Why ordinary Americans are prohibited from building and renovating their own homes

[RussianTroll]

You remind me of a reverse Yakov Smirnoff.

In Russia all man chop down tree for house material. In Russia man fight bear for right of passage on eighteenth year. In Russia all men make own hospital. When Russian man break arm, he reset bone with rusted scrap metal and rags. Russian man have immunity to tetanus. Russian child walk nine kilometers to market in one meter snow for potato.

Honestly, what are Russian zoning laws like? Is it all red tape of licensed contractors, approvals, set back limits, height limits, utility placements, and inspection?

You can do it that way in rural places but even they have county or state oversight. As a country there are tons of stories of people's whose "great-grandfather built his house in 1914 for $5,000." Everyone could just do the wildcat building thing. That's no longer the norm.

We're just too bureaucratic now for that to still be a valid example.

Turkey also has really lax laws for home building. Just build whatever, wherever if you own the land. They forgot about The Anatolian Fault though.

You forgot about balalaikas, home nuclear reactors and girls jumping over fires))))

In fact, they are trying to force us into the framework of bureaucratic rules. For example, they tried to ban making shashlik and burning garbage in barrels closer than 50 meters from buildings. They tried to control this with the help of drones. They tried...
But all in vain. It came to the courts, but the state bodies lost all the courts. As a result, everything remained as before, and responsibility arose only in criminal cases, or if neighbors suffered.

So the Russians live as before, freely.