I am an architect, its not the local building codes that are the issue. the EPA, which has no knowledge about buildings, have inserted themselves multiple times recently, but they aren't the only fed to get involved.
-Obama's Clean Water Act, both reduced the amount of buildable land, by arbitrarily changing what counts as a water way. but also drastically increased the "protections" for water ways. some made sense and were needed, but most have just been tossed out there to say they changing something.
-the EPAs treatment to anything natural gas related, not just bans, but additional standards and components. again some make sense but then others don't.
-the change in the refrigerant used. they banned the old stuff, and the new one is considered flammable. yeah they are requiring flammable refrigerant. the industry reached out to them about how unsafe it was, and the EPA just straight up ignored us. it was better for homes to burn down than for there to be a .5 difference in GWP available. for about 2 years there was only 1 way to safely handle that new refrigerant. build a fire rated chase for each refrigerant line. hecking expensive and labor intensive, plus the added danger of working with a flammable liquid. thankfully the industry eventually figured out ways to handle the flammable liquid without a chase, but its essentially doubling the cost of each AC system. *also there is a good bit of corruption when it came to the selection of that flammable refrigerant but I will leave that to a different rant*
-most of the red tape increasing cost have been on the manufacturer side, while doing little to nothing to make a better end product.
-another energy saving one has been the requirement for a digital disconnect switch on building transformers over a certain size. disconnects aren't bad, in fact there is already a physical disconnect required for the same amperage. but the government thinks it will save energy to add a digital disconnect after the physical one. when just added a component, that can fail, requires maintenance, adds another point for the system to get hacked, and its completely pointless. the physical switch creates a literal physical break in the electrical connections so that electricity can't flow. this new digital switch is just a little chip telling the electricity if it can flow or not via some regulating piece that doesn't actually create a physical disconnect. it doesn't take an electrical engineering degree to figure out what is wrong there.
typically the building code changes that cost the most money are driven by the fed government. yeah an independent agency creates the building codes, but they are responding to requirements set by non-elected bureaucrats.
