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Hippie commune shut down

From here, and only reading the article, it looks like a classic result of code officials confusing "being nice" (a good thing) with "not doing their job"(a bad thing). Whole decades were wasted not getting this done. All of the punting and the second and third and twelfth chances with no intention of real follow-up actually end up in a worse result for everyone involved.

Which is not unusual, but our culture as a whole struggles with this basic concept.
 
There are a lot of benefits to letting someone set their own timeline for compliance (including milestones), when they deviate from the timeline, allowing them to revise it.

I did this a lot. It does help with voluntary compliance. People are more likely to comply when they feel you are being reasonable (compliance "feels" more achievable). On the other side, when you are pursuing legal action, it sets a really good foundation in court to show that the persons didn't meet the schedule that they came up with and did not meet any of the revised timelines. It demonstrates a clear lack of interest in complying.

In a lot of cases, I would ask people to take another look at their proposed schedule to make sure it was reasonable and achievable. Most people seemed to think I wanted to see a schedule of this issue cleared up as soon as possible. Not true. I wanted to see a schedule where you took a week or two off, added in some time in case something comes up, etc.
 
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Twenty-five years into it they decided to get excited about shutting it down. The article says that the County is required to find housing for the people prior to bulldozing the dwellings. There's the assumption that these people are domesticated.
 
Yikes said:
https://www.sfgate.com/northcoast/article/california-hippie-commune-defeated-21069367.php
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Hmmm ...

For Norris, the former Yee Haw resident and longtime advocate, the board’s decision raises a larger question: “If the county can force people off private property who are not doing anything wrong … this could happen to anyone?” In a statement to SFGATE, she called the fight over Yee Haw a “David v. Goliath situation at the root” and acknowledged that the commune “may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it beats the streets.”
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Somebody has not been paying attention. In my state, people who thumb their noses at the building code can be fined and go to prison. You don't (usually) get sent to prison for not doing anything wrong.
 
Yankee Chronicler said:
Somebody has not been paying attention. In my state, people who thumb their noses at the building code can be fined and go to prison. You don't (usually) get sent to prison for not doing anything wrong.
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That's one of my biggest peeves when it comes to people who aren't in the industry (the dude in the article). They blow things way out of the water (slipper slope fallacy) and just assume things. What makes that dude thing the owner did nothing wrong?

I've worked with people like the owner of that property. Just do whatever they want and get in trouble when code enforcement finds out, pay the fine, maybe fix the issue, do the exact same thing again, and repeat over and over again. The owner wasn't going to do anything. If 25 years, $60k in unpaid fines, and changing the legal owner of the property suddenly is any indication, he was probably hoping to kick this can down the road forever.

I feel bad for the tenants though. They had a crap landlord who didn't do what they were suppose to do.
 
Anyone besides me wonder what funded this community? Did the long bearded owner let them squat for free? Was there rent involved in some form or other or was this all out of the goodness of his heart? How did they eat? Who paid for the electricity (assuming it wasn't bootlegged somewhere)? Just curious what the financial end of this looked like.
 
These are our main two local news pages, the search will show you there's a history of stories. Short answer, dude has money, just doesn't want to spend it the "right way" and/or believes his way is better.
 
The code enforcement photos show the real picture. "Hippie commune" paints a very nice picture, I've seen very nice places that would fit that title a lot better, and those places are not getting shut down by code enforcement. This place is not nice, to me it looks more akin to the various homeless encampments I've seen.
 
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