
Holdout - smacktoward
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/holdout/
======
kghose
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."

~~~
facepalm
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.

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

~~~
facepalm
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.

~~~
toyg
"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.

~~~
facepalm
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?

~~~
toyg
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.

------
patio11
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!")

~~~
rprospero
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.

~~~
mikeash
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?

~~~
hnal943
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.

~~~
mikeash
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?

~~~
jdietrich
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.

~~~
mikeash
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.

~~~
hnal943
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.

~~~
mikeash
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!).

------
sjwright
A more recent photo of Edith Macefield's house:

[http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-
media/image/upload/18uugtoshe2...](http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-
media/image/upload/18uugtoshe2yyjpg.jpg)

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

~~~
aturek
On Google Maps

[https://www.google.com/maps/@47.662205,-122.375384,3a,75y,6....](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.662205,-122.375384,3a,75y,6.7h,81.39t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1slB3jsbSE7
--QIoXnwwrU9g!2e0)

~~~
Scoundreller
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...](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.662933,-122.375932,3a,75y,149.55h,85.47t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sJ4JifqT-
Fi0peU_gQCR5aQ!2e0)

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

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

~~~
raygunomical
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.

------
simonw
Here's the Hess Triangle on Street View:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.733578,-74.00303,3a,75y,205....](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.733578,-74.00303,3a,75y,205.72h,75.6t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sFWs1ZuxiN96f8a7EcJGH2g!2e0!6m1!1e1)

------
kaji88
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.

~~~
nine_k
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.

------
evan_
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...](http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31978793-78/everything-
comes-up-roses-for-florist-developer.html.csp)

> 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.

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

~~~
zzzmarcus
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.

~~~
bluthru
It'd be a great little coffee shop.

------
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
gills
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).

------
empressplay
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....](https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=47.662934,-122.375759&spn=0.40788,0.890579&cbll=47.662934,-122.375759&layer=c&panoid=Rtte1vzE4pXNHhUQpQdM-g&cbp=12,183.89,,0,-3.01&t=h&z=11)

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

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

