TheAgitator.com
What. The Hell?
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009Fresh from a proposal to charge residents extra fees for street lights, D.C.’s latest effort to generate revenue is to ticket residents for parking in their own driveways.
No, that isn’t an exaggeration:
Beverly Anderson is mad as hell. She just started to get tickets for parking in her own driveway.
That’s right. The District of Columbia is ticketing people who park their cars in their own driveways.
“This is clearly an attempt by the city to extort money out of property owners,” Anderson tells WTOP.
Anderson has received two of the $20 tickets in the past month. Anderson has owned the Capitol Hill house (and the driveway, so she thought) for more than ten years and has never gotten a ticket. And she’s not alone.
It turns out that D.C. has an odd, obscure law stating that the land between the front of your house and the street, otherwise known as your driveway and front yard, falls under a bizarre classification known as “private property set aside for public use.” Essentially, though owners have to pay for its maintenance and upkeep (they can be fined if they don’t), it’s considered public property. Which apparently means that, technically, you can’t park your car on it. The city recently dusted off the law, and began writing parking tickets if any part of a resident’s car is parked between the front facade of their house and the street, even if it’s parked in the driveway.
When Anderson complained, one D.C. official told her that if she wanted, she could pay the city to lease the land between the front of her house and the street, which would allow her to park her car there legally.
In November 2007, I wrote about how D.C. was phasing out due process rights for people who want to contest parking tickets in person.
So if it’s public property, has DC been taking property taxes from people for it?
That is almost unbelievable. They claim it is public land but you can lease it from them for your use if you want. But at the same time, you must cut the grass on the public land? Also, what about other uses of the land between your house and the street? Such as drinking a beer, sitting outside with friends, watching the sunset? I don’t know if the neighborhoods are really such in DC that you could or would want to do such things, but in Texas that sort of law would not sit well at all (I hope…).
What does “ludacrious” mean?
@3
Whatever it means, one thing is for certain…
The encyclopedia has a picture of Washington DC officials next to it.
I think The District better get ready for lots of checks with Bullshit Money Grab written in the For______________ area.
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/9430721/detail.html
I really expected that link to go to “The Onion.”
I hate to call you on this Radley, but I think the headline is wrong. It should be WHAT. The FUCK!!!! SHIT!!!
That said, if it’s “private property set aside for public use,” can I come party on the lawn? Oh whoops, I see #2 beat me to this obvious point. Jesus H. Christ nonetheless.
So you have to drive around to your backyard?
New slogan:
“Washington D.C.! Doing our level best to be more fucked up that Detroit!”
This is beyond stupid.
The damage from the 1968 riots were still visible in lots of DC until only a few years ago. Very few people were willing to be urban pioneers while Marion Barry was Mayor. With more sane and stable administration, we started to see more and more people move into DC and entire regions gentrify. More people brought more services (stores etc) and so on in a virtuous circle. They get crappy schools, and pay higher taxes, but the convenience and lifestyle is great.
Now, for the sake of a few tickets, they want to piss off the very people who brought about this miracle. With houses going cheap in the surrounding burbs, do you want all these people to move back out? Say goodbye to all the income taxes, the new stores, etc.
Cities need to get over the idea that they somehow offer an essential service that cannot be replicated elsewhere: people and businesses will and do move.
1) many municipalities require cars to be in garages and not in driveways
2) in pasadena ca the sidewalks are city property, yet any damage to them, such as from tree roots from a city owned tree between curb and sidewalk (which homeowners are not allowed to trim), must be paid for by the homeowner
the increase in city expenditures (median city employee salary in pasadena is $80,000 with defined benefit pensions currently needing a tax increase) and decrease in services is to me a potentially bigger problem than the mortgage/banking fiasco
All your driveway are belong to us!
(Somebody had to say it.)
Isn’t it usually the homeowners association that do this crap? I see some turf battles coming up.
An obscure law?
Probably one of those enacted with: “We promise we will never use it! Honest!”
I think a decent case could be made that this is an unconstitutional taking, even under our lousy 5th amendment jurisprudence.
Its clearly a regulatory taking as it denies the owner use of the property, if the city had a rational basis that the taking was for a public purpose they would be in the clear constitutionally. This is a low bar for the city to clear, but I don’t think D.C. clears it here.
The fact that D.C. would lease the property back to Ms. Anderson and allow her to park there demonstrates the the purpose of the taking is to generate leasing revenues from the owners, not because there is any public purpose to not having people park in their driveways. Even under Kelo, the taking was justified on economic development grounds, not because New London wanted its citizens to start paying the city rent to live in their own houses.
Maybe the headline should be congresswoman mad at having to pay for government spending. Anyone see the irony here? The only problem she has with this practice is that she was ticketed along with the peasants.
It’s no wonder they’re so intent on disarming the population.
#12 | Aresen | April 29th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
All your driveway are belong to us!
(Somebody had to say it.)
—-
No, they didn’t….
Oh, ok – pretty good. “YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME”
“This is a fact.” Got all excited watching the “All Your Base” video (version 2, my favorite). For some reason was reminded of these geniuses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5RS87izl88
Radley, where do you find this shit?
In Buffalo Grove, IL I had to purchase a permit to park in my own driveway. It’s pretty common in the socialist hellhole known as the northwest Shitcago suburbs. I’m glad I left.
Isn’t there an adverse possession issue that the homeowners can bring up?
@ Michael Chaney
It’s not hard to find. Stuff like that ll over the place daily!
It’s not that big of a surprise that the state considers your driveway their property, and the act of you parking your property on your property a potential source of revenue.
As far as the state is concerned:
Our kids are state property
Our income is state property
Our property is state property
Our bodies are state property
Our thoughts are state property
What’s left but our driveways?
At least we don’t have a TV tax. In your face England!
USA#1!
#2 Actually they use this to ticket you for drinking a beer on your porch. Your porch is public property.
Wow, and I thought nyc was bad with it’s clusterfk of parking regulations and vice taxes. (don’t be getting any ideas from this, nypd)
Does this make eminent domain grabs easier?
Obama will fix this.
http://www.grimmy.com/images/MP_Archive/MP_2009/MP0119.gif
(fail)
Is parking on public property (like what most of us call street parking) illegal in DC? Are the driveways posted “No parking”?
Is there an ordinance in DC that says anything like “Any appendage attached to a horse’s ass shall be considered as a leg and treated as a tail”? Because then they could start fining people for having 5-legged horses.
Er…I was going to say “Obama will fix this problem just like the other one he promised to fix”, but I’m just too bitter to type.
i wasn’t trying to threadjack. :P
Power corrupts. Period. This is what happens when you grow the public sector at the expense of ordinary hardworking people. I live in Mass, where the crazy electorate actually voted down a proposal to eliminate the state income tax. I told everyone I knew that it was only going to embolden the politicians. They just passed a bill to increase the state sales tax “by 1.25 cents”. That is 1.25 cents on top of the 5 cents already extant, that’s a 25% increase, not just 1.25 cents. Be very afraid…
This is just an example of Washington’s concept of limited government. It’s limited only to what it can get away with.
Anyone else notice that the comments in the linked report are under the heading “malcontent blogs”? You are now a “malcontent” because you object to getting parking tickets for parking in your own driveway?
another example of why i have had no regrets about leaving america after 7 years. “land of the free”.
Where did you go, killian, that’s any better? Cause I might just join you.
killian where did you go? I know America is heading in the wrong direction with respect to freedom, but is there yet any other place that is more free?
What, you thought you owned your driveway? I would have thought that the rent you pay to the local masters would make it clear exactly who owns your driveway, and the rest of “your property” for that matter.
Who do they think they are, parking their cars on land they don’t own without permission? These people need to sit down and shut up and be glad their masters continue to graciously allow them to continue to rent their homes and live in them in the approved ways.
Fight the tickets by claiming that DC forfeited the property by operation of adverse possession. DC constructively abandoned its claim by not enforcing its rights for too many years while the homeowners openly and notoriously parked (in full view of patrolling police) in their driveways.
chsw (not an attorney)
A point well made.
If I lived in DC i think would have to find out where the local officials live, and start having cookouts on their lawn. We’ll see how quickly they stick by this public property BS then.
#41
You don’t get it.
THEY own your property AND own their property. You would get tossed in jail and have to pay THEM money to get out.
+1 for random guy. Something similar worked a few years ago: people started mailing thousands of letters to the guy who basically invented junk mail. He tried to get it stopped and I believe that the judge said, hey, they are not doing anything illegal.
Good grief.
Someone just blow up the country and put us out of our misery….PLEASE!!!!
Is there ANYONE with any sense left out there? Anyone??? And to think…I used to consider myself patriotic….now I just consider myself disgusted.
I think I’m going to go outside, take my flag down and use it to scoop dog poop at this point…that’s about what America seems to stand for these days. Anyone have a copy of the constitution I can use to scoop with?
And I’m a 10 year USMC war vet…I want my 10 years back damn it!!!! What a fucking waste of time. Thank god I didn’t die for this shit! My country really is beginning to disgust me at this point. And yeah…I know we are talking about D.C. but the idiocy is EVERYWHERE!
Thanks for the chance to vent. I feel better now. Still taking down my flag though….seriously…doing it now.
Yet one more reason to start phasing people out of the District and have them move to Virginia or Maryland. That would free up a lot of land within the Federal District, cut costs associated with public schools and poverty, and end the nonsense regarding “statehood” for the federal capital.
Anyone who would live in DC deserves what they get, given that the only industry in the city is dedicated to separating people from their private property.
Yes, I include “beltway ‘Libertarians’” in that.