Aaron Peskin got his illegally merged $1.5M “monster” home | Hacker News Reader

Aaron Peskin got his illegally merged $1.5M “monster” home

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97 pointseigenvector28 comments

San Francisco housing policy is literally insane.

Having read this entire article I'm not even totally sure what kind of insane this is, but I'm sure of my conclusion.

What's the original rationale behind preventing a duplex to be merged into a one-family home? I would have thought it is just so you can't use it as a reason to kick out a tenant. But if the tenants are already gone...?

I believe to maintain rental units which are available to those who do not or cannot afford to buy.

There is a rental shortage in the city, thus rental prices are going higher. The more rentals that leave the market, theoretically, the higher rent goes.

It isn’t city policy to prevent such mergers but it is city policy that you must get a permit for such a merger before actually doing it.

It's a bit like removing busstops as a municipality, in favour of car lanes. If you know that busses are used 4x as much by a low socioeconomic class compared to say an upper class, and vice versa for cars, then a law preventing the elimination of (even unprofitable) bus stops is essentially a protection of vulnerable citizens.

Same with housing stock. If you only have gigantic housing units that only the ultra-rich can afford, poorer people get pushed out the city even faster compared to a housing stock with many smaller (and thereby affordable) units. Preventing parties from eradicating this stock again is a protective measure for people who rely on this housing stock to have a home in the city.

That can’t really be the reason because SF has approved numerous such mergers and expansion of gigantic single-family structures and they steadfastly forbid subdivision of buildings no matter how large into duplexes in the vast majority of the city. The city’s actions indicate that detached single-family structures are the strongly preferred type.

Not sure, in my city (capital in western Europe) we have similar laws, both for division and mergers. They're built to protect the housing stock. Family homes can't be split up because it incentivises landlords to create many small units for young single tenants, students etc, while reducing homes available for families who need multiple rooms, who get pushed out the city. But similarly, you also can't just merge two homes, because it does the opposite, push out young/student/poor people and attract only families or those with the money to buy a larger unit.

Of course mergers/divisions can still happen, but it has to be approved by the municipality.

The popularity / trend of either mergers or divisions purely based on the market may change every five years or it may swing one way for decades. The point of these laws is for the municipality to exert control over this, because it's an elected body with normative ideas about what the city should look like and who should be able to live there.

A protective law for small units doesn't negate that at the same time there could be good reason to have a protective law for large units.

Second, my city doesn't just do it to control the overal housing stock. It also does it to steer individual neighbourhoods a certain way. It may be that the aggregate distribution of small and large units is completely fine in the city, but that one neighbourhood has only family units, and another only single-person units. It tends to be that, while some concentration/clustering of characteristics is helpful (e.g. a family vs a student neighbourhood), it's also healthy for a neighbourhood to maintain a bit of a mix. Healthy municipalities of highly livable cities often try to steer this mix, such that you don't end up with de facto segregation. Rich and poor, young and old, educated and uneducated, various ethnicities and trades all living together instead of segregated. This also means municipalities tend to want to create laws to protect a certain size of housing stock, could be small or large units, by requiring approval for both mergers and divisions, to protect certain citizen's groups. The fact laws for both mergers and divisions exist certainly isn't necessarily strange.

Anyway I'm relatively unfamiliar with SF, never lived there, so honestly I've got no clue what's actually happening here.

But bus lanes and roads are public infrastructure. Non-governmental buildings are private property.

I’m not saying there isn’t a housing issue in the Bay Area, there is, but that separate from private property. City gov is making it difficult for all but the most expensive developments to become viable. There is seemingly no way to build middle class housing in SF and be profitable.

Author here: there are protections in place for demolishing rent controlled units without replacing them. Otherwise, you could easily induce tenants to leave (or Ellis them) and then just knock down their units without replacement.

Something seems a bit off here.

“Dec. 2002: Trafton sells the duplex to Peskin’s parents for $800,000 — a $700,000 loss on the $1.5M she paid two years earlier.”

Later on the parents transfer ownership to their son and his wife....

2002 was after the .com bubble but not a terrible real estate year...

That stairway looks awfully narrow. Is it even up to code? I thought the minimum width in CA was 34". Also there's not a proper landing with a handrail.

It's an illegal merge, it's highly unlikely the made sure to do the work "up to code".

That being said, if you look at the railing it looks to be made out of a 2x4 sized piece of wood. The 5 floor slats looks roughly the same sized. So with that we get 20" wide, which would be a narrow but doable staircase.

The landing width of the stairs in my SF apartment (which is new and to code) is 30". So not sure what code is, just a datapoint.

I think the railing would need to continue at least the width of a stair to form a proper "landing"

Not from the US, I must say I find it ridiculous that one seems to require a permit to renovate a kitchen in SF. Is this common in the US?

In some jurisdictions, I imagine Peskin might be that lone corrupt regulator whose brazen corruption makes the public suspect all regulators. In lots of other jurisdictions, his misconduct isn't unusual in the least...

This reads like such a recursive mess of "why is that any of anyone else's business" that I have a hard time sympathizing with anyone involved.

Nobody would care except Peskin makes it his business to tell everyone else what they can’t do with -their- property.

In addition to the other poster, it's clear political corruption:

A person merges their duplex. Peskin blocks it using his position on the neighborhood board. Peskin then acquires the now illegal single family home at a large discount. Peskin, a city official, then manages to get a permit for the exact thing that he had blocked not three years earlier.

Seems to me the appropriate action here is

Grand Jury -> Indictment -> Trial -> Peskin goes to prison.

Peskin's NIMBY supporters are basically on the same level of denial of trump supporters...they don't care what their own party's candidates do, they just want to make sure their side wins.

Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I stand corrected, the legislation will indeed harm tenements. I would suggest that arguing against legislation by showing a supporter's hypocrisy may not be the strongest approach. It is a tad fallacious after all.

Full disclosure, my incorrect original post:

Find a guy with dirt that supports protecting rent controlled units. Use that to attempt to discredit legislation that helps tenants.

If the best argument against protecting rental units is a weak Tu Quoque, then perhaps protecting duplex rentals is a good idea.

I am the author. I did not bother with a refutation of the terrible piece of legislation being proposed, because others have done a better job elsewhere. One could check out https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Peskin..., for instance.

What tipped you off that this was happening?

I got a tip from a friend that something was off with the whole duplex/sfh situation, and I guess I have a reputation for pushing through to publication with stories like this.

Interesting. How much research did this take?

> Use that to attempt to discredit legislation that helps tenants.

This legislation will hurt tenants.

Rent controlled duplexes are already protected by the regulations that were violated here. You can't remove rent-controlled units without a permit!

Obviously some onlookers don't understand current laws and don't understand the proposed legislation. It's important for them to know that their trust in the legislator to do this for them is misplaced.

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