Well, first of all, fourteen dollars per annum seems like a small sum for thirty-five obscenely rich households to pony up each year, but somehow the HOA fucked up until $994 in taxes, penalties and interest stacked up, the city put a lien on the private street, and auctioned it off to cover the sum. San Francisco collected $90K in 2015, and the proud new owners are now prepared to put the squeeze on:

Thanks to a little-noticed auction sale, a South Bay couple are the proud owners of one of the most exclusive streets in San Francisco — and they’re looking for ways to make their purchase pay.
Tina Lam and Michael Cheng snatched up Presidio Terrace — the block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions — for $90,000 and change in a city-run auction stemming from an unpaid tax bill. They outlasted several other bidders.

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.

So imagine the residents’ surprise when San Jose residents Cheng and Lam wound up with the street, its sidewalks and every other bit of “common ground” in the private development that has been managed by the homeowners since at least 1905.

Oh dear, oh dear. The rentier class are unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of this sort of thing. This is so unjust.

The homeowners, however, are crying foul and want the Board of Supervisors to negate the sale...In a letter to the city last month, Scott Emblidge, the attorney for the Presidio Homeowners Association, said the group had failed to pay up because its tax bill was being mailed to the Kearny Street address used by an accountant who hadn’t worked for the homeowners since the 1980s.

Tough titty, folks. Take it up with your former accountant.

My guess is that the plutocrats will get their street back following some costly but futile legal maneuvering, eventually laying out beaucoup simoleons to the new owners. And while IANAL, it wouldn’t surprise me if these plutocrats begin quarreling among themselves thereafter, looking to saddle some of their own number with the blame and the liability. Why, there could be children yet unborn whose Stanford tuitions will be underwritten by the litigations this episode will generate.

I concede that this little newslet is less gratifying than, say, the overthrow of the existing capitalist order and its replacement by armed workers’ soviets, but I trust that it will afford mmoffitt a little tingle of satisfaction. I certainly chuckled.

cordially,

“Built right out to the edges of the lots” is the way they roll out here.

cordially,