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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

[1] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

> 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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Rural Montana here: you can do pretty much whatever you want. From time to time I muse about building a nuclear waste dump...

Makes me miss the Rockies

I have not lived in Rural New York in over thirty years, but when I did, there were unzoned areas in the Southern Tier, and looking at what got built there, it was clear that it was unzoned. I am certain that many of the properties were uninsurable. I knew one resourceful individual that built his own house, basic carpentry, started with tar paper exterior over open stud frame, no windows, just one door, no interior walls. None. There was the kitchen sink, five feet away, there was the toilet and bathroom sink. The interior 'insulation' and walls were discarded carpets nailed to the wall studs. Power came into a fuse panel, that only had (first year) a single double plug outlet, and a single ceiling light. The next year, he picked up a dozen windows from the dump, someone else had upgraded, and installed windows, and sheet rocked the external walls. As he 'rocked', starting low and working up the walls, he filled the voids with crumbled newspapers (also from the dump) for insulation. Are we having fun yet? So at the end of year two, he had tar paper siding (and roof), newspaper insulated exterior walls, no interior walls, and an newspaper insulated sheetrock ceiling. He also installed plugs around the perimeter exterior walls, and added a couple more ceiling lights. Almost entirely from found and recycled material. That is what no zoning will get you. I moved away around then, and have not been back. I don't know anyone that lives in that particular county any longer.

I had >30 acres (12 ha) in a famously restrictive county in CA in 1999. Zoned for timber production, one house per parcel.

Before the building permit was issued I had spent $120k on a fourteen-inch stack of documents and fees, for a house of 2200 ft^2 (~200 m^2).

It has got much more restrictive in the intervening time. New construction in the timber production zones has just about halted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It sounds like you signed up for something like the fight you’re having.

You are lucky that you can even abuse it that much. My home country seems a bit stricter. My grandparents split their farm between my uncle, aunt and mother, with the later two only inheriting a house. When my mother tried to pass it on to my brother someone noted that it handn't been part of a farm or used to house farmworkers for years and should be torn down. The plot it stood on had to be converted to residential to deal with that surprise.

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.

I would suggest subdividing the parcel.

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

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.

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.

Building codes are written in blood.

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.

> The refusal to issue a septic permit noted in a nearby comment is a prime example

The problem isn't that they're forbidden from using a septic field when there's a perfectly good sewer line nearby. The problem is that they're being charged $40k for a sewerage connection. Where I live, it costs only $1000 for all the permits and inspections required for a new connection.

"Only" $1000. That's an absurdly high amount for what amounts to a visual compliance inspection in my opinion.

I would have to disagree that the unreasonably high fee is the only problem there. Charging a captive customer an unreasonable amount is certainly abusive. But so is arbitrarily forbidding what is permitted on private land. Such restrictions should require clear and articulable justification based on real world impact.

> That's an absurdly high amount for what amounts to a visual compliance inspection in my opinion.

This is really outside my wheelhouse, but I could see an argument being made about the capacity of the larger system.

E.g. The direct, marginal cost of installing service to your house is $200 to review the plans, send the guy out for an inspection etc. But the added capacity requirements of you and the 10 new houses in your development puts an upstream sewer out of capacity, costing $50,000 to upgrade. If you don't charge the full marginal cost through the whole system for the upgrade, either the rest of the city is subsidizing your marginal cost, or there's a significant monetary shortfall on the short (say 1-3 year) timeframe, and you'll hope a rate increase is approved to make up for it.

It's an interesting point, but bear in mind that the scenarios raised in this and adjacent threads didn't involve subdividing but rather just hooking up an existing lot. One would hope that system capacity was at least sufficient for the lots that already existed when it went in.

If there were a need to charge for capacity upgrades, it seems such things should be billed separately and explicitly. (My electric bill itemizes hookup, transmission, and generation among other things.)

And absolutely none of it explains why septic should be disallowed!

If the infrastructure is available, it had to be built, and someone paid for it. If there wasn't a hookup before, then it seems reasonable to pay the full share to recoup the investment, even if the line is right there. Otherwise the infrastructure investment would have to be paid by someone else, or from other taxes.

These days, septic should be disallowed, if a reasonable sewer is available, as these days the effluents contain all kinds of toxic and non-degradable stuff that poisons the land and ground water. Over here, lossy septic tanks are illegal. You can either hookup to a sewer, treat your wastewater in situ via certified processes or, under some conditions, use a non-draining septic tank and have the wastewater treated.

> "Only" $1000

I don't know your profession but let's take a statistical guess and say you're a software developer.

If I asked you to drive out to my place to take a look at 500 lines of Javascript, and tell me if the code is kosher, and if you're wrong I'm going to sue you. How much would you want to be paid to do that?

> if you're wrong I'm going to sue you

I think the local municipality typically sends an employee out to do the inspection? At least that's how it worked for me in the past (tbf that wasn't specifically sewer though). Permits having a nominal paperwork fee is understandable.

I very much doubt that the inspector only visits one property per day, or that they are paid anywhere near $1000 per day.

The legal risk is on the provider of the service, which is not the employee. Obviously the employee is not getting the entire fee themselves.

$40k only gets you permission to hook up. The inspections, excavation, and most of the plumbing work needs to be paid for by the owner independently. So all the work that actually costs resources to do is not part of that $40k fee.

No, a fair number are written in green ink. Green for someone else.

Devil's advocate: without regulations and permits, how do we know that what you're building isn't a nuisance etc. etc.?

That's why I never suggested the (obviously fatally flawed) idea of abolishing regulations and permits. Rather I raised an objection to the current state of their implementation.