“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so.”
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When do we start paying taxes directly to the nobles?
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Agree.
Oh, come on. $14 a year. Hardly tax dodging on any kind of scale. It’s an obvious oversight. In fact, under English law, the asset seizure would, I suspect, be voided under de minimis non curat lex. The seizure was obviously wildly disproportionate to the debt. And regardless of who the buyers were, it’s clear that no effort at all was made to sell the asset for anything like its true value.
One of the most important points about the law is that it has to be equal (That is in fact the meaning of “egalité” in the French slogan. Unfortunately for some that means that the moral or cultural status of people cannot be taken into account in applying the law. And that’s just as well because the end of that slippery slope is the confiscation of property of the Jews, the Russians, or whoever is the current hate group.
If it was an abusive landlord who was due a peppercorn ground rent, and when it didn’t come waited a year and then evicted an elderly lady for nonpayment of ground rent so he could re-let to a rich friend, people would be angry at the landlord. If they are not, then the fault is in society. But whether it’s a poor old lady or some rich householders should make no difference in law; expropriation for a trivial debt is no better than theft.
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I was just going to post about this same point; is the board of supervisors bound to follow their previous decisions in the same way as a court?
This is becoming an unfortunate pattern with his posts, they are getting more and more hyperbolic and inflammatory, sometimes to the point of being misleading. Which is disappointing, because the subjects that he covers are the ones I am the most interested in reading about, but more and more I find myself skipping posts when I see his byline attached…
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Sure, but this is 35 years worth of unpaid tax and penalties. What did they consume in municipal services during the same period? And how many of these wealthy landowners would have jumped on a similar opportunity if it came their way and wasn’t in their own front yard? How many of them are wealthy from exactly this type of opportunism?
And while you insist on fairness under the law, that is definitely not how it plays out in practice. The wealthy wield the courts and government like a hammer to crush everyone else. Case in point.
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To be fair, the 1948 stuff and the buyers being Asian was all in the original news item. Cory didn’t add that in off his own bat.
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Depends when Amazon moves to Chicago (and you work for Amazon there), or someone else decides to replicate this offer…
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I wonder what happens to the speculators and their money. They legally bought this at public auction, with a reasonable expectation of a return on their investment. Legally, it must be theirs, now - the city is eminent-domaining the property away from them? Just returning their money would mean the city held their money, interest-free, for a period of time, and they might be significantly out-of-pocket, depending on loans they might have taken out to buy it.
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Wow great non journalism guys!
Did you read the part where they were mailing the bill to a accountant that hasn’t worked for the association for decades?
I’m all for putting rich folks feet to the fire but let’s have some common sense.
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The way I read it, that’s exactly the point in this whole article. If the owners were “regular folks,” the response of the Board of Supervisors would have been, “Oh well, you didn’t pay up, you should know well that taxes were due on your property, and we already sold it. Tough luck.” But because of the status of the owners, they got a do-over. Again. This case is an example of inequality, not of picking on a group of people over a trivial matter because they are rich.
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I’m sure that was just an innocent mistake (again). Surely, the HOA thought that the city taxes just went away. I mean, it’s not like someone has the fiduciary duty at the HOA to make sure that all taxes and fees are paid, not just to the city but also by residents. /s
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Is Ahab supposed to stick the harpoon into the property owners or the Board of Supervisors?
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I don’t care which gets harpooned, but I hope they’re all on the ship when it sinks.
edited for spoilers
My argument, however, is that in such a case everybody should get what you call a do-over.
When my child became a lawyer one of their first cases involved a client who they disliked intensely and suspected were somewhat criminal. But, in this particular civil case, they were 100% in the right.
It’s bad that only the rich have access to the law. I don’t agree with that. But the answer is not to spread obvious injustice across everybody.
Happy now? (See above).
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I agree with the sentiment, but not in this particular case.
The same HOA, if they were shorted $14/year in fees by a resident, for 35 years, would have incredible power up to and including putting a lien on the resident’s home.
This isn’t the kind of thing that’s done on accident. At one point, they were paying the taxes. Then they stopped. They were reminded and started paying them again. Then they stopped. It’s not the kind of thing that gets missed when the HOA bookkeeping gets done. I could see it happening one year. Oops. But either the HOA treasurer or their management company or hired accountants would have caught it. At that point, somebody decided to try and get away with it.
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Much better. I edited mine for spoilers as well.
This point and many others like it were addressed in the previous thread.
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Speaking as a resident of the SF Bay Area (and someone who is NOT wealthy and does NOT have unconditional sympathy for the wealthy) I think the spin put on this story is more than a little bit unfair. The original actions of the city – selling the land to speculators – was pretty egregious to begin with. I view this as a correction of that mistake, not some kind of giveaway to the rich.
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The City put the land up for auction after the homeowners failed to pay the tax for over 30 years.
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You’d better ask the estate of the late Robert Lowell to edit The Quaker Graveyard Nantucket for spoilers too. He gives the whole thing away. But at least he doesn’t mention the bit where unknown to Ishmael, Starbuck survives the wreck of the Pequod and goes on to start a chain of coffee shops.
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