I’ve been recovering from eye surgery since Thursday afternoon and so have spent more time than usual watching TV. (The World Cup soccer, by the way, has been really fun; I loved Germany’s last-minute win with a beautiful set-piece goal yesterday.)
Last night my wife and I watched “Still Mine,” a movie that I hadn’t heard about. It’s based on a true story. (Spoiler alert: if you read the link on the true story, some of the suspense might be ruined.)
It’s a very libertarian, pro-property rights, anti -absurd government regulation movie. It’s about a man who decides to build a one-story house on his own property in the province of New Brunswick in Canada, a house that will work better for him and his wife, who has dementia. The man has learned to build well and so doesn’t understand why a government agency needs to judge his building standards. But he’s not implacable. He tries to work with them, to show them that his standards are actually higher than those in the rules. But what matters to the government bureaucracy is, surprise, surprise, the rules, not what the rules are allegedly designed to accomplish.
Any movie that I rate a 7 or above out of 10 is one that I am glad I saw. I would give this one at least an 8.5.
READER COMMENTS
john hare
Jun 25 2018 at 6:02am
Reading your post and links brought back my experience with a storage building and workshop I tried to build.
In 2000 I bought an acre zoned Linear Commercial Corridor with the intentions of building a small workshop and storage building with the rest of the land available for parking vehicles and equipment. I went down to the building department to make sure that I could do what I wanted. I have mentally blanked out much of the list of things I could do, though I remember that I wasn’t allowed to park a lot of vehicles and equipment there. Many trips.
In 2001 I got such a good deal on a 2,400 square foot pre-engineered steel building that I bought it and tried to apply for a permit. Couldn’t get one because the site “wasn’t developed”. I had to hire a civil engineer to develop the site. Several thousand and many months for a poor job the I could have done in a weekend given a requirements list as I have an engineering background myself, though no degree and licence. Still couldn’t get a permit as the building engineering wasn’t stamped for current code that had changed since I started.
By the time I had located the original building engineer in another state and paid for an updated print and all the various other hoops, my permit was issued in 2004 a couple of weeks before the hurricanes hit. Charlie, Francis, and Jean hit our county across six weeks. First steel panel didn’t go up until New Years Eve 2004.
It goes on with other problems. It had taken long enough, and cost enough, that I was in a financial bind by the time I started. The imposed feature creep put the project beyond the finance I had arranged, and my cash flow and reserves had dropped in the meantime as well. The project drug on as I could afford it until I lost it all in the recession.
I can get quite annoyed by people that insist that all the requirements are needed for our own good.
john hare
Jun 25 2018 at 6:05am
Previous comment. I have forgotten most of the list of things I couldn’t do on the property. Though a couple of weeks ago I drove by and noticed that the current owners have it covered with all kinds of vehicles and trailers that I was told I couldn’t park there.
David Henderson
Jun 25 2018 at 10:16am
Wow! Thanks, John. In Monterey (fortunately not Pacific Grove, where I live and which is next door), you need a permit to install a new dishwasher in a home. My impression is that few people bother because, for obvious reasons, that requirement is hard to enforce.
David Seltzer
Jun 26 2018 at 5:09pm
Some years ago, a friend, converted rental properties to condo’s in NJ. He did so , as did many other developers, to get around rent control. Getting a certificate of occupancy was complicated and time consuming, especially when you were carrying mortgages at 14%. City inspectors in several NJ towns expedited the process to one day when a fat envelope found its way into their hands.
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