Regional Building Codes Formulated and Enforced by the Federal Bureau of StandardsAuthor(s): Robert SoloSource: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 1981), pp. 173-175Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4225004 .

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JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES JW Vol. XV No. 1 March 1981

Policy Options

Regional Building Codes Formulated and Enforced by the

Federal Bureau of Standards

To accomplish its task of developing and promoting the use of solar heating in home and commercial construction, the Department of Energy has chosen the scatter grant approach. It invites proposals and passes out the cash to selected proposers-institutes, academics, architects, builders, industrial corporations, as the case may be-in the hope that grantees either will devise new technologies or, by demonstrating their value in use, encourage private owners or builders to use established technologies. This scatter grant approach has been used repeatedly and, so far as I can tell, has never succeeded either in generating significant technological advance or significantly accelerating the pace of innovation. It will be recalled that when George Romney became the first secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he instituted a scatter grant program with the important objective of introducing modern systems building and other technological advances into home and com- mercial construction, with the promise of revolutionizing that laggard in- dustry. It was a revolution that never came, nor had the program any visible impact on technology and productivity.

Possibly the Department of Energy's program will at least appear to help a spontaneous movement in the private sector that, under pressure of higher energy costs, seals up the cracks, insulates attics and walls, buys solar collectors, and otherwise seeks means of reducing the consumption of purchased fuel. Yet, the same formidable barriers, the same hedgehog

173

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174 Policy Options

resistance to any significant transformation of that cluster of technologies in an industry of fragmented home-grown contractors and builders, of unsophisticated and risk-fearful home buyers, of traditional handed-down skills institutionalized in work rules and perpetuated through craft union- ism, of architects who are quasi-artists trained in design but not technol- ogy, of building codes that break the industry into localized protectorates, will remain.

If the existing potentials for conservation and solar-based building are ever to be achieved, if the cycle of solar technologies being not economic until mass produced, and not mass produced until economic is ever to be broken, it will have to be through establishing a locus of responsibility and motivation, coupled with competence and power, which does not now exist. In fact, such a locus of public responsibility, competence, and power could be brought quickly into existence (the institutional apparatus is already in place). Building codes should, at long last, be made a federal responsibility, with their design a federal function, under federal enforce- ment and control. The locus of responsibility for the design and enforce- ment of these codes, and for the development and testing of relevant tech- nologies, would be the Bureau of Standards, an agency with a long tradi- tion of service and a high level of research and development competence.

An integral code-making system does not preclude inputs from a di- versity of interests. Given a powerful research and development backup and regional laboratories, regional codes would be formulated presumably in rational relation to climatic and other significant variables. There could then, and for the first time, be a systematic evaluation and a rapid in- corporation of change in specification from the vast variety of (consen- sual) trade standards and, more significantly, an evaluation and accommo- dation of codes to emerging new technologies. The building codes then could be no longer merely protective but the spearheads of innovation. Solar installations and solar building in appropriate regions could be re- quired within a range of standard specifications. Industry would be simul- taneously offered a set of developed and tested technologies and the mass market for their low cost disposition.

What is suggested here is not a replacement of liberty with coercion. The coercion exists. The codes exist, and no one denies their necessity. And houses will be built under one code or another. What is suggested is a rationalization of that system of coercion, so that it will for the first time have research and development behind it; so that there might exist the possibility of systematic evolution and rapid accommodation to new tech- nological potentials; and so that the codes, rather than being a barrier to

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Policy Options 175

innovation and development as they inevitably have been hitherto, could become a spearhead of innovation and, in this instance, an instrument for organized and rational response to pending disaster.

Robert Solo

The author is Professor of Economics, Michigan State University, East Lansing.

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