I was looking at a home with property on the central coast, inland a bit. The gentleman had spent the last 20 years building his own little subdivision. He ha

I was looking at a home with property on the central coast, inland a bit. The gentleman had spent the last 20 years building his own little subdivision. He had 10 or so homesites of 1 acre with modular homes on poured foundations. He told me that he would never do it over again. He told me a story about how he was required by law to build an affordable unit for every however many traditional units, so he had to build one. The problem was that the county also said that the maximum acreage for an affordable unit was .5 acres, but the minimum acreage for a septic system was 1 acre. There is no overlap in that venn diagram. So he was stuck there for a while, then the local government organized a meet and greet where he could meet the folks in local government in that county and tell them his troubles with getting his subdivision built. The guy in charge of the affordable housing laws was on one side of him at the table, the septic guy on the other. In that moment each of those men discovered that the venn diagrams did not overlap. Those two functions of government had never talked, and didn't even known that their regulations were mutually exclusive. He said it was a lot of that kind of stuff. What I learned from that whole interaction- don't develop property in California.