In the interest of encouraging renovation of existing industrial and commercial buildings to live/work use, many cities (and some states) have relaxed building codes in several important areas, many of which are treated individually elsewhere on this site. These include:
What all of these relaxations have in common, when well integrated into a coherant live/work building code, is a pragmatic approach to a building type which is clearly here to stay. Such relaxations are an adaption to an ongoing phenonmenon and an attempt to rationally combine residential and commercial building code requirements -- with a certain acknowledgement that while live/work is a hybrid of the two, it is also at once neither and both. In short, a good live/work building code is well-integrated with its land-use counterpart -- live/work zoning regulations-- and ensures that this building type can be understood and conducted with a reasonable level of life safety at a level of affordability near that which gave rise to its emergence and mushrooming popularity in the first place.
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Code relaxations in 
