No way. Depending on the town, you'll either piss someone off, or a busybody will rat you out to the codes compliance people. Once that happens, they'll investigate and you're done.
When they figure out that you have guests, it's closed and the complainer is directed to do a noise complaint. If they figure out it's a business, you get cited.
> The Department's highest priority for investigation and resolution of reported violations are health and safety-related. If evidence exists that a violation of Planning Code may have occurred, the Enforcement Planner sends a notice to the responsible party... High service demands can routinely cause cases to remain open for some time. These cases usually involve violations that do not constitute a significant impact.
They only process 500 complaints a year. This is not a serious problem at the scale described in the article, so local governments do not allocate resources to it.
>No way. Depending on the town, you'll either piss someone off, or a busybody will rat you out to the codes compliance people. Once that happens, they'll investigate and you're done.
For most of HN that is true because most of HN lives in wealthy cities or suburbs that have enough tax income that they can have a big enough government to the point where spending man hours chasing down that kind of stuff is important. Poor cities don't have the resources to go investigate busybody crap.
All cities in the US are wealthy. Same applies to Canada, Germany, Spain... Sure there are poorer people, but on the global scale the poor in Spain are still rich. (this isn't to imply the poor have it easy)
You are mistaking the inhabitants for the city balance sheet. The inhabitants might be rich, but that doesn't mean the city government has the resources.
The article is completely focused on the US. In that context I assumed the person I was replying to was talking about relatively rich or poor US cities.
Poor and broke are two different things. When people say "poor cities" they mean "broke" because while the cities may not be poor by global standards they're broke because they don't have enough $$ to pay for what they're supposed to pay for.
True, but the point is still all cities in the US have plenty of resources to enforce whatever arbitrary thing they want to. (note that the courts might strike down some for constitutional reasons). That they don't have the resources to do all isn't anything new, even the richest person in the world cannot afford to do everything.
Maybe it’s a west coast thing. I lived in a fiscally challenged city (worst in the state I think), where the someone tried to repossess a fire engine for nonpayment of repairs. Code enforcement is a profit center.
They still managed to give my neighbor a $150 ticket for parking his commercial vehicle (Verizon Ford Taurus) in his driveway.
No way. Depending on the town, you'll either piss someone off, or a busybody will rat you out to the codes compliance people. Once that happens, they'll investigate and you're done.
When they figure out that you have guests, it's closed and the complainer is directed to do a noise complaint. If they figure out it's a business, you get cited.