This is where it fell apart in Santa Cruz. The couple I was building for were blindsided by the cost of the building permits. Santa Cruz wanted upwards of fifty thousand dollars for their permit. This last week Contra Costa county handed me an estimate of thirty-seven thousand five hundred and told me that I'd need to apply for a variance to the height restrictions and limit of floors in a residential structure. They added that it would take three to six months to process. This isn't the type of news you want to take back to your client. Sixty-five hundred of that is to go to the school district. Twenty thousand is supposed to go for road construction. That's about twelve percent of the entire construction budget. I was so pissed off that I almost attended a tea party. The client, like any sane man, said that he'd have to consider his options. I spent my last night in the Bay Area drinking, unhappily. The next morning I found an email from the client asking how soon we could apply for the variance.
The variance was indicated because we'd designed the house to both comply with the flood plane regulations and bring the living floors up above the top of the levee. The majority of the homes on Taylor Road are constructed this way. I'd assumed that the county had realized that grade, being 13 feet below sea level, was going to effect what kind of houses were going to be built on Bethel Island. I can understand that you don't want your neighbor building a four story house next to your two or at the most three story tract home. But nobody builds tract homes 13ft below sea level. I looked into what variances were granted on the twenty homes closest to our building site. Twelve of those houses have had to get a variance. You are no longer varying from the norm when the majority of the houses have the same variance. That seems clear enough doesn't it? And if they processed these things in a timely manner I don't think I'd be so upset, but three to six months? Is this what scars the hell out of people when they visualize a future of government run health care.
This link will take you to the document set that we submitted to Contra Costa county.
The plans are beautiful. I know it's a cliche to remark on how computers have changed everything but these are the state of the art in Building Information Modeling or BIM. The topography is so well detailed that you really get a feeling for how the structure works in it's surroundings. The program, Autodesk Revit, lets you take the basic design even further by allowing you to convert the planning documents into actual detailed building plans that incorporate everything from engineering detail to lighting plans. So cool.
