According to newspaper reports and to documents filed with the Local Area Formation Commission, Page Mill Properties has requested a Sphere of Influence change that would detach East Palo Alto’s West Side from the municipal control of the City.  With shocking audacity, seemingly tone-deaf to the real work that went into the formation of East Palo Alto, Mr. Taran has applied his seemingly infinite legal resources to making the claim that he would run the city much better than the City itself.

Almost 5000 people live on the West side of East Palo Alto, and though they are undoubtedly in need of better services, Page Mill is certainly not the entity that will provide them.  With a mismanagement record that has included the death of a worker due to failure to observe proper safety codes, to a string of ham-fisted rent-increases, to failures to provide basic services, Page Mill seems to have trouble providing proper services that they are being paid to provide.   How are they going to take over running a City?

According to Page Mill, they have a plan which they call “The Page Mill Properties Plan”.  They claim it is much better than the East Palo Alto Plan, which one can read online.  Would you like to judge for yourself?  Well, you can’t: Page Mill will not release this plan, even though they are asking for the most extraordinary judgment possible from LAFCo, the movement of a City border, based on the claims of this document.  This is pretty darned ironic given that Page Mill has filed at least five (very dubious) lawsuits accusing the City of East Palo Alto of violating the open meetings act, also known as the Brown Act.

We can only assume that Tarantown is a town where your rights to know will be provided on a need-to-know basis.  It’s really existing feudalism! 

How does Page Mill spend the retirement money of CalPers investors?  Well, according to documents that Page Mill themselves voluntarily filed, the answer is, not so well.  The picture below, ladies and gentleman is for a fence built by Page Mill Property services and then billed to themselves, cost an astounding $21,080.   Now we measured the fence: it’s 211 linear feet.

That means $100 per linear foot of fence.  This is constructed out of 4×4 posts, 2×4 rails and rough 6 x 1 x 6ft planks. Home Depot, less than a mile away, will sell you these materials for about $1800-2000.  Page Mill is “selling” the fence to themselves with a 10x markup.  Court documents also reveal that this wonder happens through Page Mill’s “custom cash management system” and “non-exclusive licensing agreement” through which the “Woodland Park” logo is licensed to their various sub-corporations.

Skeptics might say that it takes a lot of money to lie to people.  But we see it as entertainment, a way to pass our golden years.

You say, but wait, that’s real money involved!  Yous say that perhaps they are paying for their bossmen to take a vacation while bilking their investors for every penny they can?   Hard to say, we suppose.  If you were born yesterday.

One has to wonder if people who worked hard as state employees, paying their retirement money into CalPERS at 7-8% of their monthly salary, year after year, think it is funny that a fence that could be built in a day of hard honest work cost as much as half of their annual salary.

Maybe Calpers thinks it is funny. We haven’t heard from them.  Maybe Mr. Taran thinks it is funny.  Maybe Mr. Schaadt who made the declaration thinks it is funny. They are laughing all the way to the bank.  But I can hardly imagine CalPERs retirees think it is funny, nor will the taxpayers who need to ante up to keep the system alive.

Next up: we’ll report on the $20,000 a month that Page Mill was paying for color consultation on their homes, and more!

Maybe they need a new tag line: “The glory of the mortgage bubble golden years continue at Page Mill Properties”

Christine Griffith, the lawyer from Ellman, Burke, Hoffman and Johnson who seems to have spent four lawyer-years attacking East Palo Alto with an incessant barrage of contrived lawsuits has hit a new low with her filing attempting to keep the Rent Stabilization measure off the ballot.

In a pleading that will be heard before the court on September 3rd, Griffith claims that the revised RSO should be removed from the ballot so that an environmental review can be conducted.  Page Mill essentially wants at all costs to stop the ballot measure from going before the voters.  Why? Could it be because her firm has raked in millions attacking the old RSO on technicalities?

Page Mill is apparently so desperate to stop the new, improved RSO that their paid help is willing to argue the following:

Rent control in general and, in particular, a program that so severely restricts rents, is known to result in physical deterioration of properties and neighborhoods subject to rent control to the point of creating physical urban decay or blight. It is now well settled that CEQA requires public agencies to analyze the urban decay or blight effects associated with their decisions. Bakersfield Citizens for Local Control v. City of Bakersfield (2004) 124 Cal.App.4th 1184, 1204 (“if the forecasted economic or social effects of a proposed project directly or indirectly will lead to adverse physical changes in the environment, then CEQA requires disclosure and analysis of these resulting physical impacts”);

This is idiotic. Ms. Griffith is trying to argue that: 1) urban decay will inevitably result from rent control;  2) “urban decay” is somehow an environmental problem; 3) the minor modification of an already existing rent stabilization ordinance constitutes a “physical change in the environment”; and 4) that this inane argument is grounds for a judge to intervene to prevent a ballot measure from going to the people?

Oh, but take her word for it: “this is well settled.”  Seems to us something is floating to the top here; it’s far from settled.

One has to ask the question: is there any way for the citizens of East Palo Alto to get an environmental review of Ms. Griffith?  There is a lot of hot air being wasted here to no good effect, and it is contributing to global warming. How do we file such a suit?

Wait there is more!  In one part of Griffith’s filing it argues that rent stabilization causes a “loss of housing stock” and just a bit later the filing says that the same law also causes “growth inducing impacts,” a tortured way of saying rampant urban growth.  Sounds like East Palo Alto’s law, which has been in place for twenty-five years causes simultaneously contradictory events. Oh dear! Perhaps a black hole will open up as a result.  Now that would be an “impactful” event!

But, concludes Ms. Griffith, with legal seriousness, “Neither the City Staff nor any City Council member said anything in response…to defend the claims of a CEQA exemption other than to summarily repeat their position that CEQA review was unnecessary” and that a refinement of an  existing housing ordinance fell under the “common sense exemption.” Griffith says this about objections she raised at the August 4th meeting, the night the ordinance was approved.  Griffith wants every time she comes up with a crackpot suggestion to stop a deliberative process so that she can shut it down with an expensive and pointless study.  Truth be told, this “project” is as exempt under CEQA as is putting a new toilet in your house.  It’s an existing project that you don’t need to file an exemption for.

Good grief, why can’t we on common sense grounds be exempted from this tortuous argument?  Should the City have asked if their Rent Laws also violated the War Powers Act or the rules of Maritime law?  How can one be sure?

The only solace here one supposes is that Griffith is doing this work pro bono to save the environment. According to her web page, she’s clearly very concerned about the environment.

Oh, no, wait, sorry: actually, retired school teachers and firefighters are paying for her work out of their retirement money.  Griffith charges around $400 an hour to produce this stuff.  We’re sure the forty page document was produced in a jiffy.

The disgusting truth about this suit is that is aimed at destroying civil rights.  The East Palo Alto City Council had a long series properly noticed public meetings with large attendances that Ms. Griffith attended.  Griffith doesn’t claim she didn’t receive notice; rather, in what appears to be an intentional distortion of the notices, Griffith chops up her discussion of the notices and the law to try to give the impression of gross impropriety, when in fact the notices were merely marred by a few typographical errors–fewer errors than one can find in a typical Griffith brief.

The whole of Griffith’s filing revolves around trying to stop the public from being harmed—harmed by being allowed to vote.   One would think that the public doesn’t need to be protected from voting on a measure put before the public.  But then if one thinks that one would not be the kind of upstanding member of the public that is Page Mill Properties.  For reasons that we can’t explain, certain words suddenly  come to mind: block, delay, obfuscate, confuse, disenfranchise, lie, bully, intimidate.  And if all else fails, argue that a law concerning the environment is somehow an obstacle for revising an existing housing ordinance.   Shameful.

Is there nothing money won’t buy?

Calpers is paying Page Mill to attack the City in this stupid way.  Incredible, incredible brain blight threatens. Calpers and Page Mill ought to donate some money to environment that their pathetic lawsuits are damaging with all the wasted paper.

Griffith, Page Mill, have you no shame?  Page Mill?  CalPERs?

A bizarre court trial, involving one of Page Mill’s shadow companies, 1643 Woodland LLC, was concluded on Tuesday with a judgment in favor of the defendant, the City of East Palo Alto.  Andrew Zacks, Page Mill’s lead attorney in the case, presented an often tortured argument that seemed to turn on a series of hypothetical questions that no one could really understand.

The central assertion seemed to be that 1643 Woodland LLC was a “small landlord” seeking to do its civic duty to inform other “similarly situated” companies (in other words, to inform itself and  Page Mill’s other LLCs) of their right to evade the ordinance by carving themselves up into sufficiently small bits so as to avoid detection.

Sometimes, people in East Palo Alto wonder if God has chosen them for a strange, cruel trial. How else can one explain one of Mr. Zacks’s most fascinating arguments, which involved trying to prove that the City of East Palo Alto was “being actively engaged in convincing tenants” to not organize to eliminate a provision of the Rent Stabilization Ordinance that would just so happen to benefit Page Mill.  (We’re not kidding, please go ahead and read the brief.)  The problem with this particular conspiracy theory, of course, is that no one from East Palo Alto was aware that we were somehow supposed to be organizing in order to allow Page Mill to keep raising rents contrary to the ordinance.  The conspiracy of silence was apparently so broad and insidious as to actually thwart the conspiracy itself.

Or maybe there is another answer: could it be that Page Mill has simply alienated everyone in the community by behaving illegally?

Reading these arguments would all be very funny if the consequences weren’t so real.  In truth, Page Mill continues to raise rents and evict tenants.  They pretend like they can’t read the law or that the law doesn’t apply to them.  Real people are being injured while Page Mill files suit after suit in an apparent attempt to destroy the city.

All of this unfolds against Page Mill’s incessant argument that somehow they are the victim. This is far from the case.  Maybe Page Mill should hire Mr. Zacks (or some other wordsmith) to file a lawsuit alleging that they were victim of a vast conspiracy to convince them to not not buy property in East Palo, not knowing that there was not not Rent Stabilization?  Why not?

Ed Mendel over at Calpensions has an interesting post about a nation wide call for transparency in placing pension funds.  Yes, residents of East Palo Alto, too, would like to know more about the process whereby companies with little or no experience in managing residential real estate suddenly get $100 million dollar equity lines.  What kinds of influence peddling is necessary to convince people that you can make large returns on real estate in a rent-controlled district?  There needs to be full disclosure to make sure money is not passing under the table.  We certainly think that nation-wide disclosure law is a good idea, and the East Palo Alto experience seems to concur with the investigations in New York that CalPERS isn’t doing enough to vet their business partners and their commitment to the Principles of Responsible Investment.   Please consider calling your federal representative today and encouraging them to support Cuomo’s initiative for more scrutiny. Representative Eshoo needs to hear that you believe that the registration of Pension Placement Brokers is a national issue with a local importance.

Welcome to the age of corporate counter-blogging? When no one has anything good to say about you, what do you do? If you are Jim Shore and David Taran, you apparently hire someone to slime those who question you. Paul Hogarth reports on Page Mill’s low technique in a story at BeyondChron. It is strange to see a supposedly professionally-run corporation have such a love of the personal counter-attack and the big lie. Please tell us if you know of further examples of this type of behavior.

Fair Rent Coalition of East Palo Alto today issued a press release with shocking eviction data. Apparently, Page Mill evicts tenants at somewhere between six and ten times the county average, and has a very high vacancy rate, unheard of for these properties. There are a lot of displaced lives behind these numbers, and one has to wonder what the motives are for this kind of behavior in the midst of a massive economic downturn. A complete data set can be found on the epa-tenants.org website.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20090430006637/en

This blog is dedicated to tracking the actions of the reviled landlord of East Palo Alto, Page Mill Properties.  We are just getting started.  Read more about Page Mill at the epa-tenants.org website.

Reviewing the rent crisis in East Palo Alto that Page Mill Properties has induced on the West side of East Palo Alto, The East Palo Alto City Council voted to express their concern over the predatory practices of Page Mill.  James Shore, General Counsel for Page Mill, stuck to his absurd talking points, the idea that Page Mill’s endless legal assaults on the City somehow arise out of a desire for co-operation and a deep-felt impulse to follow the law.  We guess Mr. Shore’s boss has told him that he can’t say “Our aim is to use California Public Employees Retirement money to destroy an ordinance duly passed by the citizens of East Palo Alto.  Our value-add is senseless litigation.”