> Your city and neighbors don’t want to be responsible for or have to deal with your house falling down because it was improperly constructed.
Why on earth would the city or the neighbors be "responsible" for that?
Why on earth would the city or the neighbors be "responsible" for that?
I'm building a house now. I sent the county... A picture of a square on a map. No plans no inspections nothing. Fuck all that. I build based on what seems reasonable after a cool Busch Light and then I just do it without asking permission from anybody.
Half my county did the same. It's not rocket science, and the world here hasn't fallen apart or burned down. But you will be told the opposite to get locked into expensive contractors and corrupt inspectors and the cash extracting nightmare licensing and permitting systems that surround that.
And before anybody gets too excited... this is all 100% legal if you pick the right spot.
The sewer one is obvious, since it could be a public health issue -- if you screw it up you could wind up contaminating local water sources (or just stinking up the area). Issues with the lumber you use, or with your building plans, could potentially result in your house collapsing in such a way that it might damage your neighbor's property. And getting a new permit if you take too long is probably just a way to force you to check in and make sure that you're not deviating from the earlier plans you filed.
Hell, if my neighbor's tree falls into my property and causes damages I can't be sure I'd be fully compensated for my losses. You can take someone to court, but they can't give you what they don't have.
People also just don't want to live in slums filled with run down barely standing shacks since it hurts their property value too. Part of living in a community means giving consideration to other people around you. The closer you are to others the more responsibility you have to be considerate of your impacts on those others.
At this point it seems completely plausible more lives would be saved through complete deregulation including setting loose uncle joe the methhead electrician.
RE:
>cities to turn into dangerous shanty towns where anyone who can lean a piece of corrugated sheet metal against a mud pile can call themselves a home builder.
My whole county did this. No inspections or building plans. It turned out fine. I became a legal 'home builder' with nothing more than filing my signature with the county. It's the only way I can even afford a house.
re county: believe the options are unincorporated burrows of Alaska, greenlee or cochise Arizona, Jackson Wayne and several other county in Tennessee, bunch of others.
I'd agree that those costs shouldn't be excessive, and they may even be higher than they should be right now, but we've got plenty of examples of what deregulated construction leads to and it's never the utopia you'd imagine. It's much better to have sane standards than to deregulate and allow our cities to turn into dangerous shanty towns where anyone who can lean a piece of corrugated sheet metal against a mud pile can call themselves a home builder.
I'm certain that I can find more evidence that a lack of regulation leads to deaths than you could of code compliance causing untreated cancer. In fact, some regulations prevent building homes using materials that we know have caused cancer. Feel free to try to find a study or evidence that suggests otherwise though.
Would you be willing to provide us with the name of the county so that we can determine for ourselves how it turned out?
Right. It's exact same problem as the FDA. If the FDA approves a drug and it kills people, they look bad. If they don't approve a drug and that kills people, no one blames the FDA because the FDA's victims in that case are invisible.
Someone else's property value is their problem, not mine. You're not guaranteed that the value of an investment is going to go up. It's called "risk", dude. Your opinion of what I should do with my property does not trump my opinion of what I should do with my property.
At one time, people claimed that their property values went down when a black family moved into the neighborhood. Guess what? They eventually had to suck it up and live with it.
On an individual level, sure, but if we have a repeat of 1929 or 2001 or 2008 or 2020 (we'll see about 2024), even if you're not personally directly affected, there are going to be ramifications that affect society beyond a couple of unlucky individuals. We don't really need another once-in-a-lifetime economic event.
This is true in some ways, and false in multiple other ways.
1. Fire (and similar) codes exist because other people don't want their homes to burn down because you didn't want to spend the money to safely build your electric/gas/whatever system.
2. Certain codes exist related to upkeep because, if your building become derelict and infested with rats, it's going to negatively impact the livability of the ones around you.
3. Some places you can run a business, other places you cannot. Zoning rules are extremely common. In fact, they are widely considered _too_ common, but even most people pushing back against them don't think they should not exist at all; just not be so strict.
4. Some places have rules set up as to what's allowed (length of grass growth being an example); sometimes as an HOA rule, sometimes as a government rule. And these exist both for health and for "this is what we think is nice".
If enough people in your area want _everyone_ in your area to uphold a certain standard, then yes... their opinion _does_ trump yours. Because that's how society works; people decide, as a group, what is allowed and what isn't.
And yet, weirdly, you're no longer allowed to prevent someone from selling their house to a black family, no matter how many "people in their area" want to forbid it. How do you explain that?
Majority rule isn't the only rule, dude. Individual rights are still a thing.
Maybe you should look at your house as a place to live rather than an investment vehicle.
Or maybe you should just accept that investments come with risks.
The exact same thing that makes me think I can't just walk into your home and take what I want, because I want it and you're not using it. The rules set forth by the society we live in, as decided by the people living in that society. Sure, not all the rules are great; many of them are awful. But the solution to that is to fix the rules, not to say there shouldn't be _any_.
No, it doesn't work that way. My house is not your house. My land is not your land.
If you're going to restrict my use of my property to increase your property value, you should pay me for that privilege.
The rules in many areas used to forbid selling houses to black people.
Those rules were changed. By force.