[drewrbaker]

I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on the design and permitting process immediately. Despite it being in populated Los Angeles, we need a septic system, to widen the road and add curbs, move a power pole, relocate 3 trees, and extend a water line. We won’t have gas as we want to go all solar. All of this the city is making us pay for.

Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve.

The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening).

The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k.

The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too.

We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already.

I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building!

Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.

Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.

[999900000999]

You're in one of the worst ran cities in all of America.

I rant here often about how horrible LA is, wonder why they're so few new homes getting built in LA. Well now you know.

The cost to build anything is so astronomical. The only thing that gets builts are luxury apartments/condos are multi-million dollar McMansions.

To see an extreme example of this, just look at how much money was spent per each homeless shelter unit. Each of these units can only house one family or so, the city somehow spent $600,000 to $700,000 on each one. This source article uses a high estimate, some of these units are costing 800k.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/la-spending-837000...

I wish you the best of luck with finally getting your house built, but just factor in you're going to have to deal with these problems in every single aspect of living in Los Angeles.

I decided to leave, and in every aspect of my life I'm doing much better. I make more, my housing is cheaper, I don't need a car, and frankly everyone's nicer.

PS: If you want know WHY things are this bad, look at Prop 13. This allowed home owners to lock their taxes to when they purchased their homes. So say you currently own a house worth $800,000, you bought it 15 years ago when it was worth 200,000. You have no motivation to ever move, even if it would be better for you aside from the taxes.

So You end up with a very large contingent of homeowners who are going to be in their properties for their entire lives, and are extremely resistant to any change. NMBY level Max. Many people in LA don't want you to be able to build your house in any efficient manner, the easier it is to build a house. The cheaper houses are. If I'm a home owner, I don't want competition.

[_fat_santa]

Really all across California, there seems to be this huge battle between the status-quo and the demand for change.

On the one hand you have the obvious demand for change. Housing if far too expensive, far too difficult to build and thus costs and astronomical amount which skews the economics of home building to the higher end of the market.

The top wants this change. The citizens want this change (for the most part). The solutions penetrate down levels of government until they are stopped dead at the lowest level. The bureaucracy at a certain level realizes they are on the chopping block and halts progress on change. They push back, their unions push back, the works.

So what you end up with is a bloated government agency, bloated for the sake of being bloated, making life miserable for the majority of residents, all of the sake of keeping itself in it's current bloated state.

The only thing that i see fixing the mess in California is if the guys at the top eliminate these many of these agencies. But they won't, because these agencies workers have unions, lobbies, the works. So the system will likely stay. Politicians will stay in the good graces of bloated government agencies which will only become more bloated and oh...the citizens? Who cares them.

[always2slow]

>the USPS sucks

No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather.

Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver.

FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation.

UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.

[Cerium]

USPS is great. I run a small ecommerce business and each year a package or two is lost (out of hundreds, maybe this year thousands). So far USPS has been responsible for one and UPS the rest (I don't ship on any other carrier). As you mentioned, the USPS carriers are almost always friendly and helpful.

[parkingrift]

It is stunning to me that people within the same country hold such opposite views on things.

I live in NYC and USPS is worse than useless. They’ll leave shit on the porch (in NYC), lie and say they put it in your mailbox, or lie about attempted deliveries. It’s usually easier to just order it again than it is to get USPS to make a second attempt at delivery.

If I need a local letter or package delivered I would prefer to hand deliver it than entrust it to USPS. If I have something important to deliver I would never even consider USPS.

For me USPS is just spam delivery service. The only thing I reliably get from them is junk, and it’s a weekly chore to move junk mail from my mailbox to the recycling bin.

[light_hue_1]

It depends on where you live.

USPS regularly leaves mail in the wrong mailboxes in my location. FedEx and UPS never do. And the people delivering the mail here are incredibly rude. My neighbors and I have to regularly swap mail. No amount of complaining fixes anything.

[hahamrfunnyguy]

Mail delivery to my home has gotten worse over the past ten to fifteen years. I complained to the local post office about this, and they said part of the reason is that this route no longer has dedicated carrier.

[hfjfnnf]

It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine. Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes.

Whats worse, USPS has some PO boxes in some condo complexes, residents of which rent PO boxes that are at their physical residence and USPS delivers mail to these PO boxes. Its also sprung a private business who collects mail from PO boxes amd deliver to physical addresses for a small fee.

I simply dont understand why its the case here.

[vageli]

> It depends on where you live, I am in one of the cities around lake tahoe. USPS here doesn't deliver mail to your residence, however UPS/Fedex deliver just fine. Instead everyone in town rents a USPS PO box, to which USPS delivers and everyone goes to the Post office to collect their mail from their PO boxes.

Do you have to pay for the box? I was under the impression that the USPS was legally obligated to deliver mail to your residence. I wouldn't expect to pay for their shortcoming.

[throwaway48375]

I agree USPS is by far the best carrier.

[zbrozek]

This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here.

I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.

It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.

[ryanSrich]

Completely agree. I bought land in 2019 with the hope of building. Not only is the government painfully slow, no builder will take on the project unless the budget is north of $5m. That’s what I was told. $5m and they’ll sign a contract to start in 2025. Anything less than $5m and they aren’t interested. This is the case for around 6 builders I’ve talked to. I’m probably going to just end up selling the land.

[mensetmanusman]

At those prices it might make sense to fly out workers from the Midwest and house them.

[ryanSrich]

There isn’t anywhere for them to live. Luxury ski towns are feeling this pretty hard throughout Colorado.

Get this. If the average rent is north of $3k/month for a 1bd. And the average house costs $3.7m. Where is a ski lift worker making minimum wage supposed to live? Or the person running the only local gas station? Or the food service workers? They can’t live outside of these towns because the prices are still within 50% of the prices above. It’s just entirely unsustainable.

Now take this and apply it to larger cities, where even teachers making $50-$80k/yr can’t afford to live within an hour commute.

I’m all for a free market, but at some point you need to protect critical workers, and the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs. Most places have neither unless you’re borderline homeless poor. Middle class continues to be gutted.

[bubblethink]

>the only way I can think to do that is through rent control and special housing programs.

This is a part of the problem. Rent control is such a half assed solution that makes everything illiquid and worse for anyone not already locked into a good deal. It's similar to the deal that incumbents have in ownership. Look at SF. Rent control or not, you will have to pay 3k+ for a 1 BR in a 100 year old building with no appliances, poor heat, and no parking. Only people who have been living in rent controlled apartments for their whole lives have a good deal. It doesn't facilitate liquidity at all.

[ryanSrich]

Yeah I probably misused rent control there. I didn’t mean anything specific, or to imply the way it currently exists. It could even be as simple as the government subsidizing housing for critical workers. Doesn’t have to rent control for everyone.

[deepakhj]

Ski towns should have prioritized apartments and condos in dense villages to make proper transit in town and from the city make sense. Instead they allowed mostly large single family homes.

[zbrozek]

House them where though? CA is short housing, that's one of our worst problems. And local homeless people have already put up tents and parked RVs everywhere.

Could we have avoided this problem by building housing while labor could still afford it? Sure. But we didn't, and now we reap what we sow.

[jeffbee]

Sounds bad but objectively Los Angeles has the fastest permitting process and the lowest fees of major California cities according to data compiled by the UCLA Lewis Center. Not to say you are lucky, only that this problem is actually much worse than you've described.

The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!

[ryanSrich]

Yeah LA isn’t “bad” compared to most places. Try to build a house in Boulder Colorado hahah

[s1artibartfast]

I had a similar experience. After 20 years off the power grid, we wanted to connect to the grid and the nearest line was about 1/4 mile away. The state and PG&E wanted ~500k and several years to extend the power to the home.

Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.

[nostromo]

> The American bureaucracy is insane.

This is an California issue, not an American one.

> Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it.

Again, this is a California issue. We know the bureaucracy is broken, but we vote for the same incompetent people over and over again.

[lbriner]

I think bureaucracy is broken generally. It is a fallacy that all problems can be avoided or solved by "due process" since life is infinitely more complex. How many people have been told by a Local Authority that something is 5mm too wide or 30cm too close to the road?

I think the only solution, like we have in UK Courts, is that you need people who are trusted with an amount of knowledge and wisdom (i.e. the Judges) who are permitted to, for example, visit a property and take a holistic view. "Is the drain slightly too close to the road? Yeah but realistically 90% of the other properties have a contravention that is not enforced so just get on with it".

We used to have something similar in Local Authorities in the UK where the "Borough Engineer", pretty much had the last call on roads, street lighting etc. If you wanted to make representations, you wrote to them and they decided whether they cared about what you were complaining about. No appeals.

As the article says, where this gets unfair, people think that by adding process or sign-off, you get the best of all worlds but the truth is, that only works if everybody wants the same thing, otherwise as OP says, people game the process even if they can't win as some malicious act to cost the builders money.

[lesam]

NYC taking 17 years to build 3 subway stops doesn’t sound broken?

[rootsudo]

"Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?!"

They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with.

By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity.

You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.

[x3iv130f]

Americans need a better voting system.

Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design.

Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.

[dragonwriter]

> Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.

No, it won't. Any system with single member districts as the sole basis for representation in the legislature has minimal impact on the problem. If you want to fix it, you need a system that structurally promotes proportionality. That doesn't have to be a party list system; I personally prefer small (5-ish) multimember districts with STV.

(Incidentally, I find the way Instant Runoff Voting proponents have shifted to preferring the name Ranked Choice Voting for the very worst of ranked choice methods annoying.)

[gjvnq]

I would recommend Ranked Pairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs

[unnamed76ri]

Much of what you describe is specific to California and to a lesser degree democrat run states in general.

[criley2]

Splitting it by Democratic/Republican is a bit of a trick because nearly all urban areas are Democratic and nearly all rural areas are Republican. So talking about "Republican run urban areas" is a bit of an inside joke, Republicans can't/don't/won't run an area with any concentration of people.

As someone in a very Democratic run city in a very Republican state, believe me when I say, the Republicans who run this place are absolutely pathologically insane. They have lost their minds and our legislative sessions are mostly full of rank conspiracy theory and foreign agit-prop. What little work the Republicans do here revolves around attacking the successful city to placate the poor rural 52% majority, usually through as much wealth transfers and cancellations of urban development as they can.

[s1artibartfast]

Mostly correct, but many republican counties are far more reasonable.

Meanwhile, in the bay area a building permit is required to replace a water heater, toilet, or dishwasher.

moreover, When you do a renovation yourself, the fees are based on the typical cost materials and labor, even if you do the work yourself.

[gnopgnip]

A building permit is not required for a toilet or dishwasher replacement in the Bay Area, in Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley at least

[s1artibartfast]

In San Mateo County they do.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

[unnamed76ri]

They make you get a permit to replace household appliances? My goodness…

[thatfrenchguy]

They do for the water heater, not the rest (at least in San Francisco). Obviously that’s how you end up with 90% unpermitted work when you buy.

[hackerfromthefu]

My god, is this just designed to skim FAANG salaries, I can't see much other reason for it?

[s1artibartfast]

Toilets must be permitted to ensure they meet local standard for water conservation.

Obviously this isnt a problem that cant be solved by controlling sales, because people will just drive to neighboring counties to get toilets that actually work. Mine takes 3 flushes.

[tastyfreeze]

The bureaucratic inefficiency existed before FAANG.

[umvi]

Don't project California's/LA's inefficiencies on the rest of the USA!

[bilbo0s]

Sounds the same as what we've got going here in Wisconsin. Permitting is murder here. It's horrible and takes forever.

[umvi]

I built a house in Idaho, and it was pretty painless

[zbrozek]

You have to live in a red state to build anything at all. I want to move to one to quit wasting lifespan trying to work my parcel. Sure I disagree with many of the social values, but those are abstract problems. I'm male, so I will never need an abortion. But I do need permits, so I want out of CA.

[eximius]

I wonder what the cost of the fines would be if you built anyway. If they didn't make you tear it down and the fine was less than the difference in costs, it might be optimal to skip.

[throwaway48375]

My girlfriend's parents have been trying to build a house on undeveloped land in LA county for over five years now. It wasn't until one of their kids got a job that made them connection in county government that they started getting things approved. It is absolutely ridiculous here.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.

No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.

[xvector]

The problem is that there is no incentive for a government service to perform as its existence is not at risk.

There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well.

The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.

Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve.

They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.

[lotsofpulp]

> The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.

USPS is not federally funded. The federal government mandates the USPS to serve every single address in the US, even if it causes them to lose money, but does not give USPS any money. So they have to subsidize that with their other pricing, but FedEx/UPS do not.

[missedthecue]

The USPS may not technically get congressionally allocated tax dollars each year, but they do have

1. A federally protected monopoly on the delivery of all mail smaller than a manila envelope or parcel. This is why FedEx can't mail a letter for you.

2. A federally protected monopoly on the use of mailboxes. This is why Amazon must park their truck, get out, and walk up to your front door to leave a tiny box.

3. An exemption from property taxes on all post office locations. Competitors must pay tax on their offices, distribution centers, and retail locations.

4. Interest free zero covenant loans from the federal government that only must be repaid in theory.

[lotsofpulp]

Good points I had not thought of!

[pishpash]

It's "not" funded but gets politically motivated emergency loans and sometimes one-off funds from the Treasury, or it couldn't run a deficit. It's probably quite corrupt in how it spends money.

[lotsofpulp]

Interesting, I had not heard of these. Seems like it passed in the house in Feb 2022?

[AvesMerit]

I agree with your sentiment with the DMV, but I would remove USPS from your example.

That specifically is not federally funded, does have alternatives (FedEx, UPS), is under both economic & political pressure to compete, AND outcompetes the private alternatives by serving all addresses in the continental US. In fact, FedEx and UPS often add USPS to their routes for last-mile deliveries when it is economically advantageous - so it is those private carriers who are being subsidized by USPS

[DangitBobby]

The other side of that coin is that they are not driven by profit motive, so the cost of improvement is not passed on to the users as "what the market will bear", but instead "at cost" so improvements are much more likely to be worth it for users of the service instead of just a new and exciting way to justify price increases.

As for "no reason to improve" well, there's no reason for people to do more than the very bare minimum, and yet they do it all the time. Sometimes organizations improve because they want to. I might even argue that it's harder to improve under existential crisis, not easier.

I think it's become a bit of truism that private businesses are more efficient than government run organizations. I wonder if that holds up under scrutiny?

[chii]

> Sometimes organizations improve because they want to

or that there's an alternative reason for their action other than maximal profit.

There's darwinian natural selection at work in the private sector (where reproduction can be taken to mean profit). Such a force doesn't exist in gov't funded entities providing a service. That doesn't mean there's no force to make those services improve - it's just not the darwinian natural selection force (may be a politician decides to make it his/her objective to improve XYZ as a promise for votes).

[EricDeb]

I generally agree but also the local residents (who do vote in local elections) don't want permitting to be speedy. In fact they want it to be slow because there is a lot of NIMBYism and protectionism around property values. So in this case I think it actually is what voters want.

[ec109685]

The CA DMV is way better now than it was a few years ago (it was horrible). Nearby, there's a massive driver license / renewal center and you can do more online than before. And some positive stories here: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/16/grieving-parents-get-...

It also doesn't make sense that you need competitive elections to fix something like the DMV. There are humans in the seats of government and why wouldn't they want to do a good job?

[spaetzleesser]

A lot of government workers want to do a good job. I think in a lot of cases it's intentional underfunding that's causing problems.

[bluGill]

I'm not convinced it is under funding. It could also be too many managers and not enough front line staff. Or it could be too many regulations making the process need far more time (time=money).

I don't know, but I lean to too much process.

[zbrozek]

I watched pretty closely while I was changing from a KY vehicle registration to a CA registration. The staffer was plenty quick, there was just an absolute heap of stuff to do that all seemed pointless. I'm sure each of those little legally-mandated whatsits was well-intentioned, but in aggregate they bedraggle getting anything done. Similar story in zoning / planning. And in both arenas the result is that doing things is slow and expensive. Please, government, spend some tiny modicum of effort on deregulating and streamlining for the sake of not wasting my limited lifespan.

[thatfrenchguy]

California DMV is so efficient, I’ve never seen a government agency be so fast during Covid.

[pishpash]

Because they're not graded? No KPI tracking.

[ec109685]

Why wouldn't they have KPI's? It doesn't make sense that government has to equal incompetent: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/about-the-california-departmen...

The military is a government agency and while not perfect in a lot of ways, they aren't incompetent.

[scarface74]

The military is very incompetent. It has bases that it neither needs or wants and are just make work projects. But this is the fault of the civilian government.

[koolba]

> There are humans in the seats of government and why wouldn't they want to do a good job?

I can’t tell if this is a joke.

[spaetzleesser]

"There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well."

I have been to the DMV in Ca, NV and NM in the last few years. All of them had appointment systems. In all three states I got there at the appointment time and had my car registered and a new license in between 30 and 60 minutes. I would rate the service better than at most private companies, competition or not.

[jjav]

Post-pandemic CA DMV has moved a lot more online, including things like title transfer which used to be in-person only. So you mostly don't need to go to the DMV anymore.

And if you do, since most people aren't going, it is now quick. A handful of years ago I remember appointments were a couple months out. Last month I needed an appointment and got one for the next day (and it wasn't a one-off, there were times available every day of that week) and I barely waited 5 minutes when I got there.

[bluGill]

Sure, once you get an appointment. Last time I tried they were booked a month out. Then when I got there I forgot one piece of paper and another month before I could get the next appointment.

Before appointments I just walked in, and worst case was only an hour wait.

[oblio]

It's deeper than that, since you also have the "competitive" telcos.

[ransom1538]

"Residential Construction Permits require an average of 5 to 7 working days for approval or response. Commercial Construction Permits require an average of 14 to 21 working days for approval."

First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.

[xnx]

One of the primary goals of homeowners (one of the largest voting blocs) is to prevent the decrease in the value of their homes. In this way, government is fulfilling its purpose beautifully.

[theNJR]

I’m curious why you are putting yourself through this? Given this is a multi million dollar project, why not purchase an existing home? I know inventory is tight, but you’d close on a place within 6 months.

[tonyedgecombe]

>It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.

Corruption isn't the answer to these problems.

[b0afc375b5]

I like to think corruption isn't the answer to ANY problem. Is there a problem in which this isn't the case?

[SubiculumCode]

Sounds like a City problem, not an "American" problem.

[abecedarius]

It's an American problem to the extent most of the economic opportunity is in that kind of city. (The recent growth of remote working does help.)

[jimmaswell]

Why do you even want to live there?

[oblio]

Job, family, a million reasons.

I really hope you're not gatekeeping.

[jimmaswell]

No, it just seems like such an arduous process that I would pick somewhere else if it were me. I'm personally likely aiming for Montana.

[dboreham]

You'll still need a septic permit in Montana and only certain excavation contractors are certified to install septic systems.

[bluGill]

Sure, but the cost of a permit is cheap, and the certified contractors are charging a fair price. I think you are allowed to install yourself if you have certified plans that you work to.