Rich SF residents get a shock: Someone bought their street

[running_coach]

@TruCelt

Holy Greek Goddess, Batman! If you follow the Presidio’s private golf course up and to the left, it borders on a Nike Missile Site. Just openly labeled, right there on Google maps.

That’s deep.

The shoe company was sponsoring a missile system!?
That is so cool!!!

:D:D:D

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

@running_coach

The shoe company was sponsoring a missile system!?

That is so cool!!!

:D:D:D

Just Do It takes on a more sinister tone…

[Enginerd]

@TruCelt

True for the homeowners perhaps. Not true for whoever represented themselves as being qualified to manage the HOA.

These were not uneducated homeowners though. They almost certainly used real estate lawyers for their multi-million dollar purchases, and had financial managers of their own. So there is every reason to consider them responsible for knowing and overseeing the responsibilities of their HOA management (or hiring an auditor to do so).

I just checked my HOA for a neighborhood of more or less cookie-cutter homes. There’s a line in the annual operating budget for property taxes, and every budget line shows both the actual amount expended last year and the amount budgeted for this year. Any zeros on this line should have tipped somebody off. It would be interesting to see if they budgeted for taxes and then simply didn’t pay them.

If the budget didn’t catch the error, it seems like an audit should have. The annual operating budget determines the frequency, but even at the bare minimum (annual budget less than $75,000) an audit by an independent CPA is required every four years. I’m no CPA, but shouldn’t that have come up here?

[aceplace57]

The BBC explains the long practice of Americans privately owning streets.

I didn’t realize it went back to Colonial days.

In the US, buying streets is a centuries-old trend

But how could the common areas in a street where homes sell for millions go for a relatively small sum? More to the point, how could it be sold at all?

The answer goes back centuries and is a very American approach to an age-old question of the role of government.

Two decades before Americans dreamed up an idea for independence from Britain, Joseph Basset walked into city hall in New Haven, Connecticut, with what might sound like a terrible idea for the city.

Basset, in 1751, gave his city a fairly worthless strip of old highway he was about to inherit from his father. In exchange, the city awarded him a main thoroughfare in the middle of town.

The exchange was common in colonial America, where cash-strapped cities often didn’t have the money to maintain infrastructure. So they sold off or traded streets for other land to developers who could improve the roads and make money by charging residents to use them.

[Reluctant_A]

Heard about this the first time this afternoon, while catching up on my favorite podcast; thought it was hilarious.