Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 39 /Aug 18, 2026
Codes are the industry's consensus, and they have to keep pace
Gabe Maser, International Code Council
Aug 18, 2026 /Real Estate, Cities & Housing
Codes are the industry's consensus, and they have to keep pace
Gabe Maser is the executive vice president for innovation and growth at the International Code Council, the organization that writes the model building codes most American jurisdictions adopt. He came to it through law school, Capitol Hill and home-retrofit finance. He explains how a code actually changes, and why AI built on codes has to pull the real requirements.
Gabe Maser, Executive Vice President, Innovation & Growth, International Code Council
In this conversation
Why the narrative that codes raise costs confuses price with cost, and how the council weighs every change.
The mental model for how a code gets updated, from post-disaster science to adoption by local jurisdictions.
What the latest cycle covers: water availability, wildfire at the urban edge, data centers, and accessibility in the plumbing code.
How digital codes, online plan review and permit scheduling changed the field, largely since the pandemic.
When we talk about costs, and I think where most people would go, we're talking about price.
Gabe Maser
Chapters
From Capitol Hill to the code council
Gabe's route from Washington to the organization that writes the codes.
How a code changes
How a rule about floods or fire gets from the science to your permit.
By the numbers
Damage one inch of floodwater can cause to a home
Gabe says flood costs American homeowners more than any other risk, which is why the 2027 codes move to a 500-year floodplain.
Source: FEMA, FloodSmart ↗Flood, data centers and what's next
Where the codes are heading next, and what AI developers need to get right.
Flood costs American homeowners the most out of any sort of risk every year.
Gabe Maser
Takeaways
Codes are the industry's consensus mechanism. The council's job is to make an on-ramp for constituencies, like data centers, that arrive with conflicting requirements and no idea how to participate.
Flood costs American homeowners more than any other risk every year; the 2027 codes move from a 100-year to a 500-year floodplain because claims kept coming from outside the old map.
A general chat doing its best is not a code check. AI developers must pull the actual requirements, and the council now audits software that claims to review against its codes.
If you're an AI developer, ensuring that you're pulling what are actually the requirements, that's really important.
Gabe Maser