Posted by Ilya Somin:
Adventures in Government Land Use Regulation:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_16-2007_09_22.shtml#1189972698
UCLA law professor Steve Bainbridge recounts the following personal
experience with the LA land use bureaucracy:
My wife and I wanted to put an addition on our house here in the
City of Los Angeles. Our general contractor told us that the first
thing we had to do was get up-to-date zoning and property
information from the Building Pemits Department. He recommended
that we hire a "fixer" who was used to dealing with the
bureaucracy. That was 2 months ago. Today, we were informed by the
City zoning department that they could not give us the necessary
zoning information ... because, according to zoning records, our
house does not exist! On top of which, the zoning folks also had no
record of the street on which we live.
I was speechless until it occurred to me to ask why, if our house
doesn't exist, we have to pay property taxes and so on. The answer?
"That's another department." Back to being speechless. I then
recovered enough to ask what we had to do to have the existence of
our house established, which I thought would be a simple process -
after all, you can see it on Google Earth. I was told we would
first have to have a hearing to determine whether the street that
runs in front of our house is a public street or private road.
Given the backlog, it would be about a year before that process
could be completed. Then we'd have to have another hearing to
establish the existence of our house. Then we'd have to apply for a
building permit, geological inspection, etcetera etcetera. At which
point, I gave up in despair....
Obviously, we shouldn't generalize from a single case. But it is worth
noting that Bainbridge couldn't figure out a way to solve this problem
despite the fact that he is a prominent legal scholar with (as he
notes later in the post) connections in city hall. Things may be even
worse for less well-connected LA property owners. The moral of the
story: even seemingly reasonable government regulations may seem
undesirable once we recgonize that they will be administered by
bureaucrats with little or no incentive to cater to citizens' needs.
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