AFAIK, this kind of thing doesn’t happen a lot, and so there aren’t exactly a lot of examples to point to. That means there probably aren’t any comparable citations for me to point to, nor you. But for the record, I would be in favor of the city correcting this kind of problem regardless of wealth.
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If the owners were aware of the outstanding tax bill and did nothing for 30 years, I think you’d have a point. Someone did clearly fail to do their job properly, but it’s not at all clear that the owners were aware of the problem.
Yes. The homeowners.
WHAT?!? OUTRAGEOUS! Where do we live, Soviet Russia!?!? /s
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Boing Boing is not a news outlet. The Bloggers aren’t journalists.
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Which obviously raises the question: why was it only $14/yr? Are the maintenance services performed by the local government really that cheap to provide?
If not, why are ordinary people subsidising the private property of the wealthy?
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Where did you get that information from?
All the previous stories were pretty clear that the taxes hadn’t been paid because the residents’ association hadn’t been getting the tax bills. Even their court pleadings didn’t claim that they had been paying the taxes, just that they clearly could pay them.
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I keep forgetting that although the US inherited some law from England, the system is different. In England courts are courts of equity as well as law, so they can take into account (to a degree) whether an action is ethical as well as legal. My father won at least one case that I know of on this ground. I get the impression that only is this not the case in the US, but most citizens are perfectly happy with it.
It is very interesting to read posts from the US above and realise how absolutist are the attitudes.
The distinction between equity and law is a little more complicated than simply “equity can take into account whether an action is ethical/unethical even if it is legal”.
This sort of thing would be just as legal in the UK (whether in law or equity) assuming Parliament had enacted similar laws.
The Human Rights Act might get the property owners somewhere but probably not since the measures could probably be justified as being in the public interest (got to ensure those taxes get paid).
We of course don’t (usually) take people’s property away if they didn’t pay the taxes due on the property. We send them to prison instead.
Although of course we could take their property away. First step is a liability order which can lead to a charging order securing the unpaid sums, that can lead to an order for sale which means you lose the property. No statutory lower limit so entirely at the judge’s discretion whether they order sale.
Your post did get me intrigued about how the US dealt with equity/law and it turns out most of the States merged the jurisdictions just as England and Wales did but some haven’t. Virginia apparently only merged them in 2006. Federal law is apparently merged apart from bankruptcy which is supposedly pure Equity.
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Racism is still racism, whether you’re the original author or not.
It is hypocritical to give Corey a free pass for forwarding on racially charged content “because he wasn’t the original author”, but then denounce Trump’s retweeting racially charged content.
Hmm… you apparently felt the need to call me hypocritical for something I haven’t (yet) done (denouncing Trump’s retweeting racially charged content).
Let me remedy that:
Trump’s retweeting racist rubbish is merely the latest in a long line of acts by Trump that make me wonder at the thought process of anyone who voted for him in the primaries or for the Republicans in the election. It is not the worst thing he’s done but it is pretty mindbogglingly stupid.
Does that do you?
Having got that out of the way, there is a world of difference between (more or less) accurately précising a newspaper article which makes the accurate points that:
a) this residents’ association has previous when it comes to not paying their taxes and losing their property as a result (and getting it back);
b) the area was previously “whites only”;
c) the people who bought the property at auction are non-white and that some people might find this ironic.
and
retweeting a bunch of racist rubbish from a well-known racist.
Are all of those points relevant to what happened in this case? I agree they are not.
Would I personally have preferred to concentrate on the element about the squawks of outrage of the elite at actually having the same law applied to them as ordinary mortals (however briefly)? Yes.
Is it illegitimate for a website which purports to curate interesting stuff from across the web to include that stuff? Hell, no.
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But in this case the first thing the owners knew is that the rights had been sold under them. The city knew where the owners were. Why didn’t the owners get a writ?
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I never said that you were hypocritical, I was trying to convey that Corey and BoingBoing were being hypocritical and that they should stop publishing irrelevant race-bait, whether or not they were the original authors or not,
Would the precedent actually be that local government would from now on have to make the effort to contact the property owners before seizing and auctioning off private property? Naaah, makes too much sense and doesn’t have an irrelevant race-baiting issue that can be thrown in…
Sorry - to be clear, the liability order stuff is what would happen here if you didn’t pay your council tax.
In San Francisco, there is a whole raft of legislation about what has to happen before your property gets seized - which I ran through/linked to in the earlier thread.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff that the City has to do before it can sell your property and they did it all.
If they’d known it was someone’s street, they’d probably have gone further (it seems to have been listed as just a vacant lot) but they weren’t required to.
Enough of the Board of Supervisors seem to feel that they should have to go further so they agreed to rescind the sale. Which is also provided for in the relevant legislation.
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=RTC§ionNum=3731.
Interestingly, that seems to indicate that the county legal advisor agreed that the sale should be rescinded. I’d like to see that piece of advice 
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I’m confused by your choice of meme. Does this mean you’re on board with average SF citizens paying proportionally more in property tax than these wealthy ones?
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No, that they’re so out of touch with the actual costs of things that it wouldn’t matter if it was $14 or $14,000. They’d whine and complain about having to pay taxes at all, but are so insulated from the actual value of money that it’s ludicrous.
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Maybe, maybe not. But I can guarantee that if they don’t follow that precedent in the future, it will result in a lawsuit down the line.
