[phl]

A couple of years ago some art school students built an apartment in a Berlin subway tunnel. Some years later another artist built a little penthouse unnoticed on the roof of an apartment building. I went to visit it after I found it listed on real estate website. It turned out to be sort of a mock real estate agent pitch performance. Later the artist told me that all renters, neighbors and janitors though it must be legitimate and nobody suspected it to be built without permission from authorities or the owner.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-11/photos-a-...

https://penthaus-a-la-parasit.de/

[hinkley]

Owning beehives was illegal in NYC until a decade or so ago and around the time the law was repealed a bunch of clandestine beekeepers came forward and confessed how they had hidden their hives.

One guy had disguised his hives as an AC condenser on the roof. He even went so far as to wear workman's clothing when he went up to work on it, so any neighbors who were only passingly curious would see a tradesman and ignore what he was actually doing.

[samhw]

This is why I disagree with recreational lawmaking. If you employ a bunch of people whose only job is to make laws, you soon end up with a bunch of absurd laws like this, just because someone got stung by a bee once and a politician decided it would make for a handy Facebook ad in their next campaign. And before you know it, you can't move a finger without breaking one of the ten million laws that govern your every action. No one wants this and yet somehow we've ended up with it.