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?
