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Holdout

99percentinvisible.org

264 pointssmacktoward60 comments

I had Tibor Gergley's "Great Big Book of bed time stories". There is a story in it called "Make way for the thruway" by Caroline Emerson. It is about an old lady who refuses to vacate her house so that they can make a highway. It has a happy ending when sympathetic construction workers build the road around her house, and she becomes the famous old lady with the pretty house next to the highway.

My favorite quote:

"You'll be paid for your land," said Mike.

"Money isn't everything in this world," said the little old lady.

Aww, heck, you guys deserve the whole paragraph:

"You'll be paid for your land," said Mike.

"Money isn't everything in this world," said the little old lady. ...

Next day, the Big Boss drove to the old house. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, "this house must come down."

"Young man," said the little old lady, "I've lived in this house for seventy years. I watched those trees grow. I planted that rose bush. I'm not leaving."

"But the thruway must go through," said the Big Boss. "People want the quickest, shortest way these days."

"What's their hurry?" asked the little old lady.

The Big Boss shook his head. he didn't know.

...

(After the diversion has been built)

"Oh, look at the roses!" people cry as they drive by. They slow down a little to look.

"Hum," says the little old lady to her cat, "they're not in such a hurry, after all."

Having a beautiful house right next to the highway is a lot noisier than my personal dream residence -- and less quaint when your entire neighborhood abandons you. Money isn't everything, but I can't help but feel she got the fuzzy end of that banana.

Maybe she likes noise and hates people.

There is a farm in the middle of the M62 over here, though contrary to popular tail it was left that way more for geographical reasons than because the owner of the land didn't want to sell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M62_motorway#Stott_Hall_Farm

Why the road splits to go around both sides instead of just one I'm not sure though.

Isn't it rather antisocial not to sell for public building? I don't understand why everybody sides with the holdouts.

Also I feel sorry for everybody who lives next to a highway.

If someone showed up at your house and told you that you had to leave, would you?

Personally, it would depend on why they want me to move. If it's so they can build something of huge public benefit and have sound reasoning for why it needs to go through my house, and I'm compensated suitably, then yes of course I would leave. Doing otherwise would be selfish.

But if they don't fulfill all of those requirements, I would probably still move if they increased the compensation offering enough.

Concepts like "huge public benefit" and "sound reasoning" are in the eye of the beholder; and as mentioned above, money isn't everything. Especially for old people, memories can be more of a comfort than cash, and losing your home inevitably means losing some of those memories.

> Concepts like "huge public benefit" and "sound reasoning" are in the eye of the beholder;

Yes. That's why my first word was "Personally"

> and as mentioned above, money isn't everything.

Yes. That's why I wrote "compensated suitably" and "increased the compensation offering enough".

> Especially for old people, memories can be more of a comfort than cash, and losing your home inevitably means losing some of those memories.

That seems rather condescending to old people to me.

Isn't it rather antisocial to pave over someone's home?

Not if you pay them accordingly. Moving is not that big a deal.

I am talking about projects for public benefit. Some things have to be built somewhere, after all.

"Not if you pay them accordingly."

And so it came to be, that money was the measure of everything.

I hate to border on strawman-building, but... what if I told you that you have to renounce your laptop, your telephone number, all your social media accounts, all your pictures, everything you've ever hold dear, right now, "for the good of the community"? Of course I'll pay you "accordingly" (up to a point, i.e. just enough to replace them). Would you take it?

For a lot of old people, relinquishing their homes means losing memories and likely being uprooted from the community they belong to, which is what they really care about. They don't care too much about their bank accounts, because they are aware that their time is short and what really matters for them is the connections they can still make, the history they can pass on.

That sort of thing doesn't have a price tag.

Well helping people has a price tag. If they don't care for the money, they could still accept it and donate it to cancer research or food donations for starving children.

It still seems selfish...

In any case what is the point of the discussion if I say "if they pay accordingly" and you say "but they won't"?

Money as a measure for everything - it is just a convenient proxy for talking about the value of things. What is so bad about that? Should these people be paid off in other things? Like what?

The point is that in some cases, there are things that cannot be "paid off", whatever the currency. Not everything can be bought and sold.

"Moving is not that big a deal."

I'm going to venture a guess that either you've never moved or if you have, you just threw nearly all your possessions out and started completely anew.

Or he's never had a home in the full sense of the word.

If you work in the construction industry I imagine this is the equivalent of an IE6 user.

This is why the concept of eminent domain exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

Eminent domain is sadly abused in 99% of the cases.

I'd rather it didn't exist, but I can see the need in the most extreme examples.

See for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_for_Billionaires

Edit: keeping on topic, there was a holdout when building a mall here in Uruguay, and they built the parking lot around his house:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Geant/@-34.8667764,-56.023...

there's a controversy in my country (Uruguay) because the state wants to apply Eminent Domain to a supposed landmark, because a study said 200 years ago it had been a campsite of the national hero:

http://www.diarioelpueblo.com.uy/destacados/el-hervidero-una...

My father (commercial real estate developer) has great stories about persuading people to not be the holdout. The most common objection is that they're older and moving is a major hassle, and the most usual way for resolving it is paying way above "going rates" for the property.

Interestingly, property owners theoretically can collude against a developer by sharing knowledge that the last person to settle has the best chance of getting a great deal, but that very rarely happens. Instead, most rush to sell quickly. (For obvious reasons, commercial real estate developers very rarely decide "You know where I'm going to make a mall? On top of 25 families' dream homes!")

I remember a holdout situation in my old home town that was resolved... differently. The developer offered way above market rates to the last holdout, who still refused. A few weeks later, while the holdout was out shopping, the developer had a "miscommunication" with a construction subcontractor, who drove a bulldozer through the building.

Obviously, the homeowner sued the developer, but wound up only winning the normal market for the building. No longer having an emotional attachment to the empty lot, the owner then wound up selling the land to the developer as well, just to move on with life. Not counting some probably substantial legal fees, it actually came out cheaper for the developer than their earlier offer.

Sometimes the law seems incomprehensible. How is it that you can knock down somebody's house on purpose so you can essentially steal their land and all you have to do is pay for the house?

As far as I can tell, we have culturally decided that all is fair if you are working for a company. Things that are clearly criminal if done on your own time are seen as just clever manipulation of contracts if you are working for a company. I can't understand it either, but it seems that simply prosecuting illegal acts evenly would fix most of the problems that people currently complain about as flaws in "capitalism".

The difficulty would be in proving malice. If all you can prove is a bulldozer accident, then paying them the replacement value of the house seems reasonable.

And yet, I'm virtually certain that this would not apply to me personally.

Let's say that my neighbor has a window that I don't like, so I go smash it with a hammer. When questioned, I say, oops, sorry, I meant to smash my window with a hammer! Just an honest mistake, officer! I was going to replace that window, but you know, got pointed the wrong way.

I'm certain that I would still get hauled off to jail at this point.

So, why the difference?

If (for whatever bizarre reason) your job is to go from place to place smashing a list of windows, then you might have a legitimate defence. No reasonable person could confuse their own house for that of a neighbour, but someone could reasonably enter the wrong house number into a database or misread a job sheet.

This sort of stuff happens all the time. A backhoe driver misreads a site plan and digs straight through a utility trench. A civil engineer miscalculates bearing capacity, puts a piling in the wrong place and causes an adjacent building to collapse. A debt collector mistypes a license plate number and the wrong car gets repossessed. People make honest mistakes at work that cause damage and inconvenience; No just system can treat that as criminal behaviour without evidence of malice. It's a tort of negligence, no more and no less.

OK, so let's expand the analogy a bit....

I don't smash your window with a hammer, but I hire a guy to do it for me. Afterwards, I claim it was a mixup, and that I meant to hire him to smash my window. After a long history of attempting to pay my neighbor to replace his window, and complaining about how much I dislike his window, and how I really really want it gone, would this not be sufficiently clear that this wasn't an accident?

Is "revenge by contractor" really a viable, punishment-free approach available to me? Can I break people's stuff with no consequences beyond paying for the items if I hire a professional to do it for me? I don't think it would work.

It depends on how much money your neighbor would want to spend on legal fees proving your malicious intent. You are offering to replace the window, so there's not much more a civil court could demand of you.

Criminal proceedings don't generally require hiring private lawyers. It would be up to the local police and prosecutor to decide whether to investigate and bring charges. Which, again, I'm pretty sure they would.

If they wouldn't, I want to know this, because it would be really handy to have this sort of tool at my disposal. (And important to know that others have it at their disposal to potentially use against me!).

The homeowner likely got some money from the building insurance as well. So in a way, insurance paid for the property developer.

Can't the insurance sue the developer to recoup their costs? Seems like it should.

I guess so. Maybe the sum likely to be recovered was inferior to the cost of suing. I'm speculating anyway.

A more recent photo of Edith Macefield's house:

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/18uugtoshe2...

Nice balloons. Won't quite lift the house up though.

On Google Maps

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.662205,-122.375384,3a,75y,6....

A quick "drive" around the neighbourhood confirms what I saw in the aerial picture in the article: what appears to be another holdout:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.662933,-122.375932,3a,75y,14...

Sadly, it doesn't look that good anymore. It's all boarded up with a "coming soon" sign for something that's probably some sort of elaborate scam on it. Pretty sad, actually.

The last photo in the article is much more recent than that. It's covered in plywood now :(

http://i0.wp.com/99percentinvisible.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

I've said it before, the 99percentinvisible podcast should be right up the alley of the hacker news crowd.

Does it have a proper podcast feed? I cannot find it.

http://feeds.99percentinvisible.org/99percentinvisible

Definitely. Anyone reading this, go back and listen to the archives! They're 10-20 minute, well produced, interesting casts.

I discovered 99percentinvisible 2 days ago on Pocket Casts app on android, I was surprised to find this post right after I listened to this very episode. Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon at work!

Man, I just learned about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon the other day, and now it seems to be popping up everywhere.

Would that lady qualify as a 99%er? After all she owned a house and was offered a lot of money for it.

No. It takes at least $6.8 million to be in the 1% [0]. She was only offered $1 million plus another house and some medical care.

[0] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732330040...

Just so we're clear, the podcast isn't about 99%ers. It's about design, and it just happens to have "99%" in its name.

Here's the Hess Triangle on Street View: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.733578,-74.00303,3a,75y,205....

Stories like this sometimes just break my heart. When you are at a certain age, money just doesn't matter any longer.

Although the world can't just sit here and stop development and wait for people to move on. I am always so torn on how to feel about these types of situations.

I hope I never live up to that "certain age".

I mean, a lump sum of money, seriously exceeding a relocation cost, may have a lot of usages, from donating it to charity to traveling around the world to starting something new you wanted to do but did not have the resources.

Being locked in the amber of the memory of the days past and the ingrained routine may be a fine choice, but I hope to choose otherwise when the time comes.

Very often there is more to it than money: A single holdout can make a development less profitable/unprofitable. That reduces the bargaining power of his/her neighbours, who may be eager to move to better accommodation. Then you have a big fight that can last a decade or longer.

See this documentary: http://english.cntv.cn/2014/07/19/VIDE1405753920238884.shtml

A flower shop that has long occupied a choice corner in my town recently made a unique deal with a developer wishing to build a large apartment building around it:

http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31978793-78/everything-c...

> Neal offered them a novel solution: He would design a building that included commercial space for a new Eugene’s Flower Home and give the family a deed for that portion of the building.

I think the house does a wonderful job of breaking up the monotony of the streetscape.

Whilst in some ways I really hate the planning/listing laws in the UK, it does at least leave some very interesting buildings around. You can be walking down a London city-centre street, past one big blocky modern building after another and then suddenly encounter a 400+ year old Tudor inn. Absolutely fantastic when you see them; it's one of the main reasons I like walking rather than taking the underground.

It used to break up the landscape, but in its current dilapidated state it's a bit of an eye-sore, even compared to the rest of the Ballard Blocks which are far from being architectural marvels.

Hopefully someone will fix it up, because as it is, it is less a memoir of a woman with a strong will than a monument to the futility of resisting change.

It'd be a great little coffee shop.

Forgive me for making a somewhat philosophical tangent.

It has been said that naming things is fundamental to our abstract thinking. The ability to not only group some concepts together, but to give a single label to this group that is further composable, enables us to do more complex, more advanced things with those concepts.

To present a very clear example:

> In China, (...) they call their holdout houses “nail houses.”

Finally I know what words to type into Google Images to find pictures of those.

TO loop this back around to the posted article, Seattle has a long and proud history of holdouts. Search for images of 'denny regrade' - long ago Seattle removed an entire hill, leaving quite a few of those "nail houses" (well, temporarily).

Looks like this restaurant on the corner of the Ballard Blocks was also a "holdout"...

https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.662934,-122.375759&spn=0....

I remember when this was all happening with Edith. She was pretty much the only person in Ballard that didn't sell when offered.

She was literally the only person who didn't sell when offered, that's why the Ballard blocks is built around her house.

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