Called “ground-zero” for high housing costs, with a median price of $2.46 million, the city of Palo Alto, California, is being sued for trying to charge a family about $8 million to close down their old family business.
The problem is that the business is a mobile home park, which the city has been counting as part of its low-cost housing “solution,” explains the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the family.
The city wants the family to pay the millions to tenants who will be forced to find other housing as the business closes.
“No one should be forced to carry on a business that they want to close,” said PLF Attorney Larry Salzman in a prepared statement. “The city is treating the Jissers as an ATM to solve a problem they didn’t cause – the lack of affordable housing in Palo Alto. That’s not just wrong, it’s unconstitutional.”
See an explanation of the fight:
The case is on behalf of the Jisser family, owners of the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park.
Because of the city’s land-use policies, housing is extremely expensive in the city. So it has adopted penalties for people who withdraw rental property from the market.
The city determined that the Jissers can close their business but only on the condition that they pay millions of dollars to tenants as “relocation” costs aimed at “ameliorating” the city’s prohibitively high housing costs.
The total is up to $8 million and could rise.
The lawsuit on behalf of the family alleges the condition violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment limitations on taking private property for public use. It also violates a California state law prohibiting conditions on the closure of mobilehome parks that “exceed the reasonable costs of relocation” of a park’s tenants.
“The way to make housing affordable in Palo Alto is to build more housing,” Salzman noted. “The city has for decades refused to permit enough housing to be built to meet the skyrocketing demand, and it is now shamefully scapegoating the Jissers for its own failure.”
The family moved to the U.S. from Israel in the 1970s and opened a business next to what now is the park. Tim and Eva Jisser purchased both the building and the park when the previous owner decided to sell the property in 1986.
Their son, Joe, who manages the site, said in a statement released by PLF: “My parents came here as immigrants with nothing and built a successful business. They were pursuing the American dream. But now the city is trampling on the promise of freedom that drew them to this land.”
He said his family “has worked hard for 30 years to provide safe and affordable housing here.”
“Now we’re told by the city that providing that service is not enough, that we have to pay a staggering amount of money just to close our business,” he said. “It’s not fair for the city to force us to pay our tenants millions of dollars as the price of my parents’ retirement.”
A statement emailed to WND from the city was attributed to Palo Alto Attorney Molly Stump.
“We are confident that the city followed both state law and the process that is set out in our own municipal ordinance related to the closing of the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park,” she said. “There is no merit to these claims.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/11/22/city-sued-for-charging-family-8m-to-close-business/
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