Re:Florida started penalizing bureaucratic delay. Housing pe...
by EdwardDiego on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @07:16PM
(#32245265)
A poorly built building, disregarding catastrophic collapse, can
a) affect your health. [0]
b) lose large amounts of value, requiring significant investment of extra capital to remedy. Given a home is usually a person's largest investment, this can be ruinous. [1] [2] [3]
There's a reason building designs are regulated, and plans checked to ensure that they're appropriate for the planned site. Again, not saying that building consent processing shouldn't be sped up, it's a significant bottle-neck, but you have to accept that old trade-off, fast, good, cheap, choose two.
I'm not sure what level of government handles these things in Florida, is it at a county level? Anyhow, how have they implemented changes in response to this bill? Have they hired additional staff? How is that being funded, is it coming at the cost of other municipal spending, or will they increase application fees or taxes?
Or, will they just start rubber-stamping applications to meet the requirements with the staff they have? Or, were they just all sitting around with their thumbs up their butt? I highly doubt it's the latter, but seeing as it was implied throughout the entire article, I'll offer it for consideration.
The article was completely silent on this. And history is rife with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies. For example, when a centre-right government in my country wanted to reduce the amount of people on waiting lists for publicly funded elective procedures, it set targets, and penalties. But it didn't increase funding, as it believed that there was "waste" in the system, so wanted the healthcare providers to reduce that "waste" and use it to fund more surgeries. Then the consequences kicked in - people were put on "secret" waiting lists until they could be seen within the timeframes set by central government for the "official" waiting list [4]. Some people were simply not put on a waiting list for surgery they needed, because they wouldn't get it in time.
a) affect your health. [0]
b) lose large amounts of value, requiring significant investment of extra capital to remedy. Given a home is usually a person's largest investment, this can be ruinous. [1] [2] [3]
There's a reason building designs are regulated, and plans checked to ensure that they're appropriate for the planned site. Again, not saying that building consent processing shouldn't be sped up, it's a significant bottle-neck, but you have to accept that old trade-off, fast, good, cheap, choose two.
I'm not sure what level of government handles these things in Florida, is it at a county level? Anyhow, how have they implemented changes in response to this bill? Have they hired additional staff? How is that being funded, is it coming at the cost of other municipal spending, or will they increase application fees or taxes?
Or, will they just start rubber-stamping applications to meet the requirements with the staff they have? Or, were they just all sitting around with their thumbs up their butt? I highly doubt it's the latter, but seeing as it was implied throughout the entire article, I'll offer it for consideration.
The article was completely silent on this. And history is rife with the unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies. For example, when a centre-right government in my country wanted to reduce the amount of people on waiting lists for publicly funded elective procedures, it set targets, and penalties. But it didn't increase funding, as it believed that there was "waste" in the system, so wanted the healthcare providers to reduce that "waste" and use it to fund more surgeries. Then the consequences kicked in - people were put on "secret" waiting lists until they could be seen within the timeframes set by central government for the "official" waiting list [4]. Some people were simply not put on a waiting list for surgery they needed, because they wouldn't get it in time.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_mold#Causes_and_growing...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_condo_crisis
[3]: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~raojw/crd/reference/referenc...
[4]: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/memo-reveals-secret-waiting-li...