Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well, it's nice to know that the city of Orange won't let residents save water while the rest of the towns on the same water system are offering bumper stickers that say "I killed my lawn.. ask me how"
They should have watered their lawn with Brawndo. It's got what plants crave.
... 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.
LA Offers upto a $2000 rebate for ripping up your lawn
Seems that in June of '09, LA wanted to try to catch up with LasVegas who is paying people to rip up their lawns as well.
the intent of the cash-for-grass program is to reduce the 50 to 90 inches of water routinely applied to turf every year. Drought-tolerant substitutes may require just 15 -- in keeping with L.A.'s average annual rainfall.
For information on the L.A. Department of Water and Power program, call the regional water agency rebate hotline at ..... The recording will say funding for regionwide programs is exhausted, but keep listening. DWP customers can press 3 for more details on their rebate.
Also, here's the link to the SoCal Turf Removal Program.
... you guys in the USA need a lawn czar to stop this kind of stupidity ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
"...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.
Why is it your neighbor's responsibility to use their property in a way they dislike in order to bolster your property values?
I live in Virginia now, and this nonsense goes on not only in HOAs but even with city ordinances--mandating grass cutting, forbidding painting your house certain colors, etc. I just don't get it--in Maine, if you wanted a hot pink house with lines of toy soldiers and an above ground pool on your front lawn, that was your own business. It's your own property, and you have a right to use it how you want within the bounds of safety and environmental concerns.
Now, if it's a safety issue that's another thing. But the state's interest in defending property should be first and foremost to defend the right of a property's owner to use it as they see fit; if you want to have crazy aesthetic restrictions then you can move into an area with a draconian HOA.
Your water pipe issue is completely different, and I sympathize greatly.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
As long as it's not presenting a danger to neighbors, they should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.
One would think that but......
It looks as though you have yet to have the pleasure to live in a place with a home owner's association (HOA). If you get the wrong people in a HOA or you'll end up with crazy by-laws. You may think that "you'll just stand up to them" but you'll quickly realize that it's not worth the fight considering they can do things like put a lean on your home or take you to court and spend your own home owner dues to prosecute you. Combine this with the general legal craziness that is common in California and HOAs can be horrible.
If home values ever go back up and we move, finding a location without a HOA will be high on the priority list. I see no reason for a HOA as long as there are reasonable county laws. It's just an extra layer of bureaucracy that is often wielded by power-hungry disgruntled neighbors out to make sure the neighborhood looks and sounds just the way they like it.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
People need to stop worrying about what the fuck their neighbors do. It's their land, they are free to do whatever they want with it. So the hell what if your resale value goes down?
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.
Yes.
That's why I deny you the right to sell any stock I've invested in when bad news comes out about the company -- my resale value might go down 10-15%.
Oh, wait, the risk you might lose money due to other people's actions is an inherent part of stock [i]and[/i] land speculation. As long as it doesn't actually harm the other person's property, only it's presumed resale value, it's not a problem.
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.
Sooo... Basically, you value your personal property over the environment of the entire planet? How unselfish of you.
I'm trying to figure out why they needed 58,000 gallons to water woodchips though.
I think that was their total water usage, inside the house and out.
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.
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.
sigh. You do realize that the worlds biggest warlord was behind the Somali gov "collapse"
I don't know if the nytimes.com is the world's biggest warlord. Sure, it's annoying to have to register to read the article, but warlord?