City, county government can fine residents who shirk home maintenance
Q. We recently received a letter from city officials saying that we are in violation of a new ordinance that requires the grass in our yard not to exceed a certain height. If we don’t cut the grass immediately, the letter states, we could face fines of up to $50 per day, or the city may send out its own work crew, then bill us for the job. Don’t we have the right to grow our grass as high as we like?
A. No, you don’t. City and county governments have the right to establish “reasonable” restrictions on landscaping and related issues, and to fine or to seek other remedies against a property owner who doesn’t comply.
Many such rules make sense. Some urban communities, for example, pass local laws that limit the height that grass can grow or even insist that homes with flaking exteriors be repainted to keep a neighborhood’s aesthetic quality intact and home prices stable. Rural and mountain communities can sometimes demand that tall trees be trimmed or even removed if, say, they might provide natural fuel for a future wildfire.
I have written about such issues for several years, but it finally seems to have come to a head a few weeks ago. That’s when news broke that officials in the Central Florida seaside city of Dunedin slapped a roughly $104,000 fine on a mother of two for the overgrown grass, algae-green pool water and other problems on property that she no longer owned.
The woman, Kristi Allen, had lost the home to foreclosure years ago, but county
records still listed her as the vacant property’s owner.
The story made national headlines. Another Dunedin resident came forward with documentation showing that he had been fined nearly $30,000 for a “chronic” overgrown yard. Yet another homeowner showed that he and his wife were fined $31,000 for making relatively small repairs to their roof without a permit after a tree fell on their house during a hurricane.
In the city’s defense, Dunedin’s various code-enforcement policies are meant to “protect the integrity of neighborhoods and the quality of the community,” spokesman Ron Sachs said.
The U.S. Supreme Court is looking at the matter a bit differently.
In a little-noticed case earlier this year, the high court ruled that the Eighth Amendment — which prohibits unreasonable bail, as well as huge property or personal fines — applies to state and local governments, rather than just federal entities.
The Supreme Court stopped short of deciding what a city’s or county’s fines for failing to cut a yard should be, but the ruling seems to put municipalities on notice: Better trim those penalties back, or at least keep them from growing.
REAL ESTATE TRIVIA
States, cities and counties collected a staggering $15.3 billion in fines and forfeitures in the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest reporting year. That was up 44 percent from just a decade earlier.
Q. Is it true that Lorne Greene, the actor who played Ben Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza, later built a replica of the ranch house that his TV family had supposedly lived in?
A. Yes. The original home was actually the center of a Bonanza-themed entertainment park in Nevada. But Greene, who died in 1987, fell so in love with the house that he built a replica of it inside the confines of the private Apache Country Club in Mesa, Arizona, in the early 1960s.
Greene named his home “Ponderosa II.” For those familiar with the TV show, Greene’s house has the same floor plan and features as the original, including its exterior wood cladding, its spectacular floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in the main living area, its rustic dining area with wood shutters and even the quirky alcove where the fictitious Ben Cartwright did his paperwork.
Ponderosa II is such an outstanding reproduction of the original that it was placed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1963, shortly after it was completed. It was sold to a private buyer for $475,000 about a month ago, according to real estate website zillow.com.
Q. I had a 90-day listing agreement to sell my home with a real estate agent, but I never received a suitable offer, and the agreement with her expired on July 20. A couple who had visited my home while I was under contract with the agent has since called me and has agreed to pay me close to my original asking price. If I sell, would I still owe the agent a 6 percent sales commission?
A. Yes, you almost certainly will. Most listing agreements include a provision that requires a seller to pay the agent a commission, even if the contract recently expired, if the buyer first visited the property while the salesperson was actively marketing it. Courts in nearly every part of the nation have upheld the legality of such clauses.
You probably wouldn’t owe a commission if the buyer had never visited the property when the agent was still trying to sell it, but that’s not the case here.
Because you’ll likely have to pay the commission anyway, you might as well call the agent with the good news and have her handle all the paperwork and shepherd the deal through the closing process.
ABOUT LIVING TRUSTS
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars for a lawyer to create a basic living trust that will let your loved ones quickly inherit your estate after you die. For details, send $4 and a self-addressed. Stamped envelope to D. Myers/Trust, P.O. Box 4405, Culver City CA 90231. Net proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross.
Send questions to David Myers, P.O. Box 4405, Culver City, CA 90231-2960, and we’ll try to respond in a future column.