Is it possible to buy an entire city street?
The homeowners of Presidio Terrace, a privately owned and exclusive gated community in San Francisco’s Presidio just had a harsh wake-up call.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a South Bay couple, investor/engineer duo Tina Lam and Michael Cheng, are now the proud owners of the oval-shaped street, on which 35 megamillion-dollar mansions stand, bought for just $90,000 in a city-run auction that stemmed from an unpaid tax bill.
Residents were unaware of the auction, sale and unpaid tax bill until earlier this year. The street fee that they failed to pay was less than $14 annually, according to Curbed SF.
It turns out that the Presidio Terrace Association had failed to pay taxes on their private pavement for 30 years. City Hall proceeded to put the actual street, sidewalks and public greenery up for auction in 2015 because of it.
According to the lawsuit the Presidio Terrace Association had filed against their new landlords last month: “The Association has not paid those taxes because the City has been sending the property tax bills to the Association at the following address: 47 Kearny Street. […] Which is not the address of the association or any member. […No] member of the Association was aware that property taxes has not been paid.”
The couple looks to earn from their investment by potentially charging residents to park on their streets. They snatched the offer back in 2015 when the city’s tax office put the offer up, hoping to acquire $994 back in unpaid taxes. Cheng and Lam jumped on the offer with their bid of $90,100, and have since kept quiet.
Before 1948, home buying was white-only in the Presidio Terrace. Lam, who was born in Hong Kong and Cheng from Taiwan, would not have been able to purchase the property until the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that lifted the ban on segregated neighborhoods.
