Chevy Chase homeowner Sally Kelly tries to ignore the half-built 12,000-square-foot mansion next door. After almost two years of inactivity, she says it's "ugly and an eyesore . . . but I try not to look at it or worry about it."
Kelly says she never dreamed that construction could just come to a stop one day on the multimillion-dollar project that towers over her yard. She knew the new house would be big, because it was to sit on the largest lot in the town, a 1.3-acre piece three times the size of her own property. But she didn't object to it as she has to big houses on smaller lots around her community. She did assume, though, that it would be finished one day.
After all, there was a permit. A notice still flutters from the construction fence, with its faded, hand-written date of March 15, 2002. But as the seasons have come and gone without anything happening, the notice, like the piles of building materials down the hill near the street and the hulking structure on the hilltop, never changes.
The situation in Chevy Chase is extreme, but not unique. At a time when entire housing developments seem to spring up overnight, sometimes something different happens: Work on a house drags on and on, aggravating neighbors and confounding communities. And as Kelly and others have found, a permit by itself does not compel completion.
A permit is generally good for six months or a year, depending on the jurisdiction. But it can usually be extended as long as work continues and the property is offered for required inspections along the way. And if no work is done during the specified six months or a year and the permit lapses, homeowners can get new permits if they pay the full fees again.
There is no single answer to what neighbors can do if work simply stops. In most cases, their best option is just to persist in complaining to the local housing code enforcement office, if they think the unfinished site is becoming a public health or safety hazard, or the permitting office, if they believe construction has started up again illegally.
In most jurisdictions around Washington, citations, penalties or fines occur only if a homeowner tries to build without a permit. "We can't compel somebody to finish a house, but we can compel somebody to neaten up the lot, to make sure that there are no holes open, and that there's no flooding being caused," said Gail Lucas, manager of Montgomery County's building construction section.
"I am empathetic [to these situations] and I would be furious if I were the neighbor next to it," said Paul Lynch, Fairfax County director of residential inspections. "But the law doesn't provide for an end date" on building permits.
Because the goal of permitting is to get projects built safely and within a reasonable amount of time, Lynch said the idea of setting an end time for a permit might backfire, causing people to abandon worthwhile projects because they ran into some financial or personal hardship during the building time.
Most builders and homeowners, he said, would never consider foot-dragging on a project because construction costs are so high and because construction loan costs mount daily.
However, Lynch said, "there are a lot of considerations that can cause a project to stall -- a money crisis, personal issues, family problems. And suspending or taking away the permit doesn't fix the problem. . . . It might make the problem even worse, if the house sits there and the [building] code changes."
Lynch recalls at least two instances where homeowners seemed to be taking forever and the county had to resort to enforcement actions. In one situation, "a fairly eccentric gentleman in Springfield was building an addition to his nice corner lot, a lot that everyone had to drive by. It was literally a concrete bunker, that he was building one brick at a time for over 10 or 15 years."
