If you live in California I can assure you beyond any doubt that people from some far-away place have had outrageous levels of influence on your local housing policy. Almost the entire body of CEQA jurisprudence has been developed by two lawyers and a handful of labor union executives.

If your local building code requires an elevator that can accommodate a hospital stretcher, which is almost certainly does, that was jotted down in the building code by literally one guy from Glendale, Arizona, on the basis of a whim.

My county eliminated code compliance checks (and building plan review) 2 decades ago for owner-builders and it's made things so much cheaper and easier to build. It is the only way I was able to afford a house.

We were warned by nay-sayers the county would burn down but that never came to fruition and meanwhile I've seen so many code-Nazi places in California burn down from wildfires.

It's hilarious watching the systematic destruction of the counter points when people tell me about the horrors

(1) "You wouldn't want to live in such a house, it would burn down." I already do, and have been.

(2) Your neighborhood would catch fire. I live in such a neighborhood, it didn't.

(3) Just wait long enough! It will happen eventually. Eventually you'll have bad luck! This has been going on for 20+ years.