By an edhat reader
Where can I find what requires a building permit in Santa Barbara City? The city website isn’t easy to navigate and it’s hard to decipher if a small building project requires a permit or not.
Thanks hatters.
What Needs a Building Permit?
Anonymous
April 20, 2022, 8:00 am
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Thanks for contributing actual information, rather than editorializing.
says the guy who “renovated a home abroad” talking about rich man vs poor man.
there is no need for a lawyer, or architect to “decipher” that code.
My job was abroad and yes, I owned a home there. You do realize half of Europeans live in historic homes, right? Everyone from the working class to the upper class. Oh, hold on – my private jet to my 6th vacation home is taking off from SBA just now. I have to go. I’ll wrote more when we land in St. Barth’s. Eye roll.
The video states, “Building Permits are required whenever you construct, enlarge, alter, move, replace, repair, improve, convert, demolish, or there is a change in occupancy.”
Based on this vague definition, I need a permit to change a lightbulb.
Good luck with every figuring any of this out without paying an architect or a consultant to explain it to you. Most of them had to learn through trial by fire and error, and also through paying consultants themselves. The government here is either completely, yet innocently, incapable of producing a clear and concise document explaining anything, or it is deliberately obtuse in order to preserve and bolster its dense bureaucracy, keeping it impenetrable to outsiders because no one can even understand its structure or aims. It’s remarkable having lived abroad where documentation and regulations like this were written in clear and parse-able on the first read language. I renovated a home in a historic district abroad and the regulations were such that they fit on 1.5 pages of easy to understand text. Here it is impossible to figure anything out and the more city / county / state websites you visit, the more the incomprehensible bureacracy-babble piles up and it gets even more fun when you try to figure out why the various documents seem to contradict one another. The law is deliberately difficult to understand in this country. It keeps the little man down. The rich man can afford the pricy lawyers who can translate and decipher the code. In other countries, this is not the case – the law is accessible to all – without having to pay middlemen to interpret it for you.
In Noleta there are exemptions for certain small projects and emergency repairs. The the city of Santa Barbara you need a permit for almost anything, especially if you live in a special zone where you need a permit and an architectural review. This generally includes emergency repairs. I knew someone in the Mission historical area who was fined quite heavily over a water heater replacement. The thing busted a seam late Friday evening of a three day weekend. She was able to get a plumber from Simi Valley who was willing to do the replacement just before midnight on the way up to a fishing trip. The work got done and she didn’t have to go without water over a three day weekend and the original wood floors in her historic home were not damaged to badly but a neighbor ratted her out the next week. As I recall her insurance company filed a lawsuit against the city and the architectural review board and they caved and settled.
This was in the eighties and I don’t imagine that things are much different now.
Thankful it took a year to get approval for a backyard project…? Whoa… that’s borderline toxic positivity!!!!
Which is just crazy. We’ve obviously swing too far as it’s crazy to need a permit for Minor/easy fixits.
Never get a permit if you can avoid it.
I have made the mistake of getting permits in the past and it has been nothing but a ridiculous runaround. The inspectors usually don’t know what their looking at either and don’t catch actual bad work but come up with useless things to require.
I know other people who have rebuilt and remodeled entire houses without permits. You will only get caught if a neighbor fills out a complaint. And even then, the enforcers are reluctant to do anything.
The county is completely bloated with incompetent bureaucrats trying to justify their existence. Each individual department sets up their own review and inspect sham to meddle in the process. They are useless and a huge impedance to getting anything done.
Never get a permit unless there is absolutely no way around it.
Thank you for articulating the approach taken by those who are poorly socialized and don’t understand civilization.