Legal Question in Construction Law in California

We have a 90' retaining wall along the back of our house. It is a 6' wall, holding back approx. two feet of our back yard that was put in before we moved in 30 years ago. The other side of the wall is a main street with a city sidewalk that butts up to our wall. About a week ago, a portion of our wall and neighbors wall came down. The city engineer came out and assessed the situation. They sent us a letter stating the rest of our walls needed to come down along with our other neighbors, on both sides. The retaining wall runs along 6 homes and built at the same time. The city engineer stated the wall was not built to support the soil behind it. There is not footing at the base, the lower blocks speared to be set directly in soil, (no footing), there was no structural integrity to the lower blocks, and contained insufficient reinforcing bars. At a few locations where there were reinforcement bars, they easily came out of the soil, not a concrete footing. My question is. Shouldn't the city have monitored the building of this wall since it butts up to their sidewalk? The city has no information on this wall. I know that I, the homeowner, is responsible for the wall, but shouldn't the city claim part of the responsibility. This wall should have been build to code and it wasn't. Now they want us to build a new retaining wall to their code specifications.


Asked on 2/06/17, 1:47 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys

The simple answer is "no." It is long and clearly established law that the government has zero responsibility to assure that anything is built to code. Inspections are solely for the benefit of the city itself, not for property owners or anyone else involved with the property and work of improvement, as a matter of law. Furthermore, if the city has no record of the wall, it sounds like it was constructed without permits. The government isn't obligated to conduct 24/7 surveillance of all real property to assure no work is done without permits, and therefore without the city even knowing about how or when it was built, much less whether it was done to code.

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Answered on 2/06/17, 6:49 pm


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