Population and Housing

[plam]

Here's an educational and possibly counter-intuitive study about the risks of fire in housing types over the years.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-anal...protection

I feel like the fire safety story is one of those unspoken ways that unrelated things, like the Fire Department's opinions, can control our housing policy in un-scientific ways.

Thanks! Two comments on that.

1. North American fire departments seem to think that they need super large trucks and so they have impacts on road design. This does not seem to be true in other places. (NZ fire trucks are also pretty big, but they do manage in places with narrow streets like Wellington, although they don't have enough ladder trucks at the moment).

2. This study is probably true of the US, where there has been a functional government until recently. It may be less true of the UK, for instance, where they have had a Conservative government for far too long, and the fire safety standards were broken, resulting in e.g. the 72 avoidable fatalities from the Grenfell Tower fire. I don't know that I would trust the US government to be competent going forward.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/4/...iry-blamed

‘Decades of failure’: Who has UK’s Grenfell Tower fire inquiry blamed?

‘Unscrupulous’ manufacturers of dangerous materials, ‘dishonesty and greed’ and regulatory failure all caused the disaster.

...

Ed Daffarn, another of the survivors of the fire, blamed the culture of deregulation spearheaded by the previous Conservative government for the disaster.