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Officials Sue Couple Who Removed Their Lawn
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. 'We've got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,' said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. 'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."
As long as it's not presenting a danger to neighbors, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
... the law requires 40% live ground cover, so they should be given a citation.
They think that law is unjust, so they are doing their duty by not following it.
The correct outcome is for the law to be changed.
Limited powers not no powers. Somalia is a great example of what happens when the state is so far weakened that even property rights/life are not protected. At the opposite end of the scale, you might see something like North Korea which is not much of an improvement over what Somalia has. The idea is not to go to either extreme and maintain a reasonably rational government is large enough to cover the basics but not so big that people start to be strangled by it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
hush, don't force reality on him. He thinks he's going to be one of the warlords as opposed to the plebes
Je ne parle pas francais.
Yeah, tell that to Rosa Parks.
"...but not so big that people start to be strangled by it."
They always make new laws, and rarely get rid of old laws. The strangulation is inevitable.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The US is so far down the track towards autocracy that warning about the dangers of too weak a government is like warning a man who is dying from dehydration in the desert of the dangers of drowning if he's not careful when approaching an oasis.
I hate printers.
I live in a planned estate, fairly upmarket in appearance. Most of the houses have "arid landscape" themed gardens, and all plants are selected for low water requirements.
I can attest that, if done well, drought resistant garden design can look very, very nice. It's also far easier and cheaper to maintain, as weeds don't grow as readily. Our garden is made up with the hardiest plants from central Australia, thus we can literally starve weeds to death while the rest of the plants carry on fine. Having big, lush, high water gardens means that hardy weeds infest it easily and you're left fighting a losing battle.
I hate printers.
As a Radio Amateur, I continue to marvel at the range of awful looking things that one IS permitted to mount on one's roof or erect in one's back garden.
(I always thought that the fed's at the FCC had jurisdiction, at least in the case of a Radio Ham's tower issue. T or F...? Anyone know for sure?)
Anyway, the obvious difference between erecting a large tower & not buying water (which - when I come to think of this thread's details - may be the "real" reason that
the couple are being taken to task, despite their decision to do a Right Thing here) is:
A tower could fall over.
In the tower case, one could conceivably go round to all neighbors within a reasonable (eg, falling) radius of the intended tower base & get everybody to sign a "I think it's just great & wouldn't complain; I've checked with this guy's engineer (who has also inspected the work, which was done by licensed builders), all is in order, & - therefore - I support this guy's tower plans. Yada... yada..." ...and - before the tower-rise - get pre-construction approval for the project.
--
One could possibly have a similar thing here; eg, go to officials, lay out the situation (cost of water, need to redirect that $$$ to college fund for baby, etc.) & request an exemption.
THEN the story might have been:
"Officials force parents of newborn to spend money needed for baby's upbringing to buy water for their front lawn."
Now, THAT would have outraged your neighbors to come & support you.
At this stage, some of those will say, "Well, the law is the law." And, then, they'll go watch TV... :-/
But as a homeowner, it's what keeps the property value going.
Sure about that?
Lots of fancy places have forest. You can't even see the house from the street. You could hide almost anything: a large boat, a helicopter, a moat, a guard house, a private lake, a tour bus...
Lawn is for shitty places where developers crap out houses onto postage stamp sized lots. You get psychotic homeowner associations and chipboard walls. Lawn says "mass production" like nothing else.
Forest looks damn lovely.
Funny how the right wing love to talk about leftists being for overbearing government that controls everything you do, but it's the conservative strongholds that have laws like that.
The US is so far down the track towards autocracy that warning about the dangers of too weak a government is like warning a man who is dying from dehydration in the desert of the dangers of drowning if he's not careful when approaching an oasis.
From an outsider's perspective I would diagnose the problem somewhat differently. It's paradoxical, the US is in many way under-regulated (eg. the banking system, consumer protection etc), yet on the other hand there are numerous examples of regulation like this.
But I don't think the problem is with the actual regulation. To me there seems a dangerous lack of discretion on the part of administrators, as to when laws ought, and more importantly, ought not to be applied.
It is as if the mere fact that something breaches an ordinance justifies taking action against that breach, or the mere fact that a crime has been committed means that someone ought to be charged. Or perhaps it is only that failures of discretion, such as in the present case, which are newsworthy.
It is a Constitutional Federal Republic. The difference is important. For many reasons, it was designed so it is not a simple case of majority rule, where people just vote on everything and whatever gets the most votes goes. While there are strong Democratic traditions, it was designed specifically so that there isn't a tyranny of the majority (at least hopefully not). The idea being that just because you have one more vote, doesn't mean you get to impose your will on everyone else regardless.
This applies to all sorts of things. A good extremely specific example is the Constitution itself. It cannot be amended by a majority vote of congress, nor of a majority vote by the citizens. It has to be a 66% vote in congress and then ratified by 75% of the states. There are extremely specific provisions preventing a simple majority vote of any kind from changing it, the higher requirements are spelled out.
Now more generally the Constitution (and other laws) protect various rights from mob rule. Property rights would be one of those. 51% of your neighbors can't simply vote that your house should be bulldozed and turned in to a park. Even 100% of your neighbors can't vote to make that happen. Your rights to your property supersede what the majority happens to want.
That doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want. Various HOA rules are completely legal and enforceable, and this might be one of them, but it might now.
As a practical matter if this goes to court it could well be struck down since the city may not have a right to force water usage. One argument is that potable water is a somewhat scarce resource and cities themselves don't control it (water rights are at a higher level). Thus a court could find that the city has no right to tell people they must use extra water, as that can cause harm to surrounding cities.
From the article at least one neighbour didn't mind.
Heck he even helped them:
Soon after the city complained about the yard, the Has placed wood chips on top of the dirt, with help from neighbor Dennis Cleek.
"It's their yard, it's not overgrown with weeds, it's not an eyesore," said Cleek, whose own yard boasts fruit trees. "We should be able to have our yards look the way we want them to."
And from the pic, it looks ok to me. As for wood-chips being a fire hazard, it's no big deal, before they start burning in a dangerous way due to some external cause, those wooden houses will probably be on fire first...
Perhaps I'm not understanding something here, but why should your neighbor care about your home's value? Of course, in the case of a shared resource like a water pipe, it's a different matter but if it's my house and I want to fill my front yard with grey paint, why should anyone object. The whole "it's not aesthetic" argument is similar to the Taliban preventing women from wearing jeans because they don't like to see it. So where does it stop?
This will probably be interpreted as a flame, but it isn't meant to be one. The _reason_ these kinds of city ordinances exist is because people wanted them - and they wanted them because they help protect property values.
No matter how noble or righteous you might think ripping up your lawn and replacing it with wood chips is, it is still violating the ordinance.
If I lived next door I frankly wouldn't give a crap how Eco-friendly the sea of wood chips next door was - if it looked like crap and it was next to my house I would be pissed off. I'm all for creative ways to help the environment and save money - but not if it means violating ordinances that exist for very good reason.
Doing things like this is frankly makes you look like a child acting out... "The environment is more important than these stupid rules and there are just too many people that don't care about the environment so I will defy them in a effort to get the rules changed. So there!"
Yes, in the grand scheme of things the environment is more important. So what does that have to do exactly with this particular ordinance? Nothing, zip. The point is if you actually wanted to change the ordinance the way to go about it is to convince your neighbors its a good idea and go to the city council. Its done ALL THE TIME all over the country. Good luck with that in this particular case - people LIKE grass.
- sigs are stupid
There's more than one kind of conservative. There's the pro-government conservatives like the kind you may find in orange county, who really only oppose social spending, and there's the anti-government conservatives who live out in the country so they can avoid government as much as possible. The majority of conservatives are the second kind, but it's a slim majority and the first kind have better appeal with independent voters, so you really only see the first kind in office.
There is no such thing as a reasonable request when someone is trying to force someone to make their own property appear the way YOU want it to. No, not even "no broken windows" or even "no purple 10-foot lawn gnomes".
Don't give me that filthy lie about how "wah, they lowered my precious property values!" can provide even the most remote excuse. You don't have a right to high property values. Period. And you know it.
You, and anyone else who is less than 100% against the city on this issue, are violently anti-freedom and cannot possibly die painfully enough or soon enough.
Discretion? By the very nature of the law it should be applied all of the time indiscriminately, anything else is corruption.
then any law which, when enforced, would have insane consequences (like this) must be abolished.
Let's try and tot up what would survive...
FGD 135
"You [...] are violently anti-freedom and cannot possibly die painfully enough or soon enough."
I don't think you know what the word violently means.
You don't have a right to high property values, and they don't have a right to have flaming crosses on their lawns 24/7. That right is exactly as made up as the right to high property values. It turns out that the neighbourhood was set up with strings attached, and either you accepted those strings by moving in there (and thus have nobody to blame but yourself), or this came up after the fact and you didn't agree to it, in which case you probably do have some recourse to complain.
And actually, with broken windows, that actually is known to increase crime in the area. I *do* have the right to security of person.
By the way, I'm DEFINITELY against the city on this issue. But you can take it too far. It seems that a lot of people maintain a childish notion of what legal property rights are and won't let go of it in the face of overwhelming countervailing evidence. Note that I'm sure a good argument could be made that property rights should be different, I'm just complaining about what is.
in many of these suburbs backyard clotheslines have been banned as well. some people reading this will think I'm making it up. Others reading it will think that everywhere has these laws.
apparently the "logic" goes that only poor people don't use electric dryers in the desert, and that perceived perception lowers the property values for the neighbors.
live free or die? hell no! these chains have resale value.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Discretion? By the very nature of the law it should be applied all of the time indiscriminately, anything else is corruption.
So the choice is between corruption and mindless stupidity? When a law clearly has harmful consequences, you should revise the law, not cling to it against all common sense.
Enforcing laws does require discretion and common sense. I think your attitude is exactly what's wrong here.
In the end, rules are meant to be broken. As long as you do it openly and for well-specified reasons, there's nothing wrong with it. (Then again, I'm Dutch, and we're famous for structurally and intentionally not enforcing our own laws. Pot is technically illegal here. Governments just decided not to enforce those laws in the case of pot.)
the idea behind water rights is to stop upstream farmers daming up rivers and bankrupting their neighbours, people collecting the water that's fallen on residental roofs shouldn't be the target.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Political discussion in USA is hampered by the fact that instead of discussing if a certain change is good or bad, frequently it's discussed if it'd be "socialist" or "communist", with the implied understanding that if yes, then it's nessecarily bad.
Which fails to be true offcourse. Communist dictatorships where abhorrent in many ways. It doesn't follow that any policy they might have supported, is automatically bad. This sort of black-white thinking is seriously broken. "If my enemies do that, I'll do the oposite, just because."
Universal access to education is a good example. Because what you say is true; while the people to benefit FIRST are the poor people who get a good education they wouldn't otherwise get, the rest of society benefits second, because with that education, the people will WORK, and pay TAXES, and in general contribute more than they otherwise would.
It's not hard to show that education-levels correlate positively with just about every positive thing you can think of, from low teenage-pregnancies, low crimerate, good health, low unemployment, etc etc etc. USA is not alone in accepting a large dirt-poor uneducated underclass. But it's not a clever thing to do. Even if you're in the upper quartile, it'd be beneficial to you to do something about it, your quality of life would improve, unless you LIKE high crime-rate in your society.
It's more than that. "Property Values" are practically political magic. The moment people start thinking of themselves as having a right to property value rather than to property merely, they inevitably come to see control of their neighbors' behavior as their prerogative(since, empirically, it is obvious enough that your neighbor can modify your property value according to their behavior). If you believe in your right to property value, any sort of (visible) social deviance is a form of theft and crime. This is how people who ostensibly believe in property rights can end up living in places with absurdly tyrannical HOAs, and even participating in the tyranny themselves.
Then, of course, you get the pricks who just hate nonconformity without any financial basis whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that they are just evil; but they become convenient allies to the first group, when it comes to keeping sacred property values high.
That is so wrong for many reasons. Discretion in applying the law may result in corruption, but it is necessary for justice, and is built into the system.
Discretion is applied at all levels - from the policeman giving you a warning (you went through a red light in an empty intersection after a full stop but you are rushing to the hospital), to the prosecutor (yes, you bounced a check (a felony) but it was an accident and you made good on it right away), to the jury (I will not convict the white man for marrying a black woman no matter what the law says), to the judge (case dismissed or probation for a man who murdered his wife- they were both 90 and she had painful cancer and he failed when trying to commit suicide).
The no discretion, Zero Tolerance (zero intelligence) application often results in injustice.
In the end, rules are meant to be broken.
Rules aren't created for the sole purpose of being destroyed (like crash test dummies or firearms targets). Rules are meant to be followed. Breaking them sometimes makes sense if the rules are written poorly. Creating laws with an intent to enforce them randomly invites corruption on the part of the state (they can supress one class of people or specific people), and invites disregard for law and society in citizens. Observe U.S. traffic patterns for an example: driving 10-15 miles per hour over the speed limit is common, even in 15/20/30mph zones.
Absolutely correct. Another thing to remember is that they would be trapping the water so that they could USE it. The water will end up as run off regardless.
That's a long, well thought out reply for not reading the article.
They don't have a dead, ugly lawn. They removed the lawn and added plants that don't need a lot of water. You know, the kind of stuff that naturally belongs in California. The city IS coming after them for not making it a lush, green, expensive and environmentally negative artificial oasis.
I can't speak for the federal/state government issues because I'm ignorant about that. But is it left-wing to like the federal government? Here in Europe the commies hate the European Union's guts.
Redistributing the wealth of people with less than you is typical behaviour of the rich, right or left. They all want to escape taxes but they loooove juicy government contracts to make their companies richer. That's why the less government unregulated free-market bullshit will never succeed. Everybody wants to suck mama-State's big tits. The rich advocate less social spending because they want more for their own pockets. Of course this is not sustainable.
About healthcare, it is a right in all developed countries (and many 3rd world) except the USA, it works better than the system you have and it costs a lot less. So I don't see your point, here.
About the nutjob thing, I agree that many American right-wing politicians and pundits sound like dangerous psychopaths to me. When I was working in the USA I used to watch Fox News to have a few laughs in the end of the day. We have a few really bad newspapers and TVs here, but I could never imagine that something like that was actually possible.
Anyway, are the Hollywood millionaires and the Silicon Valley executives so keen on all these things? Are you sure? They live in hundred-million-dollar mansions. Why would they give a fuck?