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Historic Building Codes - A Call for Education
In recent
weeks, City-Works has worked in conjunction with the Downtown Development
District and French Quarter neighborhood organizations on the
implementation of an important UNOP recommendation, which was to create a
building code for existing and historic buildings that mirrors the
progressive New Jersey building sub-code. Such a code would hold historic
buildings in New Orleans to a standard that takes into account, and gives
credit for, inherent strengths of an older building's structure rather
than having to be retrofitted to comply with new building standards,
which is often a cost prohibitive barrier to rehabbing older structures.
City-Works researched and interviewed jurisdictions outside Louisiana,
including New Jersey, South Carolina and North Carolina, to see how they
address the issues of rehabbing older buildings. We determined that we
have many of the tools needed in our current building codes that are in
the New Jersey sub-code.
When Louisiana adopted the
International Code Council (ICC) set of codes in 2005 after Hurricane
Katrina (the IBC, IRC and others), included was the International
Existing Building Code (IEBC). Nationwide, adoption of the IEBC has taken
the place of states creating their own codes. Since the IEBC was drafted
and adopted in 2003, no state has undertaken an effort to rewrite its
existing building code. City-Works found that, although not as aggressive
as the New Jersey sub-code, the IEBC offers the same principles of equivalency
and a sliding scale of code compliance that were so praised in the New
Jersey code.
Certainly amendments will be needed to
make the IEBC work for New Orleans, but the tools are there for the
rehabilitation of existing buildings without having to create a whole new
set of codes. What is desperately needed, however, is education for code
officials and other interested parties to understand the power of the
tools we currently have.
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