Why California Zoning Laws Can Be Hard To Understand
Zoning laws can be difficult to understand. Sometimes people will build something, only to be told they have to tear it down for some strange reason or another. In the 1980's, there was a famous case involving a lawyer having to tear down his home because it was six feet too close to the river, even though he'd been given permission to build the house at that spot. Eventually the case turned into a circus, the house was torn down, and the lawyer and his wife's lives were never the same again.
California zoning laws can be hard to understand; they're certainly voluminous. A good example of that is the city of Los Angeles. Their zoning laws are so comprehensive that they actually had to put out a summary package to try to help explain some of those laws. The summary is more than 225 pages long.
You want to talk about some zoning laws that most people might not even think about? There's a zoning law for how one can display the American flag. There's a zoning law for how to store tow trucks. There's a zoning law for fortune tellers. There's a zoning law for how high fences must be around tennis courts. There's even a zoning law for selling pumpkins.
These zoning laws might seem odd, but the state has its reasons for creating these types of laws; we're just not sure what they are. In a state where you can have a $500,000 home sitting next to a $20 million home, it seems like its zoning laws would be a bit more liberal.
What zoning laws do, though, it set up ways for the system to generate money. In essence, if you have an ordinance which says you must have your home 10 feet away from a fire hydrant (a fake example), they can charge a consumer to have someone come out, do a survey, then give you a report that either allows you to do something or prevents you from doing it. It's an important point because most people, not knowing some of these laws, will go ahead and do something that seemingly makes sense, only to have someone come along later on, see that you've done something that's against code, and potentially issue you a fine or make you stop doing whatever it was you were doing.
This seems like a silly issue when you're talking about regulations for things such as batting cages (that's on the books). It could be overwhelmingly punitive for those who are looking to invest in prime real estate, buildings, factories, restaurants, hotels, etc. Not all lawyers, even real estate lawyers, know all these zoning regulations.
Therefore, it would be incumbent on anyone looking to do almost any type of business in California that concerns building something to run it by a zoning expert first. The amount of money it may cost you to pay someone for their expertise is easily less than the amount of both time and money it will cost you if you do something that the government comes back and says isn't legitimate