For many homeowners, local bureaucracy is a nightmare and Bruno, a content creator from Georgia, recently shared just how baffling it can get. Under the handle SouthernAdventures on Instagram and TikTok, he and his wife Mary have been sharing their efforts to hand-build their home on a 100-acre property in South Atlanta they share with his parents. When the city council threw some unexpected new permit hurdles his way, he made a post to vent about it.
In the video that has over 18 million views, Bruno stood near a tree house he built and talked about the circular logic he encountered. He even expressed his frustration in the caption, noting, “MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.” He claims that it started with an election and a reversal. “The county said I could build a treehouse, and the county seat changes. The new guy said, hey, no, never mind. You need a permit for that.”
Bruno said what followed was a full year and a half of negotiations. When the county finally granted a permit, they insisted that Bruno increase the size of the treehouse to meet minimum square footage requirements, 1200 sq ft, which he believes was done simply “so we can tax you more.” When they completed the treehouse, there was a new problem. Bruno alleged, “Now they say that my parents cannot build a house on the same property… because now the treehouse is the primary residence.”
The 100-acre property problem
Bruno told his viewers he met with the county again and said, “Hey, so the treehouse is still only 750 square feet. We have not made it bigger, which means it meets your size requirements for an accessory structure. So we should still be able to build a main house over there.” They were refused. Purportedly, they were told, “Ordinance strictly prohibits building the accessory structure before the main house, because then people just never build the main house.”
Bruno was shocked, after all, as he tells it, they were literally saying they wanted to build. Allegedly, the county refused and even told them a variance would be denied. So Bruno thought of a loophole. He suggested, “Why don’t we just divide the property on paper? Draw an invisible line down the middle, and then my parents can pull a permit for this property, build their main house, and when they finish, we can reassemble the properties.”…