The building and housing codes Columbus wrote for itself, 1919 to 1986

Columbus wrote its own building code for eighty years and kept a housing code beside it from 1911. The building code said how a house was put up; the housing code said what a dwelling had to contain, so a reader looking in the wrong one dates the bathroom, the window and the cellar rule forty years late. This page sets out each code between 1919 and 1986 with its ordinance and date, as the City of Columbus printed them, and never says which code any one house was built under.

Last updated September 2026 · The City of Columbus's own City Bulletin for 1919, 1925, 1930, 1939, 1952, 1955, 1959, 1972 and 1975, its bound printing of the 1975 housing code, its three submissions to the federal housing agency and the federal reprint of its 1911 housing code were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

Two codes at once, and the older one starts in 1911

Columbus ran two codes side by side: a building code for how a building was put up, a housing code for what a dwelling had to contain. Almost every record below has one publisher, the City of Columbus writing about itself, so the city is named in every sentence resting on it.

The record starts before 1919. Ordinance No. 36,818, in the City Bulletin of December 1925, amends section 95 of ordinance No. 25,609 known as the housing code, passed March 6, 1911; the United States Public Health Service, reprinting its sanitation title on September 22, 1911, gives the same date. Section 36 of that reprint asked a sink with running water inside the house where mains were reasonably accessible, and a water-closet inside the house where a sewer was, in a compartment with a window of not less than six square feet. Section 32 barred a cellar or basement room in a new house from being occupied for living purposes, other than for cooking or laundry purposes.

Section 36 barred the water closet from the cellar or basement, an exception it allowed only in a house with two or more water closets, put the required one in a compartment plastered to the ceiling, and provided a privy vault in the yard where no sewer was reasonably accessible. Section 35 asked as much of each apartment of a new tenement house, a sink and a separate water closet, in a compartment not less than three feet wide with a window opening on a street, yard or court. Section 33 required the first floor of a new house occupied for living purposes to stand at least two feet above the grade of the adjacent ground, and all cellars and basements to be properly lighted, ventilated and drained. The city was still amending that code in 1925, the Bulletin shows it enforced in 1939, and the 1954 building code's index lists a housing code chapter, so it was in force across this page's whole window.

The bound code of 1919 carried both: the City Bulletin of July 26, 1919 said the building and housing codes are also indexed separately. Only Title 2, Sanitation, sections 32 to 38, of the 1911 code was read. Neighboring pages own the 1905 code, the 1986 ordinance and Ohio's own steps, the inspection offices and the 1923 ordinances, and today's permit.

The Columbus Code of 1919

It was a codification, not a fresh set of rules: the City Bulletin of January 18, 1919 called the ordinance carrying it the lengthiest ordinance ever introduced in council, embracing the codified ordinances of the city since 1896, and containing over 1400 sections. Its building code is described only in the ordinance that killed it, the 1925 repealer, which names sections 27 to 140, both inclusive, subdivision 1-A building code; those sections are the one code text in this window nobody has reached. That repealer strikes sections in four other subdivisions of the 1919 code as well, 1-D, 1-G, 1-H and 2-J, so subdivision 1-A was the building chapter and not the whole of what 1925 displaced.

Two dates attach to the codification and both print. The adopting ordinance is No. 31,200, passed February 10, 1919, named in the repealer of the city's 1923 wiring ordinance and dated on the inspection page; the City Bulletin of July 26, 1919 said the code went into effect last Tuesday, on a resolution authorizing the city clerk to distribute it. The record does not show which the city treated as operative.

The building code came out on its own that spring too: an ordinance passed April 28, 1919 had 500 copies of it printed as a reprint from the 1919 codified ordinances, for the division of building regulation.

The building code of 1925, and the subject it left alone

Ordinance No. 36,044, to establish a building code for the city of Columbus, Ohio, was passed and approved March 2, 1925 and printed whole in the City Bulletin of March 12, 1925, in seventy-eight sections. Masonry walls for a house could be thinner than for a tall building. Section 31's bearing-wall table allowed walls for dwelling houses and apartment houses eight inches in thickness up to twenty-four feet in height, where they were reinforced by piers, pilasters, buttresses or masonry cross-walls not more than thirty feet apart, and allowed eight-inch interior masonry bearing walls up to fifteen feet.

Section 44 gave each separate apartment of a new dwelling or apartment house one smoke flue of ninety-six square inches in cross section if rectangular, seventy-eight if round, beginning not less than two and one-half feet below the bottom of the first floor joist, and exempted apartment houses with a common heating system. The same section kept wood out of the chimney: hearths on trimmer arches of brick or Portland cement concrete not less than four inches thick, fireplace backs not less than eight inches thick, and no woodwork forming any part of a chimney. Section 48 let a one-family dwelling house of not more than two and one-half stories keep a single stairway where a building more than two stories high needed two, and barred winding or circular stairs everywhere but a dwelling house.

Sections 49 to 51 drew an inner and an outer fire limit, inside which buildings had to be walled in brick, stone or other hard incombustible material, the boundary between them set by a separate ordinance. The outer limit still allowed frame dwellings not to exceed two stories in height and fifteen hundred square feet of ground area; the inner limit exempted a private garage of not more than two hundred fifty-six square feet on a lot with a dwelling, and one frame addition of the same size to an existing detached frame dwelling.

What it does not contain matters as much. All seventy-eight sections were read straight through, and none sets a window area, a room size, a ceiling height or a required plumbing fixture for a dwelling; the subjects are structure, fire protection and prevention, and the permit. That is a fact about the building code, not about Columbus: the housing code of 1911 had asked the sink, the indoor water closet and the six-square-foot window fourteen years earlier. The permit counts of those years are on the yearly-count page; the furnace, flue and chimney are on the heating page.

The codifications in between, 1930 and 1952

Columbus recodified again around 1930 and the record cannot date it. By 1939 a single Columbus ordinance cited a Columbus Code of 1930: referred to the Safety committee at the council meeting of February 6, 1939 and summarized in the City Bulletin of February 11, 1939, it names chapter VII, subdivision 1-a, building code, sections 33 to 210, both inclusive, of that code. That phrase occurs once in the volume, no adopting ordinance has been found, and the 1930 volume still cites the Columbus code of 1919, so the record read for this page does not show when the one gave way to the other. The next codification is named by the ordinance that ended its building chapter: the 1954 code repealed sections 1 to 627, both inclusive, of Chapter 48 of the Columbus Code of 1952, which was not read.

The building code of 1954, and what it asked of a house

The building code Columbus lived with for thirty years is Ordinance No. 1597-54, printed in the City Bulletin of February 5, 1955. Its own lines read passed January 21, 1955 and approved January 24, 1955; the volume's index and a later amending ordinance give January 24; this page prints the ordinance's own line. The city called it its 1954 code on its federal forms, 1954 being the ordinance's number-year. It was organized by occupancy groups A through J, and says its provisions have been adjusted to include the majority of the state code's requirements.

The house had a group of its own: Group I occupancies shall be: Dwellings housing not more than two families, at section 99, with an exception where more than two families were separated by an unpierced two-hour fire wall. Section 103 (a) is where the first Columbus building code read here said how much window a room needed: glass of not less than one-tenth of the floor area of such room, with not less than six square feet of the window area shall be openable, and three square feet on a bathroom unless there was adequate mechanical ventilation. The same subsection let a required window open through a porch at least half open on one side and not more than seven feet deep. That is the first building code to carry the rule, not the first Columbus rule of the kind: the 1911 housing code had asked six square feet on a water closet compartment.

Section 103 (b) asked a ceiling of at least seven feet six inches over half the required area with no part of it under five feet, living and sleeping rooms of not less than eighty square feet, kitchens fifty, eating rooms thirty and the third bedroom and any after it sixty. Section 103 (c) put the bathroom into the building code: at least one water closet, one lavatory or sink, and one bath tub or shower stall for each family unit.

The apartment house was held to something different. Group H took in hotels, apartment houses, dormitories, rooming houses, convents and monasteries accommodating ten or more persons, with homes for the aged and orphanages. Section 95 (b) asked eight feet of ceiling over half a room's area there, half a foot more than the house, with an exception that apartments and rooming houses may have ceiling height of seven feet six inches. Section 95 (c) asked one water closet for each apartment and a kitchen sink in every kitchen, and not less than one water closet, one bath tub or shower and one lavatory for each twenty persons the building was designed to hold.

The chimney article the dwelling sections point to, sections 379 to 405, is where section 382 asked brick chimney walls built of good sound brick not less than three and three-fourths inches thick and lined with fire clay flue lining, and thickened those walls as the flue's cross section grew.

The permit, the plans and the certificate of occupancy

Section 12 (a) let nobody begin work without first obtaining a separate permit for each such building from the building inspector, and section 13 (d) expired a permit under which no work was commenced within six months. Section 12 (c) asked two sets of plans and specifications with each application, both stamped approved; section 13 (b) kept one with the inspector and returned the other to be kept on the building while work went on, and the 1925 code had already asked a duplicate set at its own section 11. Group I occupancies and buildings or structures accessory thereto were excepted from the requirement that plans be prepared by an architect or an engineer.

Section 15 named three inspections: foundation and footing after the trenches were dug and the forms erected, frame after the roof, framing, fire-blocking, bracing, pipes, chimneys and vents were complete, and final after the building was ready for occupancy.

The certificate of occupancy appears in this code and did not reach a house. Section 17 (a) says no new building or structure in Groups A to H, inclusive, could be used or occupied until the building inspector had issued one; Group I is not in that list, and the section adds that certificates are not required for double duplexes nor row houses. Section 14 (o) carries the same bar on a change of occupancy classification and points back to section 17. The phrase does not occur in the 1919, 1925, 1939, 1952 or 1954 volumes of the City Bulletin, and an exact-phrase search of the whole digitized collection of Columbus city documents returns its earliest hit in 1955, a statement about a scanned collection, not about every ordinance Columbus passed.

Two more provisions changed how the city worked rather than how a house was built. Section 18 (a) declared the whole city a fire district and divided it into Fire Zones 1, 2 and 3, whose boundaries council set by separate ordinance, in place of the fire limits of 1925. Section 10 (b) set up a standing body to keep the code current: a building commission whose duty was to recommend revisions to and reprinting of the building code from time to time as may be required, but at intervals not to exceed four years. The city described that commission to the federal housing agency in 1962 as seven members, and said council had adopted amendments on its recommendation in the past year.

The housing code of 1959, and its four-year clock

Columbus replaced its housing code in 1959. Ordinance No. 739-59 enacted Title Forty-five, Housing Code, of the Columbus City Codes, 1959, establishing minimum standards governing the condition and maintenance of dwellings, printed whole in the City Bulletin of Saturday, June 20, 1959; it was passed and approved June 1, then reconsidered, amended and passed June 15, approved June 18. Two earlier attempts, Ordinances 22-59 and 591-59, are recorded in the same volume as lost, titled Title Thirty-seven, Minimum Housing Code. Section 2 said that where the code met another city code applicable to existing housing, the provision which establishes the higher standard for health and safety prevails.

Its bathroom rule is deliberately slow. Section 4501.03 defined a bathroom as a room affording privacy, equipped with a flush water closet, a lavatory basin and a bathtub or shower, and section 4521.03 required one in every dwelling unit; section 4521.05 then made it effective throughout the city four years after the effective date, one year after adoption inside urban renewal areas council had already approved, and one year after designation in any area council designated within the following three years. The kitchen sink in section 4521.02 ran on the same pattern with a three-year clock. Section 4521.04 let two dwelling units share one bathroom: no more than six people in both together, neither larger than two habitable rooms, each unit's habitable area no more than two hundred eighty square feet, and a license for the sharing, the figures reading eight persons and three hundred fifty square feet in the first year.

Sections 4521.09 and 4523.06 asked hot water at not less than one hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit and heating able to hold every habitable room at least seventy (70) degrees Fahrenheit when outside temperature is ten. The water standard reached every required kitchen sink, lavatory basin, bathtub or shower, the heating standard every habitable room, bathroom and water closet compartment.

Sections 4523.02 to 4523.04 asked window glass which shall be ten (10) per cent of the floor area of such room, more than the building code asked, fifteen per cent where the only window was a skylight, forty-five per cent of that area openable, and three square feet on a bathroom, half of it openable unless there was adequate mechanical ventilation. Sections 4541.02 to 4541.06 counted occupancy by floor space rather than persons per room, one hundred forty square feet for the first occupant and seventy for each additional one, sleeping rooms at seventy square feet for one occupant and forty for each beyond, and a child under one year exempt from both counts. Floor area under five feet of headroom did not count, seven feet of ceiling was required over half of every habitable room, no cellar space was to be used for sleeping, as in 1911, and a basement could be habitable only where it met every other standard; a cellar had half or more of its floor-to-ceiling height below the average adjoining grade, a basement less than half. The window as a component is on the windows page. How Columbus enforced its 1959 housing code year by year, with the offices as its own annual reports named them, is on the page on how Columbus enforced its housing code.

The federal form the city filled in

The federal law behind the era's code drive is the Housing Act of 1954. Its section 303 rewrote section 101 of the Housing Act of 1949 and required a locality seeking urban renewal money or certain mortgage insurance to give the federal housing administrator a workable program (which shall include an official plan of action) for dealing with slums and blight. That requirement reaches three things, not two: a loan or capital grant under title I, annual contributions or capital grants under the United States Housing Act of 1937, and a mortgage insured under section 220 or 221 of the National Housing Act. The words housing, zoning, building and other local laws, codes sit in a different sentence, the new subsection (a), about what the administrator considers when contracting for advances for surveys and plans. Columbus did not wait for the Act: its housing code is forty-three years older.

In its 1962 submission to the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and again in 1967, Columbus gave 1954 as the date adopted for its building, plumbing, electrical, heating and ventilating codes and 1959 for housing, adding 1964 for fire prevention in 1967. In 1962 the only model code it named was the National Electrical Code, every other cell in that column blank; in 1967 the column carries that and a national fire protection association's model, and nothing else. By 1972 the city checked LOCAL for every code on Schedule 1 of its Application for Workable Program Re-certification, approved by council on May 8, 1972 by Resolution Number 48X-72, listed a Columbus Building Code 1971 beside an Ohio Building Code 1970, and based the housing code on the American Public Health Association Model Code of 1952. The same schedule records revisions council adopted in 1971 that widened housing code inspection to nuisance and established a Nuisance Abatement Board.

The same forms carry the counts. In the twelve months before its 1967 return the City of Columbus reported that its building code office issued 7,794 permits and made 36,219 inspections, its plumbing office 4,475 and 18,163, and its electrical office 8,652 and 25,459, one inspection being one visit by one inspector to one structure. That federal return is a different record from the city's own annual reports, which counted plumbing permits and inspections from 1895 to 1970 and fixtures by type for seven years, on the page on Columbus plumbing permits and fixtures. The housing code was worked differently: 5,410 housing inspections produced 2,191 violation notices, against 610 from the building code's 36,219, and the form's permits cell for housing is struck through, the housing code not being a permit code. The 1972 return adds 6,397 brought into compliance and 19,864 new inspections in 1971; the 1962 version is out of alignment and prints nothing. The year-by-year permit counts are on the yearly-count page.

1975, and the building code's last local decades

There was no Columbus recodification in the 1970s. The building code sat in Titles 41 and 43 of the Columbus City Codes, 1959, a codification authorized by Ordinance No. 870-58 of May 5, 1958 and recited in Ordinance No. 34-59, which council passed January 12, 1959. Ordinances were still cited to that codification through 1975, and Ordinance No. 1710-72, passed and approved November 13, 1972, modified an existing contract to print the Columbus City Codes, 1959 in their entirety, under the city's recodification and supplementation program, a loose-leaf supplement service rather than a new code.

Columbus put minimum insulation into that code in 1975, by Ordinance No. 179-75, printed in the City Bulletin of February 15, 1975 at sections 4315.211 and 4317.02. The standards are expressed in R values, the section's own measure of resistance to heat flow, which it says may require a greater or lesser thickness depending on the material. The table sets a flat roof deck at R-11, a ceiling at R-19 over masonry and frame exterior walls alike, a masonry wall at R-6, a frame wall at R-13, R-7 for a structural slab and R-11 for wood and metal framing over unheated space, with exterior doors stormed or of insulated type and windows stormed or of insulating glass. It came on the recommendation of the Building Code Committee, after the Columbus Building Commission approved it at their meeting held August 20, 1974, and it is first only in the sense that no earlier insulation section was found in the volumes read.

The housing code was rewritten the same year. Ordinance No. 356-75 revised Title 45 in its entirety, passed as amended March 3, 1975, printed March 8, 1975 and, by the city's own bound printing, effective April 2, 1975. Its preamble says the revision was immediately necessary in order to avoid conflict with the recently enacted State Amended Substitute House Bill No. 103, which the ordinance does not identify further and which was not traced for this page. Its section 4521.02 kept the bathroom and named the fixtures, one flush water closet, lavatory basin and bathtub or shower in good working condition, properly connected to public water and sewer. Section 4521.03 carried the sharing rule forward on a different count, one set of fixtures for each ten persons, and required units that share to meet the full requirement unless they were in existence before October 21, 1968.

Every figure fell in the rewrite, and the last made its rule harder: section 4523.01 cut light for a habitable space to 5 per cent of the floor area of such space where 1959 had asked ten, section 4523.03 cut the bathroom window to two square feet, section 4521.05 dropped hot water to one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit, and section 4523.05 dropped the outside design temperature to zero (0) degrees Fahrenheit, so seventy degrees indoors had to hold in colder weather. Both light figures had an escape: artificial lighting and mechanical ventilation could stand in for the window area if installed in conformance with the Columbus Building Code, and the bathroom window was excused where the housing inspector approved a ventilation system. The same heating section barred unvented space heaters and open flame radiant type space heaters. Section 4525.04 asked a bathroom floor reasonably impervious to water, with carpeting permitted over a floor that met it. Chapter 4527, at sections 4527.01 and 4527.02, barred lead-based coatings, more than five-tenths of one per centum lead by weight, on surfaces of a dwelling reachable by children; the federal rule on painted surfaces is on the lead and asbestos page. In 1986 Ordinance 2229-86 pointed Title 41 at a model code the state had adopted; that step and everything after it is dated on the which-code page.

What the record does not show, and why no house is named

Seven things stayed open. The text of the 1919 building code, subdivision 1-A sections 27 to 140, was not read. The ordinance adopting the Columbus Code of 1930 was not found. The bound Columbus code of 1952 could not be read, so what changed between its Chapter 48 and the 1954 one is not established. Only Title 2, Sanitation, of the 1911 housing code was read, so the page cannot say what that code asked about room sizes or ceiling heights. What happened on October 21, 1968, the cut-off the 1975 code sets for existing shared bathrooms, is unknown. Nothing ties the Columbus Building Code 1971, which the city named on its own 1972 form, to an ordinance. And the number of the April 1919 ordinance that had 500 copies printed is not established. One absence is deliberate: these codes carry fee schedules and no amount appears here.

A year built does not name a code, and this page has no permit or plan approval for any house. Every rule above is dated to the ordinance that made it and the years Columbus had it in force; none of it says which code a given house was built to, because that turns on a record kept for the job. Why the year built cannot answer that question is set out on the page that owns it; what Ohio asks of the plumbing in the wall today is on the Ohio plumbing code page.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1925 Columbus City Bulletin, 1925; read September 2026.
• United States Public Health Service, Columbus, Ohio: Housing Code. Title 2 (Sanitation), Public Health Reports, volume 26, pages 1426 to 1427, September 22, 1911; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1919 Columbus City Bulletin, 1919; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1939 Columbus City Bulletin, 1939; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1930 Columbus City Bulletin, 1930; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1955 Columbus City Bulletin, 1955; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1952 Columbus City Bulletin, 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1959 Columbus City Bulletin, 1959; read September 2026.
• United States Government Publishing Office, Housing Act of 1954, Public Law 560, 68 Stat. 590, August 2, 1954; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, A review of progress under the Program for Community Improvement (Workable Program) for the elimination and prevention of slums and blight in Columbus, Ohio, May 31, 1962; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Workable Program for Community Improvement, City of Columbus, Ohio 1967, 1967; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Application for Workable Program Re-certification, Columbus, Ohio, May 8, 1972; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1972 Columbus City Bulletin, 1972; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, 1975 Columbus City Bulletin, 1975; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Housing Code 1975 (Title 45, Columbus City Codes), April 2, 1975; read September 2026.

Common questions