The war over a private island in the San Francisco Bay | Hacker News Reader

The war over a private island in the San Francisco Bay

sfgate.com

13 pointsSirLJ11 comments

Not Red Rock Island?

That's privately owned, and currently for sale. Great location, south of the Richmond Bridge. It's a 5 acre big steep-sided rock sticking out of deep water. Nobody has ever been willing to spend enough money to do anything with it. Even conservation groups don't want it.

The price has gone from $49,000 in 1954 to an asking price of $25 million now. No takers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rock_Island

> The water board says that the island had reverted from a hunting destination to a tidal marsh over 10 years before he bought it. For Sweeney, it was a duck club in disrepair with an abandoned levee that needed patching up. He also claimed that when he bought the property in 2011, no one told him it was protected.

This seems to be the crux of the issue. If what Sweeney is saying is true here it's hard not to be sympathetic to him being caught in a sort of Kafkaesque trap. It seems common sense that you'd be able to repair levees on the island you bought.

The artificial wetlands being built in the Netherlands come to mind too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_Wadden

FWIW, a followup article indicates the island was auctioned off for $3.8M to the John Muir Land Trust and the former owner who attended the auction was then arrested on outstanding warrants.

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-island-ow...

This article is unreadable on mobile with ads. No, I don’t use an ad-blocker on mobile, I just give up after a moment of playing whack-a-mole.

I guess that tracks, given the url.

Firefox on Android with UBO

Nah, I just close sites with bullshit ads.

also works

Lame article, that's not a war. I thought this would be about the Egg War of the Farallon Islands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_War

Random thought, the egg picker drawing funny, makes me think be a random footnote in history 200 years later

When the government wants your property there is very little you can do about it. I see nothing egregious but I can imagine there are some environmental karens who are very upset.

Yeah, it doesn't seem egregious what he was up to. Fix a couple levees and throw up a country club on the water, pretty normal stuff. He was just a monumental moron for doing it without kissing the ring every step of the way and giving up the resultant pounds of flesh in the regulatory climate he did. They'll let developers do way, way, way worse but those guys are playing by "the rules".

It must have been his first waterfront development or something.

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