Building with No Permit?

[robguz]

The issue is this. The County has laws. Those that follow them get their homes appraised based on the permits and are taxed more when they do so, including when they add additions to their homes. Those that ignore the laws face no sanctions. So the County either needs to enforce the laws, or not enforce them, but then tax every home the same as if there is no building on the lot. Otherwise they are setting themselves up for a class action lawsuit. Can I apply to unpermit my home so I can go back to $100 a year property taxes? I should be able to if the subject of the article can have an unpermitted, and in this case, dangerous home. The other issue is that because of these laws there are people actually hired to enforce them and sustain the whole bureaucracy of planning and permitting and inspecting. Why do we have them if there is ultimately no enforcement. Can they just all be fired immediately and the savings returned to permitted home owners?
This has nothing to do with "cranky neighbors" or issues around AG development. If a piggery is legal where they live then there would be no issue and no article if that is what they were upset about. There would also be no issue or article if a permitted, ugly home had been built. The reality here is that you are financially penalized by the County for following the laws, and they refuse to help you or do anything about it when someone else doesn't. I hope the subject of the article sues the County. I would certainly consider it if what happened to them happened to me. Personally I know of many unpermitted places in Seaview and I have not reported them and have no intention of doing so unless they directly impact me. Nobody likes the idea of displacing people from places where they have lived for a long time, even if not totally legally. But with this house, I don't even think the guy lives there, or at least not full time. And in forested areas where you can't even see such places I can somewhat see letting things go. But when it's a known illegal eyesore and makes the front page of the paper and the County does nothing about it..Wow! At some point I think that is going to cost the County, as in all of us taxpayers, a heck of a lot of money. The County created this problem and the County needs to solve it. I can see at some point courts demanding the County take action. It would be nice to hear council members and council candidates address this issue.....Are those crickets I hear?

[Carey]

The Trib Herald article was very interesting, in that one of the county people was said to have imposed fines on the "house of cards" last year, while another county official was quoted on the fact that there were no fines on unpermitted structures in 2011....

The property tax scenerio here is one I have yet to understand.... many of my neighbors pay far below the $100 "minimum tax" (senior relief) and some are very senior, but there are also some that are not... in-fact they are closer to or under our age (although maybe senior in some things, not senior enough for "senior relief"!), one has a house trust listed on the TMK & the occupants are younger than us... another has mom listed as a co-owner along with the son, who is about our age, has worked for the county & has a legal business permit posted on his carport??!!! with the house address.... so he has a legal business but is getting senior relief, though he is not 'senior' enough for relief....

[durian]

Poor people should be free to build the best house they can, whether it is permitted or not. If you are worried about your safety and the safety of the card house occupants, check out statistics for deaths due to houses falling down and compare the numbers to deaths due to being in motor vehicles or deaths due to poor diet. No significant improvement in the safety of Puna will be achieved by harassing people who can't afford to get building permits and licensed contractors.

[Carey]

Durian, although this is an interesting analogy...one of the main drivers for building codes are catastrophic failures... recently we have seen the call in other counties for more stringent building regulations after earthquakes & people loading failures caused hundreds of deaths. Chicago has had one of the toughest building codes for over a century...established after the extreme devastation of the Chicago fire (no matter what theory you believe for the start of the fire, the spread of the fire was not cow caused, but because of the way the buildings were built with no firestops within or between the buildings)

This is also a question that is being mulled an a global scale, should the poor be relegated to housing that would not be safe for the more well to do...with the increased hazards of structural & electrical failures and unsafe sanitation... if not, how to make sure that all have access to safe housing...

I am also not sure that the house of cards should be considered the best structure that the owners could build... there is an obvious use of materials (cost) & effort to build up, rather than build well. Any time you build a structure up, you increase the cost of the structure & increase the complexity....

[Seeb]

There must be some kind of basic and UNIFORMLY enforced Heath and Safety code or you end up with shanty slums. not everyone knows how to build and kids dont get to say where they live.
What is needed is to remove the politics and profiteering from it

[durian]

Carey, Another driver for more stringent building regulations is the delicious debt it creates in the population. On any policy that requires hundreds of millions of people to comply nation wide, it is wise to ask the question, "Who benefits?" Our nation's poor live on the streets in cities much colder than Hilo. Is America really concerned about the safety of poor people who don't pay taxes or contribute to election victories? Building codes are a cash cow for the banks.

My neighbor has 3 unpermitted houses on his land. He is also a politician. He has said that there are atleast a thousand unpermitted houses in Puna and that if he is ever challenged on his unpermitted buildings he is protected by a legal principle called "unequal enforcement" meaning he can argue that it is not fair to punish him for having an unpermitted house when a thousand others have an unpermitted house and are not being punished. I am no lawyer, so am only quoting him here.

I disagree that enforcement of building codes in Puna "is coming". People have been saying that here for 25 years. It was a realistic worry in boom times, but today with education cuts, pension cuts, prison cuts, military cuts, a devalued dollar, falling property prices, low interest rates, etc, it is further away than it was when it "was coming" 25 years ago. I believe that the rate of new housing that is non-compliant has increased in the last 5 years as well.

[Carey]

The advantage for the county to crack down on people building unpermitted structures? The overall taxes on land with a permitted structure HERE are more than taxes on land with an unpermitted home...some areas of the country have a much higher tax rate for land with un-permitted structures (making it a tax advantage to comply - although many here on island do pay much higher 'temp' power rates, some for decades, rather than complete a permit...so not sure that would do anything for compliance here), other areas do not allow sale transfer tags on property with un-permitted structures.

One of the main issues I can see with living here in an un-permitted house is that you are truly at the mercy of your neighbors....the only enforcement I have heard of is when a neighbor turns in another neighbor.... That & not knowing if decades down the line you will need to bring the "best building you could afford" up to present codes....

That really does impact people here, esp people that have lived in the structure all of those years... we know of one older lady that had to upgrade a house that had never been finaled, when her utility pole had to be replaced... HELCO would not re-instate her decades old temp power, she had to fully upgrade & final her house to obtain power... Oh & her power was cut off until the upgrades were finaled (she was not off-grid & the cost to establish a system was very high... thinking it was higher, as she did do the improvements, inc. elec system upgrades... but she was really in a pickle!)

Another draw back would be that the resale market is very limited due to the lack of financing - here you have built the best house you can afford & may have a very limited pool of buyers.... cash buyers have a very large selection to choose from!

[durian]

Cracking down on non-compliant buildings so as to gain more tax revenue is exactly what the county would do if that is what cracking down would yield as a result. However, when people don't have the money to upgrade, they simply can't upgrade. The actual result of a crack down would be homelessness for people with unpermitted homes. The ugly poverty of Puna would be moved from out-of-the-way subdivisions, hidden by ohias, and placed on display on the streets of Hilo and Pahoa. The county knows this increased homelessness would negatively affect tourism and all the tax collected from it.

That said, if the builder has the money to build a permitted home, I would advise permitting the structure. There is a statistical likelihood that the builder will re-sell (soon). Like many others have said in this thread, the builder of a non-permitted home can only sell to cash buyers.

In the current climate of enforcement, neighbors should think twice before complaining. If seeing an ugly building is enough to get a neighbor cranky, consider how cranky the owner of the non-compliant building will be once his neighbor starts a mini war with him. He may feel that the neighbor is trying to remove him from the house he has built on the land he owns. He may return the favour and actively attempt to remove the cranky neighbor. All kinds of Punatic scenarios can be imagined... [:p][}][:o)][B)][8][!][xx(]

Ideal solution: Be nice to your neighbors.

[Kapohocat]

quote:

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Originally posted by Carey...Chicago has had one of the toughest building codes for over a century...established after the extreme devastation of the Chicago fire (no matter what theory you believe for the start of the fire, the spread of the fire was not cow caused, but because of the way the buildings were built with no firestops within or between the buildings)....

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Harsher building codes do not always make sense - I dont mean cost wise, I mean they just dont make any sense.

In the link below - Glenn Allen a friend of my brother's - died because Cali has a really stupid code on spinklers to the third floor of single family residences.... they have to be CPVC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/19/...r-20110219

So Mr Allen died because the CPVC melted and filled up the attic which had it's own requirement of insulation - so the attic held water like a pool until it collapsed from it's own weight. It collapsed the second floor - bent Capt Allen in 1/2 from the falling debris and was unresponsive. He couldnt breathe. He suffered extreme burns as it took 3-4 mins to even get to him and not injure other FF's.

His daughter was in labor at the same hospital as the ER they brought him to. His grnadchild was born shortly after he died - just hours.

I got to listen to replay of the call - my brother happened to be visiting us when it happened. Made me sick just listening.

This is what doesnt make sense about building codes. I understand building codes are to keep us safe but no one checks to see the collision points in codes.

[Rob Tucker]

Fire sprinklers don't have to be CPVC. The builder or owner decided to save some bucks and go cheap. They apparently got plastic instead of copper.

12,000 sf house too. Always amazes me how someone will build something like a 12,000 sf house and cut corners.