Significant discussion yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31990364

I had a similar interaction with my local government around fence height. I had a small section of fence connected to a driveway gate and the city told me I had to remove both as they were too tall.

I investigated and sure enough the code as written limited fence height to 3' in a large number of cases, however it did not specifically mention gates. I hired a lawyer and $15,000 later I still had to lower the fence. ;). I did manage to get the gate itself allowed due to the poor wording on the regulation, but the fence, which had been there for >15 years had to go. It looks worse now, but looking good was never the intention of the regulation, oddly enough.

During the conversation I actually talked to the enforcement board and brought with me over 150 pictures of other fences on the same road I am on that also clearly violate this. I would estimate there are >10s of thousands of houses in the Portland area that violate this. They indicated they understood that there were probably lots of other violations but did not care. I asked why these other clear violations were not being investigate, and they said they are only required to investigate when there was a complaint.

I'll admit I did consider writing an automated job to file a complaint against every home in Portland that has a fence to make a point, but I suspect that point would be lost.

One of the problems with complaint based enforcement is the ability to use to to harass people. If for some reason you don't like a neighbor because of their race, political views, favorite sports team, or whatever else passes your mind you can start filing complaints that are clearly not enforced across the population.

What is a carpad?