Not Able to Play In Your Own Back Yard
July 30, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
We bought our house (the house which we no longer live in, due to Charlie’s school placement situation) because it had a modest but decent-sized front yard set in from the street, and also a big back yard with a deck, visible from the kitchen. Charlie loves to be outside and to be able to go in and out as he will and we, of course, need to keep track of where he is. If your living space can’t be livable for your family—and in our family, a peaceful easy-feeling boy means peaceful easy-feeling parents. The Foote family of Paynesville, Minnesota, has been told by Stearns County officials that the deck where their 5-year-old son Alex, loves to play, must be taken down because it was built without a permit. WCCO reports:
“You hear him out here like with his little squirrels, and he’ll go inside and get his stuffed animals and he’ll bring a blanket out and with his play grill — he’ll cook ‘em food,” said Matt Foote about his son Alex who has autism.
Five-year-old Alex doesn’t know that he and his backyard friends might have to find another place to play. His parents say it wouldn’t be safe for him to wander in the yard that backs up to Rice Lake.
“So if he were to have an open play area in the grass, the fear would be the lake,” said Matt Foote.
Ever feel sometimes that there’s no place you can go, not even your own home?
On reading the article it seems the problem is not whether it is a deck or a patio, nor its elevation, but that it is too close to, i.e. not set back enough from something. It’s unclear what that is, usually I would think the street, but I guess it could be any property line or natural boundary. I wonder by how much it breaks the rule and if a differently shaped deck would suffice.
re: the “set back” thing, I am confused then why a patio in the exact same location is OK, but I deck is not? I say it’s a patio with safety modifications for a person with disabilities. If the family is trying to get away with something because they didn’t follow the right channels, that’s one thing, but it sounds like they had plans and were working with the county offices and were later told (after it was built) that there were issues…. that’s totally different. Don’t know the whole story though…
Is this a matter of a simple code violation? Or is it a code violation brought to the attention of the authorities because someone has something against the child?
Can they move the deck so that it’s within specifications?
Well, you do have to get permits and it has to be done within the codes. We have this issue in our historic neighborhood all the time. Right now we are doing a fence but we have to get everything approved. It is a real pain.
@Ange. The reporting is a bit confused. It seems if the structure were located on another side of the house that would be okay.
Perhaps the rule is that structures of a certain height need to be set back from a boundary and adding the rails made the patio/deck subject to the rule.
Yes
I often have a hard time knowing what to make of the human-interest, my-child-with-autism-is-being-treated-unfairly articles.
Sometimes they reveal real abuses or prejudices. But another common thread is that they’re generally a he-said/she-said setup, and invariably pieces of the story are missing.
This particular story would be a non-story without the autism angle, and as lisa implies, it’s not all that outrage-inducing unless the code violation was turned in with intent to pick on the child….
I do hope they can find a relatively painless way to resolve it.
Sometimes life sucks, but you gotta follow the rules. If it was built without a permit, then I suggest they get a permit next time. People around here always build what they want as if they’re immune to the rules, and hope they don’t get caught. I really don’t see this as an autism story unless they were specifically targetted, and honestly, not even then if they disregarded the rules.
It sounds as though the guys who built it for them said he didn’t need a permit, so he may have just taken bad advice. But you do have to follow the rules.
Like Marla, we have all kinds of codes, living within 3 miles of the ocean, called “the watershed”. We had to get permits for extending the patio and putting in a concrete slab for the spa. The guys who built it for us knew the codes. We had to have more than 4″ distance from the house/electrical outlet, so that no one in the spa could reach over and touch the outlet. I didn’t know before that we would have so much paperwork, and we depended on the contractors to know the codes and follow them.
Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of this my-poor-autistic-child can’t do this-that-or-the-other story. We had built a deck on the side of our house in San Carlos (CA) a few years ago. The contractor said he had taken care of all the necessary permits. When we put the house on the market, the inspections revealed that the permits had not been obtained. So, what did we do? We tore down the deck and had it rebuilt-exactly the same as it had been before. A headache? Yes. Expensive? Yes. Lifestyle changing and woe is me? No.
JoyMama wrote:
I often have a hard time knowing what to make of the human-interest, my-child-with-autism-is-being-treated-unfairly articles.
Sometimes they reveal real abuses or prejudices. But another common thread is that they’re generally a he-said/she-said setup, and invariably pieces of the story are missing.
I would think there will be more stories heard like this, in which it’s hard (or maybe not so hard) to sort out what’s an accommodation vs. what’s something else. The issue that drew me to the story was the concerns about disrupting the child’s play; I’ve often gotten my thinking locked into worrying that if we change this or do that, Charlie would be so distraught. As he’s gotten older he’s become much more able to handle this sort of thing, but not so when he was younger.
And certainly learning to change is good.