z for health and safety reasons." to jack up the price out of reach of most people of color and most poor people. And then it's enshrined in local building codes for probably all eternity. 

If you are in the USA and your building codes are over five minutes old, probably someone somewhere along the way did that, possibly intentionally or possibly because human beings tend to assume "If it works for ME, it's a generally good idea." If you want to not assume the worst about all White Americans -- if only to not unnecessarily offend the people in charge -- the way to bet is they didn't realize it contained perverse incentives promoting certain problems. 

My sister in Georgia was robbed some years ago. Someone broke into her house and stole a bunch of easily pawned small stuff. 

She noted that the emergency benefits for victims of hurricane Katrina ran out that same week and surmised it wasn't wild coincidence. The reason you shouldn't shaft certain groups consistently is because if there's no way to get a fair shake or no legitimate means to meet their needs, when push comes to shove, people will commit crimes to survive. 

And it's often a case of in for a penny, in for a pound.  It's psychologically and emotionally easier to do something slightly worse once you've done it once, plus now you can be squeezed by someone.

Fire coverage 

If you have a fire department at all, fire coverage should be provided for everyone in the community without charge. 

In counties or unincorporated communities that have trouble affording a fire department, they sometimes charge membership dues for fire coverage. If you don't pay your dues, the fire truck and personnel show up and WATCH your house burn down.

They aren't there to help you. They are there to stop it from spreading past the border of your property so as to protect other people. 

If you are living in the county instead of within city limits and not paying your fire coverage, you're probably poor. And as a sick burn, your more well-heeled neighbors will gather round and WATCH it burn to the ground, paying the salary and vehicle costs involved but not the water. 

I don't have stats, but as a guess, this policy probably costs them money because by the time they bother to turn on the hoses, the fire has grown and spread. It's probably an expensive policy for the fire department and for the community because they probably see higher rates of property damage in the community. 

If you have trouble covering the cost of having a fire department, I strongly recommend you find some other answer than "Membership dues and we show up to WATCH your house burn down if you don't pay them."

Fire Prevention 

One purpose of the fire department is fire prevention. It's also a purpose of building codes and sometimes other laws.

I loathe fireworks. If you want fewer fires, outlaw them and educate people about Christmas tree fires, which tend to be deadlier and do more property damage than other fires.

I'm not a fan of Christmas. In the US, the "most Christmasy" places aren't the places where homeless people are gifted houses for Christmas. It's where wealthy neighborhoods go nuts with excessive Christmas light displays, spending electricity and growing their carbon footprint pointlessly.

Additionally, people who do insane levels of Christmas decorations accumulate them over the course of multiple years and store them for 10 or 11 months of the year while they grow mold and mildew. Then we act like everyone being sick during the holiday season is because of cold weather.

I wish I could convince people to stop the insanity and find other ways to celebrate the holidays. 

If you want to go over your building codes and try to improve them, fire safety absolutely matters but maybe we need to rethink what that means because I see too much emphasis on things like requiring fire alarms while thinking it's not reasonable to outlaw excess Christmas decorations.

Building codes should focus on preventing fire, not notifying everyone you're about to die after it inevitably starts burning because #priorities. 

After the Great Fire of London, they outlawed things like highly flammable tar paper and thatched rooves within city limits. You can still have a traditional thatched roof in England, but not within city limits because it's a great way to spread fire.

I'm not a fan of carpeting or upholstered furniture either. I have a serious medical condition and they aren't clean enough for my needs.

They are also highly flammable. I don't care how much toxic flame retardant you douse them in, not having them will prevent fire or slow its spread better than poisoning the residents with gallons of chemicals in the production process. 

When I lived in a hundred year old SRO, other residents used their small rooms like giant walk in closets full of mountains of clothes and a TV etc. that they slept in. The building had no air conditioning and was in the Pacific Northwest which has mild summers and when it was built, people owned less. 

Everyone else was too hot in summer because their rooms were too full of crap. We were the only people in the building with three adults in the smallest room in the building and we were able to keep our room cool enough most of the time because we owned a lot less.

Modern Americans treat their homes like a warehouse for their possessions and we suffer North American Affluenza and it promotes disease and other health and safety issues, including being a fire hazard. 

Kitchens 

In my opinion, what we require for kitchens in the USA is a huge problem. 

Kitchens have a lot of built ins and it's the most expensive room in most homes to build or renovate and it's designed for a nuclear family with a full-time mom cooking for a family of four or more people. 

It's a huge waste of resources and a giant burden on the American people. It's completely ridiculous that a standard kitchen includes a giant fridge, four burners, a huge oven and possibly a built-in microwave plus many square feet of cabinets and other storage.

Cabinets can be 60 percent of the cost of a kitchen and in many cases you can't say "Thanks but no thanks. I really just want a few shelves."

I lived in Germany where most kitchens have a fridge the size of dorm room or hotel refrigerators in the US. My aunt with nine kids had a fridge like that.

One woman in an article I read joked she didn't want a kitchen at all, just a phone to order delivery. When I read a standard feature for a time in one shelter magazine profiling the kitchens of professional chefs, they almost all had tiny kitchens with a breakfast nook with only four chairs.

They cooked breakfast for themselves and their mother or something like that. One of them explicitly said "If I'm having a party with more than four people, I will do it at my restaurant."

Professional chefs with high-end, drool-worthy kitchen gadgets doing cool things for breakfast daily have smaller kitchens on average than most American homes. Families have shrunk and most people today are ordering takeout or delivery or participating in a meal kit service of some sort because the reality is most families no longer have a full-time wife and mom cooking for four or more people. 

The number of households with one to three members has skyrocketed while accommodation like boarding houses or SROs have largely disappeared. 

Those were situations where you rented a room and either had a private bath or just a sink and shared a bathroom down the hall and probably had no kitchen at all.

Rural electrification happened across America about a hundred years ago. When the SRO I lived in was built, most Americans lived in the country and typically had no electricity. 

Boarding houses typically served breakfast and dinner. You arranged your own lunch. 

If you are a wealthy upper class family and want to help out poor relatives, you can buy ir build a house with a mother-in-law suite or add one to your house. This is typically a bedroom and bathroom and no kitchen.

The assumption is she has access to the family kitchen but in practice, she may have a dorm style fridge and a microwave or get meals delivered and seldom eat with the family. 

It's an end run around building codes requiring apartments to have full service kitchens even in cases where only one person lives there.

Japanese kitchens rarely have ovens. They may have a built in wok where they cook everything and if they want baked goods, they purchase them from a bakery.

It's insane for Americans to be told "Pay the price involved for a full service kitchen most households don't actually need or be homeles" which is essentially one of the things we are doing in the US.