Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

I thought all lawyers knew better than to ask questions they did not already know the answer to .

Seriously, it is a good thing you gave up because the possibility of being told that the house had to be torn down because it should not exist was not small. No permit record means no approval. Maybe your street doesn’t meet code. Maybe it never did. As you know, there was a very good reason for not opening Pandora’s Box.

Well, why not add a non-existing addition to your non-existing house with a non-existing permit?

Seriously, though, don’t you have a a deed?

Dude, give your title company a ring. You paid for the insurance.

Ron Paul is a “Small l libertarian” too.  But you’re supporting Fred Thompson?  I really don’t get it. 

Eric Alan Isaacson

Do you have the legal description of your property from your deed when you purchased your house? The legal description should include the zoning description needed for the building department.

The building department for L.A. goes from a legal description--for example, the legal description of my house is “lot 6 of tract 1576 on page so-and-so of the book of maps, minus the south 215 feet thereof.” A book of maps were drawn up when the division where your house was first subdivided, and depending on the location, is often described as ‘lot so and so of tract so and so on page such and such.’

The street address of your house is assigned by a different agency, and has nothing to do with the legal description of your house used by the building department.

What happens (and I’ve seen it on occasion--my parents are in the home building biz) is that the translation from your house’s street address to the building department’s legal description often gets screwed up, especially in municipalities like Los Angeles. So my bet is not that your house doesn’t exist--it had to exist otherwise the mortgage company holding your mortgage would have never permitted you to buy the house. (It’s for the bank’s protection; otherwise you could walk away from your house leaving the bank with something that doesn’t exist.) My bet is that the person behind the building department counter couldn’t figure out the legal description from the street address, and simply punted.

One thing you may try is to find your house on the web site zillow.com; if you go to “Home Info” and click “more home facts”, it will give you a legal description of your house. With that you should be able to go to the front counter of the building department where you’re located (and keep in mind the city of Los Angeles has at least two building departments with separate books; one in downtown and one in Van Nuys) and see if they can’t find it based on the legal description.

And another thing: you can always try going to this site: http://www.permitla.org/parcel/

Enter your address or the assessor parcel number from your tax bill, and it should cough up the zoning information for your house. I tried a random address I found for a house for sale in Los Angeles and the web site coughed up the zoning information (in this case, RD1.5-1-0), along with other information such as the council district and even if a seismic gas shut off valve has been installed yet.

From there you can get information about zoning from the LA Building Department on-line (http://www.ladbs.org/zoning/zoning_manual.pdf), which will give you the setbacks, maximum square footage, and other information the building contractor needs to know to figure out if your addition is legal.

You’re thinking like a lawyer.  This situation does not call for law, it calls for public humiliation.

E-mail this story to the “consumer affairs” reporter at a major LA TV station, and get them to do a story.  I guarantee your problem will be resolved and you will receive several apologetic letters from senior city hall muckety-mucks.

Idiot bureaucrats are to public exposure and ridicule like cockroaches are to light.

Did you hire the “fixer”?

If not that may be the cause of your continuing “problem”.

If your contractor vouched for him that is good. You want to hire an honest crook.

why do you need a permit to do work on a house that does not exist?

Anybody here have any doubt that if Prof.B had the addition done to his “non-existent” house, his property taxes still would have gone up?

Why didn’t you do the most simple and obvious thing, ask to speak to the clerks supervisor. 

I’m willing to bet that you can get this problem resolved faster than you can get your frequent flyer problem resolved with your old favorite airline.

Small “l” libertarians should be voting for Ron Paul.
People who choose to support Fred Thompson deserve these sort of governmental nightmares.  It will help sharpen your thinking.

There are several good comments above.  Between the lawyer who handled your original purchase, your title insurance policy and the “fixer,” it should be possible to resolve this problem.  I, for one, have no particular desire for a regime where my urban neighbor can build any building he wants (wooden chimneys, anyone?), nor yet do I think we will be able to get the John Robertses of the world to work as buildings department clerks anytime soon, so the system of government regulation combined with third-party professionals to navigate the system will likely continue.

"why do you need a permit to do work on a house that does not exist?”

Exactly what I was thinking. Build the addition. What does it matter? It won’t exist anyways, as far as the city is concerned.