Palo Alto Board Rejects Zuckerberg’s Proposal To Tear Down Homes

CBS SAN FRANCISCO ^ | 16 SEPTEMBER 2016 | CBS SF

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

PALO ALTO (CBS SF) – Members of Palo Alto’s Architectural Review Board are saying no to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg’s plan to tear down neighboring homes he spent $30 million on.

Zuckerberg wanted to bulldoze the four homes around his residence in the Crescent Park neighborhood, replacing them with smaller properties.

[FreedomStar3028]

Wait, he bought the property and can’t tear down the structures. What?

[Donglalinger]

"It’s now up to the city’s planning director to decide whether to let Zuckerberg carry out the plans for the property."

Next weeks headline: Former City Planning Director buys his own Island in the Caribbean

[Donglalinger]

“Wait, he bought the property and can’t tear down the structures. What?”
He can’t tear them down and build the structures he wants to.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

Planning departments do this throughout California.

[tennmountainman]

Good! Let Zuckerburg build his empire and home in Detroit or Iraq.

[bigbob]

He’ll be moving to Uruguay after Trump wins anyhow.

[Talisker]

He wants to turn four residential homes into half-sized cabanas for visiting friends, and the zoning board ruled that that violates the neighborhood plan.

[JimSEA]

If he owns the property and isn’t making a dangerous situation he would seem to have the right. Well, he would of in the America I loved.

[gunnut]

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

[Cementjungle]

Pretty funny. Bill Gates just recently finished buying all the houses in a neighborhood not far from me (Wellington, FL). Word is he's just going to tear them down so his daughter can ride her horses there. Steve Job's widow just bought the ranch adjacent to Gates' property.

I hope Zuckerberg doesn't move down here.

[RetiredTexasVet]

Pay to play Zuck face .... you should know that by now!

[Gay State Conservative]

Zuckerberg could probably buy half of Brownsville and still have billions left over.And I'll bet their planning board would let him do whatever he wanted with that property.It would be a hoot to see what he'd do with regard to security.

[clee1]

That’s Kalefornicacia for ya!

[TheNext]

In a related story, the Palo Alto Review Board members, sudden & surprising Identity Theft, have renamed the board members, Larry, Moe & Jack.

The board’s Utilities have been shut down by way of automatic meter. Their bank accounts have been voided.

The board members are all currently homeless.

[combat_boots]

He wants a wall. Of smaller houses with whoknowswhat underneath.

[eyeamok]

They should take the properties using eminent domain and put 1000 Syrian refugees there

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Palo Alto has been too successful and is paying a terrible price for that. The toothpaste is all squeezed out of the tube and ain't going back in. A few decades ago it was a nice upper middle-class town. Now it is insanely successful and you have to be a gazillionaire to buy there. But plenty of wealthy young families with a couple of toddlers move there all the time. Most of them pay all cash and are immune to the next tech bust (other than coughing up the $30k in annual property taxes).

No coding in Palo Alto? City takes on Silicon Valley growth

Last month the city, the birthplace of Hewlett Packard and Xerox Parc and founding place of Facebook, began considering whether to enforce a zoning regulation banning firms whose “primary business is research and development, including software coding.”

Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt told the (New York) Times:

Big tech companies are choking off the downtown. It’s not healthy.

Palo Alto is a software capital. It has also become a company town, with Palantir Technologies renting 20 downtown buildings, as Marisa Kendall wrote.

Other notable tech firms there include Tesla, SAP, Flipboard, VMware and many others. It has become a center for automation and cars and is home to Ford’s research and development center.

Some of these firms are in the outer regions of the city and presumably wouldn’t be affected by the zoning regulation, which appears to be directed to the downtown.

For many of the 66,000 residents of Palo Alto, all this coding and innovation may be a bit too much.

Already the city has been under pressure to increase its housing. A planning commissioner recently resigned in part out of frustration with the city’s anti-growth politics.

[Shanghai Dan]

It’s California. If you have money, then you have to give a lot of it to some mitigation task force or social justice group before you get your plans approved. Typically at a 1:1 rate of donation to cost of project.

[Rembrandt]

I can hear it now, a reprise of John Kerry’s famous question! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?