Imagine this: After years of toiling in the Southern California rat race, you buy a parcel of land in the high desert. It is here, on a sunny lot thick with Joshua trees, that you plan to build your retirement home.
But before you can get a shovel into the ground, everything changes. Joshua trees become candidates for the state’s threatened and endangered species list and are then protected by an unprecedented conservation law. You must now apply for permits and pay fees — not just for removing the plants, but in some cases for disturbing the land around them. You must even get permits to pick up fallen branches.
You have two options: You can pay tens of thousands of dollars and navigate a morass of policies. If you want to someday add a pool or an accessory dwelling unit or even replace a sewage pipe, you’ll have to do the same thing again, potentially paying for work performed near the same trees…