I don’t think it’s actually true that the Babylonians only had expensive housing. Architects lived with some risk of death due to their buildings falling down, just like the people who lived in houses or walked across bridges.
I am curious if that line ever actually got enforced.
I don’t think that, in practice, houses collapse all that often, or that preventing that is that expensive. So it’s more like (I’m completely guessing, I know nothing else about Babylonian architecture), there was more of an emphasis on things that don’t fall down over other properties. What you do is ban flimsy housing, but the main cost of housing lies elsewhere.
I don’t think it’s actually true that the Babylonians only had expensive housing. Architects lived with some risk of death due to their buildings falling down, just like the people who lived in houses or walked across bridges.
I am curious if that line ever actually got enforced.
I don’t think that, in practice, houses collapse all that often, or that preventing that is that expensive. So it’s more like (I’m completely guessing, I know nothing else about Babylonian architecture), there was more of an emphasis on things that don’t fall down over other properties. What you do is ban flimsy housing, but the main cost of housing lies elsewhere.