Weirdly enough, I did find one city that actually wanted to get you to yes. Chicago. No, their rules weren’t perfect and they had plenty of bureaucratic overhead. But Chicago BACP actually did want you to succeed and did a pretty unique job holding your hand through the process so that you could open.
You’d never think it’d be Chicago…but it’s Chicago.
Tl;dr - nearly every building in NYC is on a neverending string of Temporary Certificates of Occupancy. (TCOs) The reason being that NYC Dept of Buildings won’t issue a final CO until every single permit, project, inspection, fine, or fix is cleared in the whole building. And in a city full of skyscrapers, the day when everything is 100% perfect never comes. So you can have a building that’s been shuffling through TCOs every couple of months for decades.
I managed to cut my NYC licensing time from 5.5 months all the way down to 5 weeks….it just required I fly out once or twice per week and park myself in their office so they couldn’t get rid of me until they reviewed my file.
Meanwhile my first NYC Article 43 (which requires registration not pre-open licensure) languished uninspected for years…until someone filed a complaint and NYC DOHMH came by to investigate my unlicensed child care center. Once they realized it’d been waiting on them for 2+ years, they got embarrassed enough that they finally cleared it a couple months later.
Oof. Incidentally, the Dept. of Health ended up being the easiest part of the whole process. Once we got the TCO, DOH issued the license pretty quickly. It helped that we had been in regular contact with them for (checks notes) almost three years while the construction side dragged on.
Some of the details, like the TCO shuffle, are so absurd as to be almost unbelievable. And yet...
Ryan Puzycki, this is precisely why, as I have often said over at Risk & Progress, that governments ought to have a built-in mechanism to remove laws and regulations.
It should be easy for anyone to take a rule to “court” and have a “jury” rule as to whether or not it makes sense. In this case, a jury would hear the absurdity of regulations that literally defy physics. It should be easy to strike things like this down.
New York repealed their Cabaret Laws in 2017, which banned dancing in certain types of establishments, but they didn't get around to updating the underlying zoning that still kept it illegal in many places until now. A near century of crazy!
1920s and 1930s Germany was the first modern culture. It was nihilist, ie, destruction for the sake of destruction. Search "Weimar culture." Read _Ominous Parallels_ by Leonard Peikoff. Nazism, with its race mysticism, was sold as an alternative to nihilism ,like Christian mysticism is now sold as alternative to todays nihilism. Of course, both mysticism and nihilism are types of the unfocused mind as alternative to the Wests focused mind.
Weirdly enough, I did find one city that actually wanted to get you to yes. Chicago. No, their rules weren’t perfect and they had plenty of bureaucratic overhead. But Chicago BACP actually did want you to succeed and did a pretty unique job holding your hand through the process so that you could open.
You’d never think it’d be Chicago…but it’s Chicago.
Nice to hear! I got married there and that was the easiest license I ever got. :)
Oh, but you’ve got to explain the TCO shuffle!
Tl;dr - nearly every building in NYC is on a neverending string of Temporary Certificates of Occupancy. (TCOs) The reason being that NYC Dept of Buildings won’t issue a final CO until every single permit, project, inspection, fine, or fix is cleared in the whole building. And in a city full of skyscrapers, the day when everything is 100% perfect never comes. So you can have a building that’s been shuffling through TCOs every couple of months for decades.
I managed to cut my NYC licensing time from 5.5 months all the way down to 5 weeks….it just required I fly out once or twice per week and park myself in their office so they couldn’t get rid of me until they reviewed my file.
Meanwhile my first NYC Article 43 (which requires registration not pre-open licensure) languished uninspected for years…until someone filed a complaint and NYC DOHMH came by to investigate my unlicensed child care center. Once they realized it’d been waiting on them for 2+ years, they got embarrassed enough that they finally cleared it a couple months later.
Oof. Incidentally, the Dept. of Health ended up being the easiest part of the whole process. Once we got the TCO, DOH issued the license pretty quickly. It helped that we had been in regular contact with them for (checks notes) almost three years while the construction side dragged on.
Some of the details, like the TCO shuffle, are so absurd as to be almost unbelievable. And yet...
Thanks for sharing, Aaron!
Ryan Puzycki, this is precisely why, as I have often said over at Risk & Progress, that governments ought to have a built-in mechanism to remove laws and regulations.
It should be easy for anyone to take a rule to “court” and have a “jury” rule as to whether or not it makes sense. In this case, a jury would hear the absurdity of regulations that literally defy physics. It should be easy to strike things like this down.
No NYC bar dancing since Prohibition?!
New York repealed their Cabaret Laws in 2017, which banned dancing in certain types of establishments, but they didn't get around to updating the underlying zoning that still kept it illegal in many places until now. A near century of crazy!
Hitler started in a beer hall revolution.
Perhaps if dancing had been allowed there, we would know him for Dance Dance Revolution instead.
Well, he was an artist...
All the more reason to cultivate a civic culture of arts and commerce—fascism prevention!
1920s and 1930s Germany was the first modern culture. It was nihilist, ie, destruction for the sake of destruction. Search "Weimar culture." Read _Ominous Parallels_ by Leonard Peikoff. Nazism, with its race mysticism, was sold as an alternative to nihilism ,like Christian mysticism is now sold as alternative to todays nihilism. Of course, both mysticism and nihilism are types of the unfocused mind as alternative to the Wests focused mind.