7 ms·

I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal ti

I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick with the county and they are charging me based on the size of my parcel rather than the number of hookups I need. My house is actually in the county (but in the city impact zone). So now I'm spending my time combing through legal records, state supreme court case rulings, etc. all relevant to my situation to try to get things resolved. Literally everything is a fight. I even had to push and fight to get a build-right for the parcel - because it is currently zoned ag - which my country requires a max house density of 40 acres per house. I could rezone - but that would require me to get permission of all my neighbors to rezone so that my new residential zoning would be contiguous with existing residential zoning. I've had to fight to get permission to have an arch/rainbow driveway. Then I wanted to have an accessory dwelling, but ag zoning doesn't allow this either - never mind that this is totally allowed for all residential zoning types in the county and nearby city. And on and on. I've spent several hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars trying to jump through all these hoops - and I haven't even started building anything yet!

slashdot2008 5y ago
There is lots of ag zoned land around me. nobody wants it rezoned to residential as that means more people and most people don't want more people around. People always buy the ag lots cause they are cheap and have low taxes if you have ag activity, and then want to build more housing on them than the zoning allows, because that is lucrative. just use a septic field instead of the sewer hookup if the county won't play ball. then they can't increase your sewer rates every year.
- rwcarlsen 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    > And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY. I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness? Really I think the state ought to be setting complete menus that the local governments can pick from and apply in specific areas. If it's not possible to build a house in some location, it should be clear that it's not possible to build a house in that location. And if it is, it should be clear that it is.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      > I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness? It's less that it's any more straightforward in NY or CA, it's just that zoning and NIMBYism regulation is not the sole domain of either American political party. You can't escape it by moving to a red state. The usual canard is something like "California won't build more dense housing, so I'm moving to Texas," but housing is even less dense in Texas, so lower costs are not caused by less regulation around housing density! It's just that the ratio of supply to demand isn't as out of whack yet, as metro area populations have been lower and the cities themselves less landlocked, so building out has been easier and cheaper.
      - dboreham 5y ago
        Rural Montana here: you can do pretty much whatever you want. From time to time I muse about building a nuclear waste dump...
        ticviking 5y ago
        Makes me miss the Rockies
        greyhair 5y ago
ed_balls 5y ago
what if you just build it? What are the sanctions? Can you legalise it later?
- sjg007 5y ago
  They force you to tear it down. If you don’t they will and charge you for it. That being said there was one guy in LA who built a massive house called the enterprise I think. Edit: he lost in court and is being forced to demolish it.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    I've never been able to wrap my head around why things work like this. If what you build isn't a nuisance to neighbors, houses the same number of people as before, and doesn't pose a safety or environmental hazard, what business is it of anyone else? I've met a significant number of otherwise carefully law abiding people with various non-permitted remodels and even outbuildings. (I guess the latter won't work so well in the future now that we have regularly collected high resolution elevation maps). It really seems like something is wrong with how this is handled across most of the US.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Building codes are written in blood.
      - d110af5ccf 5y ago
        I assume you're referring to the safety and environmental aspects that motivate them? Which (to reiterate from above) I recognize the importance of. The trouble is all the things that run afoul of local zoning rules (and sometimes even local code!) for no obvious reason other than "that's what it says". The refusal to issue a septic permit noted in a nearby comment is a prime example. Such things should be "will issue" so long as they won't cause any health or environmental problems in that location.
neartheplain 5y ago
States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Just before Austria-Hungary's collapse following WWI, the collection of taxes in Dalmatia (now Croatia) cost twice as much as it raised [0]. We still use the word Byzantine today to describe systems that are "complicated, secret and difficult to change" [1]. I don't know what this could mean at the city or county level. Keep an eye out for wayward Sultans and Allied powers? [0] https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire [1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/byzantine https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Even if you only count from the time it didn’t share an Emporer with the West, rather than viewing it as a linear continuation of the Roman State, looking at the Eastern Roman Empire as somehow a state that did a substandard job of standing the test of time is, well, implicitly setting a really high bar, since even counted from the partition its, what, the second longest lasting state in history?
- autocorr 5y ago
  While I totally agree with the point you're trying to make, to be fair to the Byzantines, having a continuous state structure for a near millennium (500-1200 CE) is actually the near opposite of ossification leading to speedy collapse. To Western Europeans coming from the very loose state structure of feudalism, the fact that the Byzantine Empire was effectively a modern state (similar to ancient China) was practically incomprehensible to them. Hence the phrase! On the flip-side, the level of institutional capacity let the Romans and Byzantines ride out incompetent Emperors fairly well compared to feudal states that would quickly disintegrate with one bad roll of the "off-spring lottery".
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    This is one reason I'm wary of any big structural changes to the US tripartite system. "Abolish the Senate!" or "abolish the Supreme court!" sounds like a fun adventure in governance but, regardless of personal political tilt, the system gives people time to organize against bad policy. It's hard to get policy I like, but the same processes slow policy I don't like down enough to organize against it. Even the most blatantly tyrannical presidents through history hit a wall of bureaucracy. It's slow, but people like me tend to get murdered when tyrants take over, so I'll take it over a quick changing system that can easily turn against me.
nibles_and_bits 5y ago
Why did you buy a lot zoned ag when you clearly wanted one zoned residential? A little due diligence before purchasing the lot and you would either know what you in for and still buy or decide it's too much of a hassle and walk.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  They probably bought a lot smaller than 40 acres and assumed that logically, a single dwelling would be allowed since otherwise a dwelling would be impossible.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    That is not a logical assumption. If "a dwelling would be impossible", the logical conclusion is that zero dwellings would be allowed. This situation is the norm in US unincorporated zoning. I have never heard of any unincorporated jurisdiction with a "minimum residences per parcel regardless of parcel size" exception. If there is such a jurisdiction, it's the exception not the rule. There is a limit to how many dwellings an area can support without major infrastructure upgrades (sewerage, water lines, new roads, additional sheriff's deputies). This limit has to be divided among the parcels. The fairest way to do it is by acreage. "Minimum acres per dwelling" is just the reciprocal expression of "maximum dwellings per acre" and more well-behaved since fractional acres make sense but fractional dwellings do not. Giving tiny postage-stamp parcels the right to build one dwelling would be a windfall for all the kooky "sliver parcels" created by things like railroads and surveyors' errors. Those obnoxious error parcels are made undevelopable in order to encourage that they be merged into a neighboring parcel.
- rwcarlsen 5y ago
  I didn't buy it until I figured out the (very convoluted and possible) way to build on it while ag. Because rezoning is a long, expensive process that can trivially be blocked by a single neighbor that doesn't want to rezone with me. I wanted the parcel because it was in what I considered a desirable location for a reasonable price. In my region, finding property is getting very difficult - and unless you want to go super far away from civilization, you don't have so many options.
joe_the_user 5y ago
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. Costs like for all city services are standard everywhere in California. The reason is proposition 13. Cities can't raise taxes to pay for services so they basically have to charge for each service "a la carte". That sewer charge is more or less for what you and others are going to get from the city over some longer time frame. It suck but the alternative is home owners paying taxes, which home owners have decided they don't want to do.
gscott 5y ago
I would suggest subdividing the parcel.

slashdot2008 5y ago

There is lots of ag zoned land around me. nobody wants it rezoned to residential as that means more people and most people don't want more people around. People always buy the ag lots cause they are cheap and have low taxes if you have ag activity, and then want to build more housing on them than the zoning allows, because that is lucrative. just use a septic field instead of the sewer hookup if the county won't play ball. then they can't increase your sewer rates every year.

rwcarlsen 5y ago
Unfortunately, the health district won't issue a permit because of the existence of the "will serve" letter from the city. So this is turning into quite the ordeal to get sorted out. I'm really hoping to keep things out of the courts, but that is a very real possibility. And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > And I live in a relatively low-regulation state. I don't know how anybody ever builds anything in CA or NY. I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness? Really I think the state ought to be setting complete menus that the local governments can pick from and apply in specific areas. If it's not possible to build a house in some location, it should be clear that it's not possible to build a house in that location. And if it is, it should be clear that it is.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    > I'm not an American so I don't know anything about your system. But perhaps the existence of many state level regulations crowds out the city and state level regulations and therefore you get less uncooperativity and more straightforwardness? It's less that it's any more straightforward in NY or CA, it's just that zoning and NIMBYism regulation is not the sole domain of either American political party. You can't escape it by moving to a red state. The usual canard is something like "California won't build more dense housing, so I'm moving to Texas," but housing is even less dense in Texas, so lower costs are not caused by less regulation around housing density! It's just that the ratio of supply to demand isn't as out of whack yet, as metro area populations have been lower and the cities themselves less landlocked, so building out has been easier and cheaper.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      Rural Montana here: you can do pretty much whatever you want. From time to time I muse about building a nuclear waste dump...
      - ticviking 5y ago
        Makes me miss the Rockies
      - greyhair 5y ago

ed_balls 5y ago

what if you just build it? What are the sanctions? Can you legalise it later?

sjg007 5y ago
They force you to tear it down. If you don’t they will and charge you for it. That being said there was one guy in LA who built a massive house called the enterprise I think. Edit: he lost in court and is being forced to demolish it.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  I've never been able to wrap my head around why things work like this. If what you build isn't a nuisance to neighbors, houses the same number of people as before, and doesn't pose a safety or environmental hazard, what business is it of anyone else? I've met a significant number of otherwise carefully law abiding people with various non-permitted remodels and even outbuildings. (I guess the latter won't work so well in the future now that we have regularly collected high resolution elevation maps). It really seems like something is wrong with how this is handled across most of the US.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Building codes are written in blood.
    - d110af5ccf 5y ago
      I assume you're referring to the safety and environmental aspects that motivate them? Which (to reiterate from above) I recognize the importance of. The trouble is all the things that run afoul of local zoning rules (and sometimes even local code!) for no obvious reason other than "that's what it says". The refusal to issue a septic permit noted in a nearby comment is a prime example. Such things should be "will issue" so long as they won't cause any health or environmental problems in that location.

neartheplain 5y ago

States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Just before Austria-Hungary's collapse following WWI, the collection of taxes in Dalmatia (now Croatia) cost twice as much as it raised [0]. We still use the word Byzantine today to describe systems that are "complicated, secret and difficult to change" [1]. I don't know what this could mean at the city or county level. Keep an eye out for wayward Sultans and Allied powers? [0] https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-and-late-austrian-empire [1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/byzantine https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

dragonwriter 5y ago
> States with this amount of obstructive ossification, such as the Byzantine Empire or Austria-Hungary, don't generally stand the test of time. Even if you only count from the time it didn’t share an Emporer with the West, rather than viewing it as a linear continuation of the Roman State, looking at the Eastern Roman Empire as somehow a state that did a substandard job of standing the test of time is, well, implicitly setting a really high bar, since even counted from the partition its, what, the second longest lasting state in history?
autocorr 5y ago
While I totally agree with the point you're trying to make, to be fair to the Byzantines, having a continuous state structure for a near millennium (500-1200 CE) is actually the near opposite of ossification leading to speedy collapse. To Western Europeans coming from the very loose state structure of feudalism, the fact that the Byzantine Empire was effectively a modern state (similar to ancient China) was practically incomprehensible to them. Hence the phrase! On the flip-side, the level of institutional capacity let the Romans and Byzantines ride out incompetent Emperors fairly well compared to feudal states that would quickly disintegrate with one bad roll of the "off-spring lottery".
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  This is one reason I'm wary of any big structural changes to the US tripartite system. "Abolish the Senate!" or "abolish the Supreme court!" sounds like a fun adventure in governance but, regardless of personal political tilt, the system gives people time to organize against bad policy. It's hard to get policy I like, but the same processes slow policy I don't like down enough to organize against it. Even the most blatantly tyrannical presidents through history hit a wall of bureaucracy. It's slow, but people like me tend to get murdered when tyrants take over, so I'll take it over a quick changing system that can easily turn against me.

nibles_and_bits 5y ago

Why did you buy a lot zoned ag when you clearly wanted one zoned residential? A little due diligence before purchasing the lot and you would either know what you in for and still buy or decide it's too much of a hassle and walk.

jjeaff 5y ago
They probably bought a lot smaller than 40 acres and assumed that logically, a single dwelling would be allowed since otherwise a dwelling would be impossible.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  That is not a logical assumption. If "a dwelling would be impossible", the logical conclusion is that zero dwellings would be allowed. This situation is the norm in US unincorporated zoning. I have never heard of any unincorporated jurisdiction with a "minimum residences per parcel regardless of parcel size" exception. If there is such a jurisdiction, it's the exception not the rule. There is a limit to how many dwellings an area can support without major infrastructure upgrades (sewerage, water lines, new roads, additional sheriff's deputies). This limit has to be divided among the parcels. The fairest way to do it is by acreage. "Minimum acres per dwelling" is just the reciprocal expression of "maximum dwellings per acre" and more well-behaved since fractional acres make sense but fractional dwellings do not. Giving tiny postage-stamp parcels the right to build one dwelling would be a windfall for all the kooky "sliver parcels" created by things like railroads and surveyors' errors. Those obnoxious error parcels are made undevelopable in order to encourage that they be merged into a neighboring parcel.
rwcarlsen 5y ago
I didn't buy it until I figured out the (very convoluted and possible) way to build on it while ag. Because rezoning is a long, expensive process that can trivially be blocked by a single neighbor that doesn't want to rezone with me. I wanted the parcel because it was in what I considered a desirable location for a reasonable price. In my region, finding property is getting very difficult - and unless you want to go super far away from civilization, you don't have so many options.

joe_the_user 5y ago

gscott 5y ago

I would suggest subdividing the parcel.