DIYbanter - View Single Post

wrote:
I'm a little irritated at this neighbor for being so
sneaky about the way that he put this driveway in. I think that his
theory is to just do it and see if he gets caught.

Nothing to add, except I feel your pain. This is very common practice
around here too: throw down the asphalt, and hope nobody calls you on
it.

But I can also see the flip side as well, because homeowners are in a
quandary in our town. We have conflicting ordinances: one demands a
certain amount of green space to asphalt; the other demands no
on-street parking. With the increase in people owning two and three
SUVs, where are they going to park? Plus then you have the trend here
of people converting single families into multi-condo/rental units,
meaning more cars per property.

If you do go through the legal route, they don't make it easy on you.
We wanted to expand our parking area, which currently only fits two
cars for a duplex of two families (total of four cars). It was a
nightmare of red tape to navigate, even though we had full support of
all our neighbors (who would love to reduce the number of cars on our
street). To extend the parking pad into a driveway going up the side of
the house to the back, we were told we'd have to foot the bill for a
100-year drain on the street, which ran into the thousands of dollars.

So we decided not to go through with it for now, and instead, are
planning on getting rid of our second car eventually, to save us the
hassle of constantly moving the second car every few days, and finding
another place to park when there's a snow storm. Having one car is good
for the environment, at any rate.

Yet then I can't help but feel a little befuddled when one of our
neighbors recently took the other tactic and just slapped down a new
driveway without going to the bother of permit process. No 100-year
drain, no hassles, job was done in a day. I'm not about to blow the
whistle on them, because now their five cars are off the street -
hurray!

jen