Comment by rwcarlsen

I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick with the county and they are charging me based on the size of my parcel rather than the number of hookups I need. My house is actually in the county (but in the city impact zone). So now I'm spending my time combing through legal records, state supreme court case rulings, etc. all relevant to my situation to try to get things resolved. Literally everything is a fight. I even had to push and fight to get a build-right for the parcel - because it is currently zoned ag - which my country requires a max house density of 40 acres per house. I could rezone - but that would require me to get permission of all my neighbors to rezone so that my new residential zoning would be contiguous with existing residential zoning. I've had to fight to get permission to have an arch/rainbow driveway. Then I wanted to have an accessory dwelling, but ag zoning doesn't allow this either - never mind that this is totally allowed for all residential zoning types in the county and nearby city. And on and on. I've spent several hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars trying to jump through all these hoops - and I haven't even started building anything yet!