William J. Polley

Sorry I am not buying it. I worked for 10 years in a County planning/zoning/building department and none of this rings true. First of all you don't hold hearings to establish whether or not a street is public or private, that is an absurdity either Public Works maintains it or it doesn't and the road crew has a Street Atlas or equivalent to tell them which.

Even if for some reason this had to go to Hearing it is hard to believe it would take another hearing to establish the existence of the house. At worst it would require a civil survey which would locate all structures in relation to property lines (and btw establish whether that is a private or public or private road).

Moreover generally zoning is map based, whether your street showed or not you should be able to figure out its zoning.

Anything is possible, building departments earned their reputation for a reason but between the use of the term "fixer" and the notion that there is a two month wait for an informational question to be answered this smacks more of urban legend than anything. In jurisdictions a hell of a lot less sophisticated than LA all of this info is available online.

I'm not sure what motivation Professor Bainbridge has to make up such a story. You'd have to take that up with him.

My reaction is that this would be more likely to happen in a large city where the left hand may not know what the right hand is doing. It would probably never happen in my town of 20,000. (Though I would never say never.)

Consider also this possibility... Perhaps on an initial search the street and the house were missing for whatever reason. Maybe someone didn't get the memo. In time the information could be tracked down, but who knows where to start. Now this probably doesn't happen very often, so the clerk might have been a little hazy on exactly where to go from there. I'm sure we've all had those moments when dealing with a bureaucracy where the person we're dealing with realizes the situation doesn't fit the usual mode. I'll bet a lot of erroneous information gets dispensed at such moments.

Bureaucracies are good at handling stuff that happens ever day. Not so good at handling things that don't fit the mold.

I have no reason to take Bainbridge at other than face value. Is it possible that this is easier to rectify than he makes it out to be? Sure it's possible. But if even the basic premise of the story is true, it is not a problem that I would want thrust upon me.

One commenter on his site discusses his experience with the L.A. building department and how things work and replies: "My bet is that the person behind the building department counter couldn't figure out the legal description from the street address, and simply punted."

That's pretty much what I described. I've certainly seen similar things happen in other bureaucratic situations.

He obviously encountered a clerk that did not know what to do when faced with an unusual situation and was in over his head.

My question is why didn't Professor Bainbridge take the simplest route and ask to speak to the supervisor-- someone with more knowledge and authority.

But of course the professor has a record of difficult dealings with bureaucracies-- see his story of trying to get some frequent flyer miles.

The good professor has a history of difficult dealings with bureaucracies, both public and private -- see his story of trying to get some frequent flyer miles.

Obviously there was a bureaucratic snafu and the clerk had neither the knowledge or authority to deal with it. Bainbridge should have asked to speak to the supervisor so he could deal with someone better able to handle an unusual situation.

I have no background with Prof. Lancaster but the red flag for me was the "two months later". By his account he was advised to hire a "fixer" whose first task was to identify the zoning of his property, which task not only took two months but came back with a null response. If the "fixer" was so inept as to not know that the clerk was inept and took two months to boot well that suggests something more wrong than just a clerk punting.

For example the good Professor should have been able to get his zoning by simply entering his tax number here;
http://zimas.lacity.org/search.asp
Or get a parcel profile including zoning here:
http://www.permitla.org/parcel/
And most likely good have gotten his road question answered via this City GIS product:
http://navigatela.lacity.org/index.cfm
All official sites of the City of Los Angeles.

Anyone can have a frustrating experience dealing with a clerk. I have stood at my station and heard colleagues giving out totally wrong information and been helpless to intervene and very often having customers being told that certain information was not available that actually was (though generally not part of our normal service). But the combination of the "fixer" the "two months" and the "house not existing" is simply too much.

Now certainly you can get a disconnect between the Assessor's Office and the Planning Department, I worked both and particularly for older parts of their records there was no clean interface, you would have manual data gathering and a separate data processing operation. The Assessor can and did pick up and tax work done without permit and pointing out to the Building Official that you had been paying taxes on something for years is not a defence for not having a permit. But absent proof of straight out illegality and resultant violation of the actual building code (i.e. building an addition on an unstable bluff) it would be extraordinarily rare that any jurisdiction would ever order an entire existing living unit torn down.

Planning Departments are reliable targets for cheap shots. I heard our Director explaining this in passing "We tell citizens what they can do with their own property and then charge them thousands of dollars for the privilege to do so". This is not exactly a formula for popularity. But at best there is some part of Prof. Lancaster's story that is not being revealed here.