What I do all day...

People ask me what I do for a living and I often have a hard time explaining it. It's not like being a teacher, doctor or lawyer. I'm a Land Use Planner, formally. Informally, I do a bunch of stuff that keeps me busy all day long (minus some minor distractions such as Gchat, Facebook, TMZ, texting...) and really cannot easily be explained.

Here is one facet of my job that I enjoy and thanks to the market turning around, I am getting to do more often. Sometimes when you have a piece of land zoned for low density, you can rezone it to a higher density (and build more houses - always a good thing). I have a great client who loves doing this (despite the added cost and time) and he lets me process the whole thing, rather than hiring an attorney. Here is how the above picture, which contains a single house now, came to be:

1. John found the property.
2. Kelly completed a feasibility study to identify any problems - none found!  I also completed a layout that looks nothing like what you see up there.
3. LDC completed Boundary and Topographic Surveys,  Preliminary Engineering and submitted an application to rezone the property.
4. John and I meet with lots and lots and lots of people over lots and lots and lots of months and the project completely changes into what you see above.
5. Next week the Planning Commission will hopefully recommend approval and then the Board of Supervisors will hopefully approve the application to rezone the property.
6. The plan then goes to our engineers to design something that can actually be built.
7. The construction plan gets approved at the County.
8. We stake the proposed houses and improvements for construction.
9. The plan comes back to me so I can have my guys prepare the individual house grading plans for approval.
10. Houses get built and sold for lots of money. :-)
11. People move in and live happily ever after.

The End.