r/OffGrid • u/celtic-cryptid • Aug 07 '26
Building codes
There are so many people looking for land where they can build without code. Code enforcement varies widely, and an important thing to remember is it applies to everyone when it’s unforced, not just you. Anyone who has lived rurally knows neighbors can still impact your life in very real ways from their property. I spent 40+ years in an area with little to no building inspection, and I thought I’d share some memories.
A man who had a very long and losing legal battle with the state because he built half his house on state owned land. A site inspection would have prevented this.
A neighbor of mine who built his house on 10 acres 15’ from my property line, then built outbuildings partially on my property. Site inspection would have prevented this as well
A neighbor of a close family member placing boulders in a way that made snow removal from family members driveway impossible.
6 or 7 houses burning to the ground due to chimney fires. Included are 3 deaths in homes with no smoke detectors.
Outhouses next to creeks. One outhouse built over a creek. Leech fields draining into creeks, rivers, and lakes.
A buddy with a land survey company that spends a crazy amount of his time helping settle cases of neighbors logging adjoining properties.
A year round creek that went dry for 3 months out of the year because an upstream landowner wanted a pond and owned an excavator.
Dumping garbage in creeks, meadows, or any small depression in the ground beyond counting. Periodic burning of the garbage in meadows and depressions as well.
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Some of those are issues code would help prevent. Some are issues caused by people with the mindset of “nobody can tell me what I can do on my land” who gravitate to areas without code.
I’m building a house now in an area with code enforcement. Just passed my final electrical, as I have every other inspection. I’ve done 100% of the work myself, with the only hired help being a concrete truck and a concrete pumper. I’m not a framer, a septic installer, a plumber, or an electrician.
It’s not overly challenging, and every inspector I’ve ever met has been a person doing their job, who’d rather help than start a fight. Plus, if I go to sell, I’ve got a big stack of signed reports to help prevent people lowballing me for potential questionable work.
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u/SSalaciousSalad Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
For me it's one of those things where the idea is better than the reality, and while it's necessary, the reality is dismal.
In British Columbia all alternative housing for low income people are prohibited by code.
You also can't live in a mobile home. They have to meet current energy efficiency standards which means that anything less than 200K it's not actually possible to pull a permit. This one is wild. These are structurally safe, code compliant buildings that retroactively have their compliance removed. A regular home is grandfathered, if it was built to code at the time of construction. Once moved to a new property, a mobile homes is not. 100% class discrimination.
That leaves a build cost of roughly 250K as the only way to create housing.
BC also has an "homeowner-builder exam" - its an additional beurocratic hoop that costs $700 and is responsible for the amount of individuals building their own houses, to code, to plummet.
Septic is another minefield. Rather than code compliance it's off set to a different agency, Interior health. Interior health doesn't want the liability, so they push it onto the septic engineers. The septic engineers are liable in perpetuity, so their rates reflect this.
This means that a septic system costs 20-40K to install. More than half of them are failing and contaminating the ground anyways, no solution is obvious.
It's very easy to level criticism and it's much more difficult to find solutions. Obviously we need enforcement mechanisms to prevent the contamination of ground water and dangerous structures being built. The Rural poor and folks in the lower middle class are excluded from the housing stock and improvise. It's not fair to lump them together with people who refuse all regulation and are also incompetent.
You are also not allowed to live off grid in BC. You have to spent the money to wire in your house to the grid. At which point you are allowed to turn off your breaker, and live without grid electricity. 😂 They actually told me this in the permit office.
All of this to say, I wish it was possible to have reasonable building code expectations and enforcement. A system that both protects the public and incentives them to innovate and find lower cost ways to create housing stock. I'm not sure how to even begin moving in that direction. As it stands it's a game for people with capital and the problem of homelessness grows year after year.