CONSTRUCTION IN CITIES
Your project is stopped! The
community is outraged that you are not hiring locally. The press is following the politicians around as they claim you are creating an eyesore for their constituents. The building department seems to be slow in issuing permits for your particular project and no one knows why. An ancestral burial ground has been unearthed on your site right next to the leaking oil tank from the land-marked outhouse that you were going to demolish until the preservationists started screaming. And then an adorable whooping crane couple decides to nest in your de-watering zone. You sigh and decide to go around the corner for a cup of coffee only to discover that one of the community activists has put your photograph on a web page, and you are being mobbed by angry neighbors. In the 1960’s, you could have awakened and that all would have been a bad dream. Now, it is your life. You as the construction professional must not only be able, technically, to build the building, but must be able to get it built amid all sorts of adverse forces that have a power today that they have never had before. In some cases, the power is legislated and in some cases it is not, but in all cases it is capable of slowing or halting your project. Gone are the days when you can rip down a building in the middle of the night as Harry Maclowe did in New York in 1967; or use uranium trappings
Environmental Regulation
Environmental policies were
generated at the federal level and came about as a result of lobbying by large numbers of people concerned about saving the earth after the flower children and hippie movements in the 1960s. Democrats were in power. Nobody really thought that saving the earth was a bad thing, nor probably had any idea of the far reaching impact of the new laws. The construction industry did not really participate in their formulation and did not lobby either for or against. Here is a chronological summary of those regulations:
