12 ms·

IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear

IMO, it's gotten bad enough in the Bay Area that local control of zoning ought to get abolished. Make a new regional zoning commission, put together some clear and consistent rules about what can be built and where, and rubber-stamp everything that meets those rules. Literal rubber-stamp here, as in "you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact".

euyyn 9y ago
Just for zoning requirements, not environmental ones, though.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Environmental requirements are often a back-door for NIMBY-ism. If you black-box the process, raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled. We have enough such levers. Everything of this "levers NIMBYs can pull to discourage development near them" category should get offloaded to a a bureaucracy that's empowered to ignore people yanking on them.
  - red_hairing 9y ago
    that is why if trump does manage to cut the EPA, it could drive down housing prices by increasing supply of new homes and apartments.
    - klipt 9y ago
      Pretty sure California's CEQA is independent of the EPA.
      - wahern 9y ago
        Yes, it is. And it's _much_ easier to bring and maintain a lawsuit under CEQA. The costs of environmental review under the federal law is basically baked into the cost of doing business these days. But CEQA is too easy to abuse, and NIMBYs can and do tie up projects for years, often killing them altogether, without any serious threat of substantive environmental harm. The procedural rules of CEQA make it difficult for judges to handle the cases efficiently, and it effectively immunizes plaintiffs from repercussions. The reason why CEQA can't be amended or repealed is because it effectively gives the environmental lobby a veto over projects, and that lobby is a pillar of the governing coalition in California. Setting aside the wisdom of granting such leverage to non-state institutions, any amendments that cut down on NIMBY abuse would almost necessarily reduce the environmental lobby's de facto veto powers. California can keep putting the screws to city councils, but unless they amend CEQA you'll see very little change in number of units built, except for large projects or well-heeled (i.e. well-lawyered) developers. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could step in. A possible silver lining of adding another conservative vote to SCOTUS would be that it might strike down CEQA as commonly applied. Likewise, they would hopefully crack down on the "community input" process that makes it difficult for developers to clear zoning hurdles. In particular, in cities like San Francisco zoning laws are so loosely defined and applied that it's impossible to submit a plan with any degree of confidence that it meets zoning and other regulatory requirements. In reality you're basically bargaining with the city like you would bargain with a corrupt city political machine in the 19th century, except it has the imprimatur of the courts. It's a failure of Due Process, the most basic guarantee of Western constitutional law. Government is supposed to apply clearly defined laws. In particular, zoning boards and other instruments of government (courts in CEQA lawsuits) aren't supposed to be venues for democratic feedback. NIMBYs are free to lobby to change zoning and regulatory law to shape the character of their neighborhood; they shouldn't have a backdoor to change those rules on-the-fly as part of development plan approvals.
        malandrew 9y ago
        This. CEQA is a nightmare. If I recall correctly, CEQA has been abused multiple times to prevent bikesharing and expansion of bike lanes in San Francisco. The argument made I believe was that such changes would change the car driving patterns and increase pollution from emissions.
  - 7952 9y ago
    The trouble is that "environment" can grow to encompass many highly political issues beyond the most obvious things. It lets politicians wiggle out of deciding things by setting up a scientific process.
  - euyyn 9y ago
    > raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled Environmental concerns under CEQA aren't "black-boxed" or generic, they have to be categorized, detailed, and public. Mitigation measures are sometimes expensive, yes. Rubber-stamping construction permits in my island is how we ended up with rows of hotels destroying the coast illegally. Once the buildings are there, the harm is done, and no one has the money to demolish them. "Going after them after the fact" can work for arbitrary zoning requirements, but it doesn't work for environmental ones.
cjensen 9y ago
Under existing rules, developers do not pay enough fees to allow the School Districts to build new schools to support the new housing. Now you'd like to rubber stamp this? For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good. To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Wait, developers should pay for schools? What are property taxes for?
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    I think what they are talking about is the resident who will move in that need schools (and will pay property tax), not the developers. He developers can't build the residencies without having enough schooling for families moving in.
  - pfooti 9y ago
    Thanks to the vagaries of prop 13, schools (and other municipal services) tend to get a lot better-funded from commercial real estate than housing. So we see cities prioritizing office space and not building enough housing to hold the people who will be working in those cities. It's pretty ridiculous.
  - panzagl 9y ago
    Property taxes pay for the schools that already exist. It's hard for a district to 'save up' because, well California, and 'surplus' money should be returned to the taxpayer. If developers don't cover the cost a district usually issues a bond but that's hard because, well, California, and direct democracy rarely votes to raise property tax mil rates whatever it would cost to cover the bond. And doesn't California basically freeze assessment values? Because why should the people who already live there pay for services for newcomers? It's all very hostile and backward.
voxmatt 9y ago
I couldn't agree more. I'm originally from the Twin Cities and we solved (parts of this) problem years ago with a regional government called the Metropolitan Council. When you have a metropolitan area that spans multiple local governments, coordinating efforts around transportation, development, and environment is critical. And coordination is difficult without some sort of central authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council
- abalashov 9y ago
  This is exactly what we lack in Atlanta, which, as you probably know, is notorious for its decentralisation and far-reaching sprawl. As a result, everything that's done in the Atlanta metro area suffers from narrow incorporated municipality focus and a total lack of regional-scale goals.
- health_in_usa 9y ago
  This is a funny example to pick since the Metropolitan Council has demonstrated NIMBYism in its own right on a few topics. Importantly, the Council has been able to direct huge groups of people to far reaches of the Metropolis (with their attendant reduced bus service, higher crime, etc). [1] http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-accuse-state-of-fair-housing-violations/275901391/ http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-acc...
- flomo 9y ago
  Originally from Minneapolis. Farmlands extend infinitely outwards in all directions. The real Met Council power is over the sewer pipes, which allows them to limit sprawl and set a growth boundary. Maybe things have changed, but it used to be run mostly by real-estate types who wanted "controlled growth". (that is, it was a racket.) In San Francisco, the situation is entirely different. We have a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area, which is 99% developed. Californians have a long history of anti-growth "pull up bridges" politics. It is not so simple as putting some enlightened developers in charge.
  - 9y ago
fmboingo 9y ago
I always find it interesting to hear what people believe they deserve. In these comments you can hear the "I deserve to live in a house with my family of 4 in Palo Alto". Do you really deserve that? Says who? That would be like me showing up in NYC and saying I deserve to live in a penthouse on 5th Ave. No I don't. There is plenty of wide open space outside the Bay Area.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I suppose that's what this discussion is about. Who deserves what. I don't think anyone really has suggestions that enable anyone to by a family home in Palo Alto. But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers. Who has what rights (who deserves what) is not an abstract truth we discover. It’s decisions we make.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    But then you're asserting that those who live in Palo Alto don't have the right to govern their community. They aren't keeping out newcomers at all, in fact, there are houses for sale in Palo Alto. For some reason people think that living in that area should be affordable. It shouldn't be. Live somewhere else.
    - Zach_the_Lizard 9y ago
      Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy. It's true that anyone is legally allowed to live here. It's also true I've excluded, by legal fiat, almost all Americans. I've declared my lifestyle superior to all others and no one else can live here except those who enjoy the same. Palo Alto is not as extreme. But it still limits the number of houses, tells everyone what lifestyles are legally permissible (don't forget to include parking or yards!), and excludes vast swaths of Americans. This isn't good governance. It's not healthy for the region, and it's not healthy on a national basis. This is why many nations take away zoning power from localities and move it to regional or even national levels. It's also why we don't have the power to vote for who lives next to us, at least explicitly. That would be local governance, but quite cruel and prone to abuse. Why do we give localities this right to implicitly vote out people? I would argue it is just as cruel and misguided as voting to ban your neighbor
pjc50 9y ago
> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes. Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.
- solatic 9y ago
  Precisely this. Especially in a market with a humongous appetite for development like the Bay Area, if you unleash the flood gates, you're going to get a lot of charlatans who cut dangerous corners, and they will mysteriously disappear before they will be held to account. In the meantime, their victims will pay the price, either in blood or in the financial losses incurred from losing property that must be destroyed because it's unsafe. Regulation isn't so much the problem as regulation which is slow to the point where it effectively kills development. There is a balance.
- ChefDenominator 9y ago
  Because the buyers are hapless fools with no means to protect themselves.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Obvious-to-me solution: developers can't sell the building until the information in the affidavit gets verified. Basically, the entire scope of my proposal is to turn the "am I allowed to build here?" question into something that can be determined without the uncertainty of "how much effort will the local community put into fucking with the project".
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact That would likely lead to a solution that's actually worse than the problem. Court cases to resolve these violations will take years to adjudicate and will in most situations lead to a settlement that still fucks over those who were victimized. A better approach would be to reform our legal system so that it isn't and/or hire more court employees, judges, etc. If our court systems are perpetually overburdened, it makes sense to clear the bottlenecks to give them the resources and reforms so that they can meet their obligations. It's a travesty that in all the places I have lived in the US, going to court for some minor infraction or permitting issue will take me at least 3 hours or more, necessitating me taking a vacation or sick day if I didn't work remotely. When my number is called, the actual process takes usually no more than 5 minutes. Perhaps a relatively small investment in our legal system could lead to a large return
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Waiting in lines and paying by spending time is what you get when you can't pay for a service by spending money. The alternative is that the poor can't afford access to the legal system. Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way.
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    > Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way. But the wealthy don't wait anyway. They just hire lawyers.
mabbo 9y ago
> you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact". My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper) way. Here's what would happen in the scenario you're describing: Developers would build whatever the heck they like. Then, they'd be told "You built something that doesn't meet code". The developer would say "Well, my mistake, but it's built now and do you really want to tear down this new housing development that people paid for 3 years ago?". Now you have a political situation where the people who want to move in are being told that the building has to be torn down. Politicians would get involved, and the building (not meeting code) would be allowed to stay. This would repeat over and over again. I completely agree that we need a straightforward set of clear, consistent rules. But the idea of pre-approval without checking what the developer plans to build, how they plan to deal with waste-water, storm-water, parking, and a long list of other requirements, that's asking for trouble.
- _archon_ 9y ago
  This seems like the sort of behavior which can be disincentivized with steep fines. You, a developer, built a large building not to code? You have to pay to have it re-worked, and in addition you pay the local town $1000 per domicile affected per day it's delayed. Made-up example, but you get the idea.
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    Createdmall development company, take the contract, deliver faulty building, accept payment, pay out funds to employees (subcontractors) and owners of the company, shut down company if the district comes after them. It would incentivize his sort of behavior too.
    - crowbahr 9y ago
      Also known as "Whoopsies I went bankrupt sorry!"
usefulcat 9y ago
"..if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact" If I were a developer, I'd be hesitant to build anything with that hanging over my head. It probably also means I'll have more difficulty getting financing. Less up-front bureaucracy, more risk and cost.

euyyn 9y ago

Just for zoning requirements, not environmental ones, though.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Environmental requirements are often a back-door for NIMBY-ism. If you black-box the process, raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled. We have enough such levers. Everything of this "levers NIMBYs can pull to discourage development near them" category should get offloaded to a a bureaucracy that's empowered to ignore people yanking on them.
- red_hairing 9y ago
  that is why if trump does manage to cut the EPA, it could drive down housing prices by increasing supply of new homes and apartments.
  - klipt 9y ago
    Pretty sure California's CEQA is independent of the EPA.
    - wahern 9y ago
      Yes, it is. And it's _much_ easier to bring and maintain a lawsuit under CEQA. The costs of environmental review under the federal law is basically baked into the cost of doing business these days. But CEQA is too easy to abuse, and NIMBYs can and do tie up projects for years, often killing them altogether, without any serious threat of substantive environmental harm. The procedural rules of CEQA make it difficult for judges to handle the cases efficiently, and it effectively immunizes plaintiffs from repercussions. The reason why CEQA can't be amended or repealed is because it effectively gives the environmental lobby a veto over projects, and that lobby is a pillar of the governing coalition in California. Setting aside the wisdom of granting such leverage to non-state institutions, any amendments that cut down on NIMBY abuse would almost necessarily reduce the environmental lobby's de facto veto powers. California can keep putting the screws to city councils, but unless they amend CEQA you'll see very little change in number of units built, except for large projects or well-heeled (i.e. well-lawyered) developers. Alternatively, the Supreme Court could step in. A possible silver lining of adding another conservative vote to SCOTUS would be that it might strike down CEQA as commonly applied. Likewise, they would hopefully crack down on the "community input" process that makes it difficult for developers to clear zoning hurdles. In particular, in cities like San Francisco zoning laws are so loosely defined and applied that it's impossible to submit a plan with any degree of confidence that it meets zoning and other regulatory requirements. In reality you're basically bargaining with the city like you would bargain with a corrupt city political machine in the 19th century, except it has the imprimatur of the courts. It's a failure of Due Process, the most basic guarantee of Western constitutional law. Government is supposed to apply clearly defined laws. In particular, zoning boards and other instruments of government (courts in CEQA lawsuits) aren't supposed to be venues for democratic feedback. NIMBYs are free to lobby to change zoning and regulatory law to shape the character of their neighborhood; they shouldn't have a backdoor to change those rules on-the-fly as part of development plan approvals.
      - malandrew 9y ago
        This. CEQA is a nightmare. If I recall correctly, CEQA has been abused multiple times to prevent bikesharing and expansion of bike lanes in San Francisco. The argument made I believe was that such changes would change the car driving patterns and increase pollution from emissions.
- 7952 9y ago
  The trouble is that "environment" can grow to encompass many highly political issues beyond the most obvious things. It lets politicians wiggle out of deciding things by setting up a scientific process.
- euyyn 9y ago
  > raising environmental concerns is a lever folks can pull to make specific proposed development more expensive and possibly cancelled Environmental concerns under CEQA aren't "black-boxed" or generic, they have to be categorized, detailed, and public. Mitigation measures are sometimes expensive, yes. Rubber-stamping construction permits in my island is how we ended up with rows of hotels destroying the coast illegally. Once the buildings are there, the harm is done, and no one has the money to demolish them. "Going after them after the fact" can work for arbitrary zoning requirements, but it doesn't work for environmental ones.

cjensen 9y ago

Under existing rules, developers do not pay enough fees to allow the School Districts to build new schools to support the new housing. Now you'd like to rubber stamp this? For example there's a new development in Fremont of a few hundred houses: the school district had to zone it as "we'll provide school for you, but it'll be wherever we have space across the entire city." That's not good. To me the idiocy is this: the state government mandates that all cities build new housing. But they don't mandate that housing and jobs balance. A city like Fremont was master-planned with enough space for both, but is being forced by the state to build houses instead for people who will work in Sunnyvale which has too many jobs and not enough houses.

tomcam 9y ago
Wait, developers should pay for schools? What are property taxes for?
- muninn_ 9y ago
  I think what they are talking about is the resident who will move in that need schools (and will pay property tax), not the developers. He developers can't build the residencies without having enough schooling for families moving in.
- pfooti 9y ago
  Thanks to the vagaries of prop 13, schools (and other municipal services) tend to get a lot better-funded from commercial real estate than housing. So we see cities prioritizing office space and not building enough housing to hold the people who will be working in those cities. It's pretty ridiculous.
- panzagl 9y ago
  Property taxes pay for the schools that already exist. It's hard for a district to 'save up' because, well California, and 'surplus' money should be returned to the taxpayer. If developers don't cover the cost a district usually issues a bond but that's hard because, well, California, and direct democracy rarely votes to raise property tax mil rates whatever it would cost to cover the bond. And doesn't California basically freeze assessment values? Because why should the people who already live there pay for services for newcomers? It's all very hostile and backward.

voxmatt 9y ago

I couldn't agree more. I'm originally from the Twin Cities and we solved (parts of this) problem years ago with a regional government called the Metropolitan Council. When you have a metropolitan area that spans multiple local governments, coordinating efforts around transportation, development, and environment is critical. And coordination is difficult without some sort of central authority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Council

abalashov 9y ago
This is exactly what we lack in Atlanta, which, as you probably know, is notorious for its decentralisation and far-reaching sprawl. As a result, everything that's done in the Atlanta metro area suffers from narrow incorporated municipality focus and a total lack of regional-scale goals.
health_in_usa 9y ago
This is a funny example to pick since the Metropolitan Council has demonstrated NIMBYism in its own right on a few topics. Importantly, the Council has been able to direct huge groups of people to far reaches of the Metropolis (with their attendant reduced bus service, higher crime, etc). [1] http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-accuse-state-of-fair-housing-violations/275901391/ http://www.startribune.com/brooklyn-park-brooklyn-center-acc...
flomo 9y ago
Originally from Minneapolis. Farmlands extend infinitely outwards in all directions. The real Met Council power is over the sewer pipes, which allows them to limit sprawl and set a growth boundary. Maybe things have changed, but it used to be run mostly by real-estate types who wanted "controlled growth". (that is, it was a racket.) In San Francisco, the situation is entirely different. We have a massive greenbelt surrounding a geographically constricted urban area, which is 99% developed. Californians have a long history of anti-growth "pull up bridges" politics. It is not so simple as putting some enlightened developers in charge.
- 9y ago

fmboingo 9y ago

I always find it interesting to hear what people believe they deserve. In these comments you can hear the "I deserve to live in a house with my family of 4 in Palo Alto". Do you really deserve that? Says who? That would be like me showing up in NYC and saying I deserve to live in a penthouse on 5th Ave. No I don't. There is plenty of wide open space outside the Bay Area.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dalbasal 9y ago
I suppose that's what this discussion is about. Who deserves what. I don't think anyone really has suggestions that enable anyone to by a family home in Palo Alto. But, the question is do local residents deserve the right to keep out newcomers. Who has what rights (who deserves what) is not an abstract truth we discover. It’s decisions we make.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  But then you're asserting that those who live in Palo Alto don't have the right to govern their community. They aren't keeping out newcomers at all, in fact, there are houses for sale in Palo Alto. For some reason people think that living in that area should be affordable. It shouldn't be. Live somewhere else.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 9y ago
    Houses are for sale, of course, but suppose I passed a law requiring all new houses to be mansions. I'm talking palace of Versailles level amenities, out of reach for all but the most wealthy. It's true that anyone is legally allowed to live here. It's also true I've excluded, by legal fiat, almost all Americans. I've declared my lifestyle superior to all others and no one else can live here except those who enjoy the same. Palo Alto is not as extreme. But it still limits the number of houses, tells everyone what lifestyles are legally permissible (don't forget to include parking or yards!), and excludes vast swaths of Americans. This isn't good governance. It's not healthy for the region, and it's not healthy on a national basis. This is why many nations take away zoning power from localities and move it to regional or even national levels. It's also why we don't have the power to vote for who lives next to us, at least explicitly. That would be local governance, but quite cruel and prone to abuse. Why do we give localities this right to implicitly vote out people? I would argue it is just as cruel and misguided as voting to ban your neighbor

pjc50 9y ago

> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact You'd better be prepared to demolish a lot of buildings if you're going to play it that way. A developer can have the buildings up, sold, the money moved offshore and the shell company responsible for the building wound up before the court case about lying on the affidavit completes. Also, you'd better have a plan to deal with the angry voters.

solatic 9y ago
Precisely this. Especially in a market with a humongous appetite for development like the Bay Area, if you unleash the flood gates, you're going to get a lot of charlatans who cut dangerous corners, and they will mysteriously disappear before they will be held to account. In the meantime, their victims will pay the price, either in blood or in the financial losses incurred from losing property that must be destroyed because it's unsafe. Regulation isn't so much the problem as regulation which is slow to the point where it effectively kills development. There is a balance.
ChefDenominator 9y ago
Because the buyers are hapless fools with no means to protect themselves.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Obvious-to-me solution: developers can't sell the building until the information in the affidavit gets verified. Basically, the entire scope of my proposal is to turn the "am I allowed to build here?" question into something that can be determined without the uncertainty of "how much effort will the local community put into fucking with the project".

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

> if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact That would likely lead to a solution that's actually worse than the problem. Court cases to resolve these violations will take years to adjudicate and will in most situations lead to a settlement that still fucks over those who were victimized. A better approach would be to reform our legal system so that it isn't and/or hire more court employees, judges, etc. If our court systems are perpetually overburdened, it makes sense to clear the bottlenecks to give them the resources and reforms so that they can meet their obligations. It's a travesty that in all the places I have lived in the US, going to court for some minor infraction or permitting issue will take me at least 3 hours or more, necessitating me taking a vacation or sick day if I didn't work remotely. When my number is called, the actual process takes usually no more than 5 minutes. Perhaps a relatively small investment in our legal system could lead to a large return

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Waiting in lines and paying by spending time is what you get when you can't pay for a service by spending money. The alternative is that the poor can't afford access to the legal system. Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  > Basically, the wait is serving an important role in making court expensive in an egalitarian way. But the wealthy don't wait anyway. They just hire lawyers.

mabbo 9y ago

> you give us an affidavit saying that your plan meets the specified rules, and you get a permit to build the same day, and if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact". My wife used to work as an engineer approving (or demanding changes) to plans for Toronto. The biggest problem is that developers will cut every-single-corner and later plead ignorance when they build the 'wrong' (cheaper) way. Here's what would happen in the scenario you're describing: Developers would build whatever the heck they like. Then, they'd be told "You built something that doesn't meet code". The developer would say "Well, my mistake, but it's built now and do you really want to tear down this new housing development that people paid for 3 years ago?". Now you have a political situation where the people who want to move in are being told that the building has to be torn down. Politicians would get involved, and the building (not meeting code) would be allowed to stay. This would repeat over and over again. I completely agree that we need a straightforward set of clear, consistent rules. But the idea of pre-approval without checking what the developer plans to build, how they plan to deal with waste-water, storm-water, parking, and a long list of other requirements, that's asking for trouble.

_archon_ 9y ago
This seems like the sort of behavior which can be disincentivized with steep fines. You, a developer, built a large building not to code? You have to pay to have it re-worked, and in addition you pay the local town $1000 per domicile affected per day it's delayed. Made-up example, but you get the idea.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Createdmall development company, take the contract, deliver faulty building, accept payment, pay out funds to employees (subcontractors) and owners of the company, shut down company if the district comes after them. It would incentivize his sort of behavior too.
  - crowbahr 9y ago
    Also known as "Whoopsies I went bankrupt sorry!"

usefulcat 9y ago

"..if stuff gets falsified on the affidavit we go after you after-the-fact" If I were a developer, I'd be hesitant to build anything with that hanging over my head. It probably also means I'll have more difficulty getting financing. Less up-front bureaucracy, more risk and cost.