There are two vignettes that capture some of the qualities that make rich people different from you and me. First there is the story of billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla who bought a piece of beachfront property and promptly declared that the beach was his private property, fenced it off, and hired private security to throw out any peons who dared to encroach on his sacred land.
Naturally he was sued and on August 9, 2017 the state Court of Appeals of the First District of California rejected Khosla’s claim and ordered that access to the beach be restored to what had existed before. They also ordered Khosla to pay the attorneys’ fees for the group that brought the lawsuit against him. You can read the opinion here. This is not the first time that rich people have tried to eliminate access to prime property that had formerly been open to the public and this legal setback is a good sign.
Another case had an amusing twist. There is a very wealthy enclave in prime territory in the city of San Francisco. The houses in this enclave are serviced by a private road called Presidio Terrace.
Those residents value their privacy — and their exclusivity. Past homeowners have included Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her financier husband, Richard Blum; House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi; and the late Mayor Joseph Alioto. A guard is stationed round the clock at the stone-gate entrance to the street to keep the curious away.
…[T]he private development that has been managed by the homeowners since at least 1905. That includes a string of well-coiffed garden islands, palm trees and other greenery that enhance the gated and guarded community at the end of Washington Street, just off Arguello Boulevard and down the hill from the Presidio.
But the residents have not paid the trifling $14 per year tax for three decades, something that all owners of private streets in the city are required to do. So the city did what it does with all property that becomes delinquent for not paying taxes and put it up for auction. The road was then purchased by a young couple in another city for a mere $90,100 and they are planning to get a return on their investment by charging the residents for parking in the 120 spaces on the street.
Unsurprisingly, the residents were more than a little upset when they belatedly found out what had happened.
…
“I was shocked to learn this could happen, and am deeply troubled that anyone would choose to take advantage of the situation and buy our street and sidewalks,” said one homeowner, who asked not to be named because of pending litigation.
Why the tax was not paid for so long and why the residents were not aware of the auction sale of the street is not clear.
There is a final little irony to this story. The purchasers of the road Tina Lam and Michael Cheng are immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan but “Until a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning the enforcement of racial covenants, homes in Presidio Terrace could be purchased only by whites.” It is probably the case that rather than seeking to actually put in parking meters and the like they are looking to have the owners buy them out at a profit.
E.g. The Guardian has that detail:
“The HOA claims that the tax went unpaid not out of any desire to avoid payment (or inability to come up with the cash), but because the city was sending the bill to the address of an accountant who had not worked for them since the 1980s. …”
The accountant detail is interesting. I bet the homeowners wouldn’t be crying foul if one of their businesses repossessed something from a poor person who’d simply missed some minor fee.
Selling the street does sound like a dickish move on the part of the city, especially if they made no effort to contact people who actually, you know, lived on the street. A dick move does not stop being a dick move just based on the wealth of its targets.
brucegee1962 #3
Unless you submit an application, they probably won’t hire you.
I expect they already have enough taint-lickers.
Do you know that they made no such effort? I din’t know about the laws of NY, but other jurisdictions require that notices be posted on or near the property, and that notices be published in a legal paper. This counts as notice to anybody who cares to read them. In any case, the “people who actually, you know, lived on the street” had given the taxing authority contact information for themselves, but they screwed it up.
Well, I certainly know that if I were to ever mysteriously stop recieving bills for my utilities, I would just shrug my shoulders and move on in the assumption that they’ve decided to stop charging me. It’s not like that’s ever going to come back and bite you in the ass, is it?
The purchasers of the road Tina Lam and Michael Cheng are immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan but “Until a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning the enforcement of racial covenants, homes in Presidio Terrace could be purchased only by whites.”
Delicious irony
One must acknowledge a certain schadenfreude, but really they would just pay their Accountants and expect them to be on the ball. All files etc should have been transferred when they changed from one firm to the other.
I foresee some litigation in their future.
Of course. The article is titled, after all, “Games rich people play”: litigation is but one of them.