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I have a funny story from Spain: My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water. He went to the City Hall, got al
by franciscop 4y ago
I have a funny story from Spain:
My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water.
He went to the City Hall, got all the tricky paperwork and applied for permission to build it. Months passed by without hearing anything, and at some point he just forgot about it, assuming he'd be denied silently. There's some people in the city hall don't like him too much BTW.
Few years later an official from the government came, "I'm here to check on the well you built", to which my father was of course confused "what well? You never gave me permission to dig it!". Apparently and according to this official, the normal thing to do is that you apply for permission, then build the project and finally then you'll receive the permission eventually, so he'd assumed my father had the well built already. Since as mentioned some people were against him, he was also not gonna officially break the law and build it before getting permission.
- pelorat 4y agoA friend of mine in Spain bought a masia, but was not allowed to tear down the old building to build a new house (protected heritage or something, even though it was junk). So the way around it was to do it in steps. Replace it whole building part by part. So now he has a new house (but it looks like the old one in shape), but there's nothing left of the original.
- jefftk 4y agoNot limited to Spain: here in Somerville MA I see people doing this pretty often. They leave just enough of the building standing (two walls?) that it counts as a remodel and they can keep all the zoning exemptions from the old structure. If they tore it down entirely they wouldn't be able to build anything nearly as large. Completely legal, but a good illustration of how even our new (and honestly much improved) zoning is too restrictive.
- ROTMetro 4y agoThis is the main way people under the California Coastal Commission's authority did projects up until I moved as well.
- Mizza 4y agoSeen this a lot in Philadelphia lately. Part of one outer wall remains standing, everything else is totally destroyed and built new around it. Creates some interesting looking collage-buildings.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giorgioz 4y agodon't ask permission, ask forgiveness
- merely-unlikely 4y agoThat sometimes backfires. My dad built a fence while the application was pending. The city approved the application but made him tear down the fence anyway and rebuild it since he didn't have permission when it was first built.