[TulliusCicero]

The sheer amount of regulations is an incredibly tangled mess. For housing, for example, typically every city has its own standards, so your talking thousands of different sets of standards. They usually won't be all that different from the next city over, but nevertheless they're functionally separate, you can't directly change the whole state or country at once.

You can get state laws that push cities to change, of course, and the feds can incentivize change through requirements for funding/grants, but overall there's just a lot of momentum behind the existing web of regulation.

[aweiland]

Some of that is for good reason. Take for instance in North Carolina; a house built in the mountains in the west will have quite different standards from one built on the Outer Banks.

[TulliusCicero]

Yeah, some local standards are reasonable and necessary, but most are just about "character", not actual building standards to adopt to local geography or anything like that.