Affordable Housing Institute : US

Previous Months in Review available here:  [Nov 08, Oct 08 Sep  08, Aug 08, Jul 08, Jun 08, May 08, Apr 08, Mar 08, Feb 08, Jan 08]

 

[Continued from Monday 19th’s Part 1.]

 

Reviewing an active December, yesterday’s post cleared out the bad news; now we turn to the more pleasurable sport of excoriating those who we think deserve it. 

 

If you don’t confess, I will post about you a second time!

 

I had harsh words for:

 

– a self-styled poverty advocate in Sorry, it’s illegal:

 

If you aren’t using it and I want it, I can take it, right?  So, according to The Boston Globe, says Max Rameau:

 

MIAMI – Max Rameau delivers his sales pitch like a pro. “All tile floor!” he says. “And the living room, wow! It has great blinds.”

 

Marie Nadine Pierre left homeless shelters behind and moved into a foreclosed house in Miami.

 

But he is unlike any real estate agent you’ve met. He is unshaven, drives a beat-up car, and wears grungy cut-off sweat pants. He also breaks into the homes he shows.

 

Breaking and entering, whose legal name is ‘burglary’.  In Massachusetts that can get you twenty years.

 

Do not collect $200 rent checks

 

And his clients don’t have a dime.

 

The thing is, clandestine occupancy is never guaranteed to be benign.  A house illegally occupied can be used for all manner of illegal activity: growing marijuana, refining drugs, running prostitutes, harboring illegal immigrants, vandalism, and other houses of crime.  To say nothing of damaging and using someone else’s property.

 

I feel sympathy for Ms. Pierre and her baby, who’s already been unpleasantly surprised. 

 

Two weeks after Pierre moved in, she came home to find the locks had been changed. Her food, clothes, and family photos were gone.

 

Thus, despite the photo of Ms. Pierre and her child, moving out of the shelter has divested her of most of her worldly possession.  That’s some favor you have done, Mr. Rameau.

 

But late last month, with Rameau’s help, she got back in.

 

Again illegally.

 

So far, the police have not gotten involved. 

 

They will.

 

Yes, we’re arresting the clown now

 

– and for the epitome of anti-poverty, former Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neil, in What you reward: Part 1, is what I’ll believe in, and What you reward: Part 2, be careful what you wish for:

 

Graduates of top universities sought their fortunes in banking, rather than in careers like medicine, engineering or teaching.

 

Oh, for goodness’ sake!  I remember people wanting to be in investment banking thirty-five years ago.

 

Even willing to cut our hair for money

 

Wall Street worked its rookies hard, but it held out the promise of rich rewards. In college dorms, tales of 30-year-olds pulling down $5 million a year were legion.

 

So were tales of getting laid.  That didn’t make them true.

 

Oh yeah, like I believe that one

 

But kind words for the man who speaks for buildings:

 

He is alone in the office and prefers it that way. Communications can be vexing. “If I had a computer,” he said, “they’d bombard me with e-mail.”  He means co-op shareholders.

 

“Just recently I got a call from a guy who was angry because he insisted a neighbor did the same amount of work and didn’t have to get approval.” he said. “But I looked it up and sure enough the neighbor had done a lot of work, but he hadn’t moved any walls so he didn’t need approval.”

Mr. Glass shakes his head.

 

So what did the angry guy do? “Nothing he could do,” Mr. Glass said. “When you are right, you are right.”

 

My kind of expert.

 

Sometimes you have to take it easy

 

We also looked at the complexities of zoning and zoning overrides, using Massachusetts’ prototypical and powerful Chapter 40B statute, by reviewing the excellently detailed compilation by MIT Professor (and AHI Affiliate) Lynn Fisher in Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B pachinko machine: Part 1, reshaping the state …, and Part 2, … in spite of local opposition:

 

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

God help us if they get to build it in our town: a 40B property in Sterling, MA

 

Yesterday’s post dug into the high-fiber statistics carefully compiled by MIT DUSP professor (and AHI affiliate) Lynn Fisher and presented in her recently issued Harvard Kennedy School report, Reviewing Chapter 40B: What Gets Proposed, What Gets Approved, What Gets Appealed, and What Gets Built?  As a general principle, I like inclusionary zoning and believe it should be on every global shopping list, and of such schemes our local flavor, Chapter 40B, is the granddaddy of them all, nearly forty years old.

 

Even at forty, 40B, you – look – marvelous!

 

Finishing on an upbeat note,

 

We’re gonna party like it’s 1959!

 

we closed out the year with a happier tale of A Christmas present for Paradise Park: Part 1, the facts, Part 2, “in contemplation”, and Part 3, the smoking gun:

 

The law and the facts: sale of a mobile home park that ‘contemplates a change in use’

 

At factual issue is whether, in 2004, when the owner group (controlled by Donald Somers) agreed to sell to their abutter, an entity controlled by James Bollerman, a conversion away from a mobile home park was contemplated. 

 

I wonder what ‘contemplate’ means?

 

This matters because:

 

[Under] the Mobile Home Protection Act (”the Act”), N.J.S.A. 46:8C-2 to -21 [,] under certain circumstances, the Act grants mobile home park residents a right to certain notices triggered by the sale of the property, and a concomitant right of first refusal. N.J.S.A. 46:8C-11; N.J.S.A. 46:8C-12.

 

The seller and buyer asserted that no such right of first refusal was available to the residents because:

 

[Section] 46:8C-13, denoted as “sales or transfers not subject to §§ 46:8C-11 and46:8C-12,” … delineates a total of twelve separate transactions or transfers of title that are exempt from the right of first refusal provisions discussed herein. These are the exemptions:

 

a. Any sale or transfer of the property of a private residential leasehold community which is not made in contemplation of changing that property to a use or uses other than as a private residential leasehold community.

 

Was a change in use ‘contemplated’?  In their contract, the seller (Somers) and buyer (Bollerman) made self-serving statements that no Sirree, they had no contemplation of a change in use.

 

No change in use, no Sirree!

 

We completed the post, with Part 4, in the new year.

 

So far, in examining the ruling (available here in .pdf) that remanded back to district court a series of actual questions about whether the Paradise Park residents were entitled to the New Jersey Mobile Home Protection Act, we’ve seen that the appellate court – even though it cannot rule on facts – gave the residents multiple Christmas presents:

 

The more we read the decision, the more presents we found!

 

1. A definition of ‘in contemplation’ that it appears certain the factual record will support – meaning that the residents’ right of first refusal should be triggered.

2. A finding that the seller, Mr. Somers, has to form a good faith view – meaning that more than likely, Mr. Somers will agree that notice should have been given.

3. A road map for plaintiff counsel as to what evidence to put before the trial court as to whether a change in use was ‘in contemplation, and some heavy dicta indicating the appellate court thinks it was.

 

Here’s to a better 2009

 

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