California fire

Don Alaska said:
Since California has not allowed rebuilding in many areas of the affected area, reportedly 60% of that land has been purchased by investors, I'll bet the building permits will flood in now.
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Why would investors want land they can't build on? That doesn't sound like a good investment to me.
 
Axel Slingerland said:
Why would investors want land they can't build on? That doesn't sound like a good investment to me.
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I think that people believe that if you are wealthy enough (and make the proper political contributions) you can build whatever you want. It is just the less wealthy who cannot build on their old sites. We have a friend here who got a grandfather waiver to rebuild her house after a wildfire since her house was too close to a lake and didn't meet current codes. She rebuild on the old foundation and the builder recommended that she put a second story on the house so she did. When she got to the point that she couldn't really live by herself any more, she tried to sell her house. She even had it under contract, but no one would finance it because it was higher than the original house. She cannot sell her near-million dollar house unless someone can buy it without financing it. Several others here are in the same fix.
 
Don Alaska said:
I think that people believe that if you are wealthy enough (and make the proper political contributions) you can build whatever you want
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Yes, that is a common belief. But just like so many things, it's not necessarily true.

Don Alaska said:
We have a friend here who got a grandfather waiver to rebuild her house after a wildfire since her house was too close to a lake and didn't meet current codes. She rebuild on the old foundation and the builder recommended that she put a second story on the house so she did. When she got to the point that she couldn't really live by herself any more, she tried to sell her house. She even had it under contract, but no one would finance it because it was higher than the original house. She cannot sell her near-million dollar house unless someone can buy it without financing it. Several others here are in the same fix.
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That is not a property that California wasn't allowing anything to be built on, is it?
 
Well, you were not talking about Alaska when you said "Since California has not allowed rebuilding...", and that was what I commented on. I started to tell you about Rob Arkley, the richest guy in Eureka, who bought a piece of property called the "Balloon Track" that cost him $millions in the end after he discovered the hard way that he could not build on it, but it was a very long story (I think it started in the 1990s) and I don't remember it all anymore. I admit I was too lazy to look it all up, so I didn't mention it.

Rob Arkley and his wife Cherie did a lot for the city. One thing I found amusing was his after his wife was on the Eureka City Council, when she ran for Mayor and lost, he got mad and said something like, "We did a lot for this city and you wouldn't vote for her?" on the news, which made it look as though all the things they did for Eureka, were actually for votes. Whether that was fact or fiction, the end results were the same. He lost a lot of support for future projects, including developing the Balloon Track.

Anyway, that is an example of what I was talking about. A short version is Arkley bought a former rail yard that was very polluted to build a Home Depot store and apartment buildings, but the City of Eureka, the California Coastal Commission, and a host of private lawsuits said no way... And then, because of it's history, nobody would buy it from him. The last I heard back in 2022, the Balloon Track fiasco cost him over $70 million.
 
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