The third call came in 2009 when I was forced to deal with my local government to an extent I had not anticipated ever being forced to deal with it. I started trying to build a small house with my own money, on my own property, for my own personal use. The City of Dallas charged me thousands of dollars for permits and inspections, made me wait for months, required me to surrender 7% of the land, subjected me to contradictory and changing requirements, and micro-managed every aspect of the design and construction. Although was trying to build my own home, on my own land, they required me to make and do what they wanted with it by threatening to deny me the use of it if I didn’t comply through the so-called “Certificate of Occupancy” requirement. They told me what part of the property I could use, what construction materials I could use, where I could put plug sockets, how many sinks I had to have, what kind of insulation I could use, what color the roof had to be, how much water pressure I could have in my shower, how many gallons my toilet could flush, and how wide the stairs had to be. They forced me to hire an architect to approve the plans made by a licensed civil engineer. The platting office told me I didn’t need a plat; but then building was delayed when another employee of the platting office decided we had to get a plat. One office told me the neighborhood wasn’t zoned for residences (even though it was filled with residences) and rejected the construction proposal the first time it was submitted. (The tax office still lists it as a commercial property.) Construction had to be paused for weeks at a time because the city didn’t have enough inspectors to complete mandatory incremental inspections. The electrical inspector made me drill a drain pipe through the front wall of the house and add a sink—after the plumbing inspector had already signed off on, and I had installed, another sink. We had to wait for a sprinkler inspection so long, the regulations changed in the interim and when the sprinkler inspector (who turned out to be the plumbing inspector because the city fired all the sprinkler inspectors without changing the sprinkler ordinance), he forced us to redo everything in accordance with the new regulation (even though he admitted everything had been done in compliance with the regulations in effect six weeks earlier, when the sprinkler was finished). We built the sewer drain to the street as ordered by the water department. Then the water department told us to tear that one up and instead dig the sewer to a 100-year-old clay sewer pipe in the rear alley because the street department wouldn’t tear up the street to allow them to hook up the sewer. After the new, second sewer to the back was finished and connected, the street department tore up the street in front of the house and told me they’d need the water department to confirm the sewer had been hooked up before they could repave it. Although it’s the only building on the street in a high-crime neighborhood (this wasn’t some mansion out in the suburbs), the fences had to be set 18 inches back from the property line to put barbed wire on top—even though most of the neighborhood fences have barbed wire at the top, and they’re all set on the property line. Adding insult to injury, the city never bothered to pave the alley, but I was required to build a curb ramp at my expense on the very land the city stole from me, to connect the gravel driveway the city required me to build on my own property to… a bunch of grass and shrubs where the alley was supposed to be. Weeks turned to months, the cost of construction multiplied, and the end result was a monument to regulation that didn’t feel like it was authentically mine.
At the same time, my son started attending a public high school in Dallas. In the name of security, emergency exits were chained shut; everyone had to enter the school through a metal detector; bags and backpacks were searched; DISD police with dogs roamed the halls; and high school children were required to get permission to use the bathroom and carry a signed hall pass with them at all times. When I asked the other students who’d grown up in the Dallas school system what they and their parents thought about the searches and metal detectors and armed police with dogs, they all said they were glad because it made them feel safe and seemed confused at my implication there was something wrong with a school like this.
My son attended the Talented and Gifted magnet school, consistently one of the top-rated public schools in the United States. The Dallas magnet schools survive on the grit, dedication, and determination of their underpaid, abused teachers; whose every creative talent and instinct is fought every step of the way by the zombie school administration. Every month of my son’s freshman year we had to go to the Board of Trustees meeting to fight for the survival of Dallas’s—and one of America’s—finest schools. The school board claimed they wanted to throttle back funding to the magnet schools because they enjoyed an advantaged status with a higher teacher-to-student ratio than the other Dallas schools. But as we demonstrated, they had baked the numbers by not including coaches or coaching staff as faculty members. While the P.T.A. at my son’s top-performing magnet school had to have fund-raising drives to buy toilet paper, paper towels, and soap for the bathrooms; and pencils, notebooks, and art supplies for the classrooms, kids at the regular high schools had shiny new band equipment, football jerseys, and large coaching staffs to sustain the district’s “Friday Night Lights” culture.
The magnet schools survived my son’s freshman year by a narrow vote of the trustees. One of the trustees voting against the magnet schools had difficulty forming complete sentences and misused words because she didn’t know what they meant. Another trustee voted against the magnets after his troubled, underperforming child couldn’t transfer into them.
Around 2010 I arrived at a TSA checkpoint and overheard the woman before me laughing with one of the TSA guards that they didn’t know why so many people complained about TSA harassment. “After all,” she laughed, “It’s not as if people have a right to fly!”
I foolishly stated the obvious. “Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right. It’s what separates citizens from serfs.” Before I could elaborate further, I was pulled out of line and hustled off for “special screening.” When one of the TSA agents asked me what I did for a living, I told him I was an attorney. Another agent, standing nearby, burst out “He lawyered up!” as if I’d been caught with explosive sneakers, and the whole hive buzzed around excitedly for several minutes. Doubtless, like me and everybody in line, they were wondering if I would make my flight or be dragged off to a windowless room for a pointless cavity search.
(first posted on Medium 29 November 2016)
