We can deny the permit until they hire a real person, but that’s what we were going to do anyway, so there’s no harm in trying from the developer perspective. The building is usually being built by an LLC that’s unique to that structure and will be dissolved when the property sells, so there’s nobody to go after when it fails in 3 years.
Shit like this is why the corporate veil really needs to be pierceable, it’s too easy for some scumlord builder to profit off of future deaths when they have shit like this to hide behind.
The city I work for is an enclave for the mega-rich. Literally every home is millionaires (cheapest house on the market in the city is 2.5 million), and it’s going through another round of gentrification, where the 1% is getting displaced by the .01% who are buying 5 million dollar homes to tear them down down and build 15 million dollar homes.
All the properties are owned by LLCs who’s membership is something like Register Agents Inc, who act as members for hundreds of thousands of LLCs for the purpose of obscuring ownership.
It means that when they ignore our rules, we end up having to cite the contractors working on the site to stop it, because the court process of tracking down the owners by through subpoenas can take months. So then they just hire different contractors, who we then cite and it becomes a vicious cycle.
Though we do tend to win in court in the end. We’ve had the court give us permission to bulldoze 25-million dollar houses built without permits, though we usually use that order as a negotiating tactic to make them fall in line instead of losing the house entirely. Also, it takes 5-10 years for those cases to resolve, which is very frustrating for the city and the neighbors.
Is there a punishment for this? I’d think submitting ai documents is very fraudulent.
We can deny the permit until they hire a real person, but that’s what we were going to do anyway, so there’s no harm in trying from the developer perspective. The building is usually being built by an LLC that’s unique to that structure and will be dissolved when the property sells, so there’s nobody to go after when it fails in 3 years.
Shit like this is why the corporate veil really needs to be pierceable, it’s too easy for some scumlord builder to profit off of future deaths when they have shit like this to hide behind.
The city I work for is an enclave for the mega-rich. Literally every home is millionaires (cheapest house on the market in the city is 2.5 million), and it’s going through another round of gentrification, where the 1% is getting displaced by the .01% who are buying 5 million dollar homes to tear them down down and build 15 million dollar homes.
All the properties are owned by LLCs who’s membership is something like Register Agents Inc, who act as members for hundreds of thousands of LLCs for the purpose of obscuring ownership.
It means that when they ignore our rules, we end up having to cite the contractors working on the site to stop it, because the court process of tracking down the owners by through subpoenas can take months. So then they just hire different contractors, who we then cite and it becomes a vicious cycle.
Though we do tend to win in court in the end. We’ve had the court give us permission to bulldoze 25-million dollar houses built without permits, though we usually use that order as a negotiating tactic to make them fall in line instead of losing the house entirely. Also, it takes 5-10 years for those cases to resolve, which is very frustrating for the city and the neighbors.