Comment by refuse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refuse | Hacker News Reader

I doubt many will see this comment now but...

In my local community (rural area) the county changed zoning laws on people's residential properties. It's a damned nightmare. You can't rebuild a home or get approval for anything. According to the wording of the law, the county can sell the trees on your property (and you have to allow any heavy equipment on premise to allow this to happen) and they can supercede any water rights you have (water is not scarce here like in the SW). To be clear those last two points haven't been used...yet.

The funny thing is that this happened along class lines in a 'progressive' county. Richer people have MUCH more forgiving zoning and many live right down the street from poor people who essentially don't own the land they live on anymore. The equity they used to have was wiped out almost entirely because nobody wants to buy their property due to zoning (!). Think they can get a loan now? What do you think happened to property values for the rich people?

I'm honestly surprised somebody at the end of their rope hasn't gotten violent about this, it's outrageous.

Given you are a brand new account with exactly one post, perhaps you'd feel comfortable sharing the location.

It's in Oregon, I'd rather not say where exactly because I live in a very, very small community and I'm not sure if it's a widespread problem in the county or a localized issue in my neck of the woods.

A lot of this goes back to the 70's IIRC where Gov. Tom McCall passed a law to limit land use, which was great. Nobody wanted the sprawl you see on the East Coast or in parts of California, it's why Oregon still has a lot of nice areas with small farms and communities instead of shopping centers. Also of concern was, say, timber companies doing a harvest and then selling the land for a housing development or something -- this would also be terrible. Unfortunately, some more activist counties used this to deprive people of property rights which they bought into, I know there was a huge legal dispute over an issue along these lines just outside Portland in the 90's. We also had a ballot measure that was on tge books for about a year or two which would compensate land owners for lost value due to zoning changes, but that was thrown out pretty quickly.

I'm not exactly sure how we got such clear class divides in zoning and if it was intentional or not, but the effect is black and white.

Also of interest is how different counties handled permitting post-wildfires in 2020. There are many wildfire victims from my area who have been unable to rebuild because of permitting issues and what appears to be intentional obstruction by the county.

A side note, I don't know any displaced wildfire victims that received the hundreds of millions in federal aid sent our way. FEMA didn't approve any loans even though hundreds of structures were lost in a poor rural area -- but they were happy to provide water and WiFi, which is...something.

I hadn't heard of anything directly along those lines, which is why I asked for location. Figured if it was close enough to me, I might be able to learn more; I'm always interested in other viewpoints as well as gov't policies that I may be unaware of, but still subject to. I live in Oregon, so I'll have to do some more digging. Based on the wildfire comment, I could make some educated guesses. Certainly every time I drive down 22 from Salem over to Bend I'm struck by how many houses are still not being rebuilt. There are some, but there are vastly more RVs siting on big empty lots with remnants of what was once built there.

Land ownership need not equal building ownership. The two can be in the separate hands and there are indeed buildings where that is the case.

Sure but in doing so you've stiffed the people least able to fight it. They don't treat businesses or the middle and upper classes like this because they'd fuck the county 23 different ways in court.

Essentially it's a slow-acting imminent domain without compensation.

Such an arrangement is not unlawful though. In fact, it can even be in two (or three even! ) different private entities: one for the land, one for the building, one for the unit ownership and and then the final tenant of the unit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com