Know Your Place, Peasant Developer

When bureaucratic channels and conventional protests fail, hunger strikes are used as a last resort. Normally they're a tactic of the poor and powerless; the strikers hope to garner media attention and elicit public sympathy.

The complexity of compliance with government red tape has made a Silicon Valley developer resort to a hunger strike. The circumstance was so unusual that it captured today's Mercury News headline:

Navneet Aron, founder and CEO of Aron Developers, says he hasn’t eaten since last Friday morning. He has spent every weekday since then camped out in City Hall with a sign proclaiming, “On hunger strike until death!”

He’s protesting the city’s decision to stop construction of 18 townhomes on North Fair Oaks Avenue after his team forgot to obtain an approval from Santa Clara County’s Department of Environmental Health. Aron worries that fixing the issue could take months, which could mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in delayed construction costs.

His sin is that he didn't get permission from Santa Clara County to install a required vapor barrier before doing it; his paperwork with the City of Sunnyvale is apparently complete.

At issue in Aron’s case is a sheet of plastic, less than an inch thick, installed beneath the foundation of his townhomes. The plastic, called a vapor barrier, is designed to mitigate health risks. It prevents toxins in the soil from rising as vapor through the foundation and into the home, potentially impacting the residents. Aron installed those barriers, but he failed to get the county’s Department of Environmental Health to sign off before he did so.

City spokesperson Jennifer Garnett wrote in an emailed statement that the city has no intention of letting work proceed until the county has given the OK. “Developers are ultimately responsible for having a compliant project. The city had to issue a stop work order because Mr. Aron failed to meet health and safety conditions for his project,” Garnett said.

I used to think that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Now that the law consists of complying with dozens, if not hundreds, of regulations from multiple departments across different jurisdictions, ignorance of the law is assured.

"The city has no intention of letting work proceed until the county has given the OK." Know your place, peasant.