Demonstrating Ultra Low Cost, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Self-Made Housing, Edible Landscaping, and Renewable Energy, Cont’d., Independence Day

Brenda Barnes, President
Home-Grown Food Network, Inc. July 4, 2009
North Palm Springs-Joshua Tree, California

I’m writing about another new phase in our under-$20,000, easy, fast, cheap, self-made housing, edible landscaping, and renewable energy project. We settled the case against the mobile home park, as I wrote about June 6, 2009.
Since then, we moved as much as we could in the time we had of the voluminous stuff we had inside the house outside, so we could move it on to new sites in the next 60 days after June 22, 2009. In the time since then, only 12 days, we’ve bought one RV to be able to travel around from site to site and are close to buying another one to leave most of the time and getting the septic tank put in so we can stay when we need to supervising and doing the development work at another site the charity owns.
That’s been an interesting process. One of the sites is a commercial 5-acre parcel in the City of Desert Hot Springs (adjacent to North Palm Springs where we’ve been located). The other is 2.5 acres residential (zoned rural living), located in the County of San Bernardino, about 20 miles from the DHS site.
Peter was going to write up what happened if we applied for permits to do the same development in both places, as far as commercial and residential development would be compatible given the two zoning laws, at the same time. His masters’ thesis in urban planning at Cambridge was on the effect of local zoning and planning processes on development, a comparative study between Ireland and Norway. This seemed to be a logical extension and update of that, and maybe he could get a research grant and/or get his Ph.D. We’re going to do the developments anyway, and we need to keep track of what happens to us for blogs and to keep justifying HGFN’s existence as a 501(c)(3) charity, so it looked logical to do an academic study, too.
My hypothesis on that—based on the lifelong research of Professor Lawrence Hagman, whom I had for an urban planning and law seminar in my last year at UCLA School of Law—was that getting permits in a city would be more expensive, slower, and ultimately more difficult than it would be in a county. Professor Hagman says every layer of government becomes more oppressive, duplicative, and expensive than the one above it. He says people put in a more local government because they think the layer they have at the time is too far away and unresponsive to some particular concern they have, like gays in the 70s in West Hollywood thinking the County of Los Angeles sheriffs were discriminating against them on Santa Monica Blvd. So people put in a city or town government to be in their control on that issue. It may work on the one issue. I haven’t heard of City of West Hollywood police discriminating against gays. But on myriad other issues—and as time goes on and the people who cared about the one issue get less involved in watching what the new government is doing, and in many cases there really isn’t enough legitimate things for yet another government to do–government expands and becomes intrusive in all sorts of things people used to manage for themselves. Besides, the local people who get elected and appointed to things never held office before, so there’s the aspect of being amateurs. Ironically, being local turns out to be the worst nightmare. Sarah Palin, after all, got elected mayor of Wasilla, Alaska because there wasn’t anyone else who wanted to be on the city council and she just pushed her way in once she got elected. Totally unqualified, ignorant, uninformed local people enjoy having power over their bothersome neighbors and then think because they can see Russia they’re qualified to control those neighbors, too.
Boy, was I wrong! It turns out to be impossible in the city, incredibly easy and free in the county. Cities may be oppressive, but they’re expensive and slow.
If I wrote the details, you’d think I was making them up. The City makes people have permits to move or build the smallest building, even a doghouse, into the city, and the permit fees, payable in cash in advance and kept whether or not the permit is granted, are over $5,000. The last time we turned in a plan, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happened for TWO YEARS.
By contrast, in the county anything allowed in the zone can be put in without a permit. No cost, no delay, absolute certainty. Imagine!
One thing I found out while researching this is that 78% of the commercial land in the City of Desert Hot Springs is vacant. No wonder! If there is land 20 miles away where the government is governing the largest county on the planet and does not feel the need to supervise or collect a fee for every move a citizen makes—much less being able to—why would a developer bother with Desert Hot Springs?
Amazing what one learns when one takes action. It’s the Law of Action. See The Secret. I’ll let you know how these actions turn out, and what our adjustments from those outcomes are. What an exciting life.
– 30 –