
Aaron Peskin got his illegally merged $1.5M “monster” home - eigenvector
https://medium.com/@vwoo/the-hypocrisy-of-aaron-peskin-177a8a739423
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CPLX
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.

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tunesmith
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...?

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IkmoIkmo
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.

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shereadsthenews
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.

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IkmoIkmo
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.

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mc32
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...

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fortran77
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.

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ShakataGaNai
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.

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fortran77
I think the railing would need to continue at least the width of a stair to
form a proper "landing"

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pintxo
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?

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jessaustin
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...

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marssaxman
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.

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joshuamorton
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.

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Gibbon1
Seems to me the appropriate action here is

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

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capkutay
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.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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TomMckenny
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._

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akanet
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...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Peskin-
s-bill-is-San-Francisco-s-attempt-to-13618207.php), for instance.

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jamestimmins
What tipped you off that this was happening?

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akanet
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.

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jamestimmins
Interesting. How much research did this take?

