Friday, March 6, 2020

Marinwood approves SPENDING taxes but WHY?


Marinwood Passed approval to spend taxes again on Tuesday, March 3rd.   The CSD claims it is not a NEW tax but merely approves spending money they are collecting.  Think about this for a second.  What do you think would happen if they did NOT receive approval to spend the money?  Maybe they would be forced to defend their expenditures.

Here is some of the colossal waste that Marinwood engages in

1.) Lawsuit defense when the CSD refused to pay for landslide repair on the property of 50+ year residents Alan Miller and his wife.  (They are are in settlement talks now MINUS our legal defense costs)

2.) A highly unusual consulting contract with former CSD politician Bill Hansell that is FIVE TIMES original estimate with NO PERFORMANCE criteria or budget limit.  They refuse to even discuss the project cost...   This is corruption, mismanagement or whatever you want to call it... It screws taxpayers and people need to be held accountable.

3.) Overstaffing at the CSD.  We have the largest payroll in history.  New full time staff positions have been created from former part time positions.

4.) Secretive Business dealings with special events that never seem to make any money despite large revenues.

5.) 80% of Marinwood Fire Department calls are served in the City of San Rafael but we pay 100% of the cost PLUS a management fee.  Marinwood Taxpayers are also responsible for 100% of the retirement liability.  It is a grossly unfair deal for taxpayers but the Marinwood CSD refuse to address it.

Marinwood CSD Park and Recreation 2/25/2020 Ponti Rd Bike Trail


A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street


A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street


Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes are now in the hands of giant companies — squeezing renters for revenue and putting the American dream even further out of reach.




By Francesca Mari
Published March 4, 2020Updated March 5, 2020




Chad Ellingwood wasn’t really in the market for a home in the summer of 2006. But when his best friend came across an intriguing listing in Woodland Hills — a bedroom community in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley — the two men decided to visit on a whim.

Entering the property beneath the canopy of a grand deodar, Ellingwood, a big man with a gentle presence, felt as if he had been transported to a ranch house in Northern California, much like one he often visited as a child, all old growth and overgrown greenery — olive trees, citrus trees, sycamores and redwoods. He and his friend meandered past a pond to an inviting teal house built in 1958, “a whimsical masterpiece,” Ellingwood told me. Inside there was a “captain’s quarters” — a room designed to look like the hull of a boat with a built-in water bed and drawers — and numerous stained-glass windows that the couple who owned it had made themselves. The pièce de résistance depicted a faerie woman with flowing hair whose fingers turned into peacock feathers. Behind the house were a couple of small buildings, one of which was office-size — a meditation “Zen den,” Ellingwood thought. The other was an A-frame, Swiss-chalet-style granny unit above the garage, where the owner displayed a toy train collection.

“The house was not in amazing shape,” Ellingwood said. “It needed some help. But I loved it. I wanted it immediately.”

One of Ellingwood’s goals had always been to buy a house by the time he turned 30 — a birthday that unceremoniously came and went six months earlier. When Ellingwood began speaking to lenders, he realized he could easily get a loan, even two; this was the height of the bubble, when mortgage brokers were keen to generate mortgages, even risky ones, because the debt was being bundled together, securitized and spun into a dizzying array of bonds for a hefty profit. The house was $840,000. He put down $15,000 and sank the rest of his savings into a $250,000 bedroom addition and kitchen remodel, reasoning that this would increase the home’s value.


Suddenly adulthood was upon him. He married on New Year’s Eve, and his wife gave birth to their first child, a son, in April. When his 88-year-old grandfather, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Houston, had a bad fall, Ellingwood urged him to move into the house for sale just across his backyard. The grandfather bought the house with his daughter, Ellingwood’s mother, and the first thing they did was tear down the fence between the two properties, creating one big family compound. In 2009, Ellingwood’s older sister bought a house around the corner.

But shortly after the birth of Ellingwood’s second son, in June 2010, his marriage fell apart. He and his wife each sued for sole custody. To pay his lawyer, he planned to refinance his house, and his grandfather advanced him his inheritance. By 2012, Ellingwood had paid his lawyer more than $80,000, and in the chaos of fighting for his children, he stopped making his mortgage payments. He consulted with several professionals, who urged him to file for bankruptcy protection so that he could get an automatic stay preventing the sale of his house.

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In May 2012, Ellingwood was driving his two boys to the beach, desperate to make the most of his limited time with them, when he got a call. He pulled over and, with cars whizzing by and his boys babbling excitedly in the back seat, learned that he had lost his house. He had dispatched a friend to stop the auction with a check for $27,000 — the amount he was behind on his mortgage — but there was nothing to be done. Because Ellingwood began to file for bankruptcy and then didn’t go through with it, a lien was put on his house, his “vortex of love” as he called it, that precluded him from settling his debt. The house sold within a couple of minutes for $486,000, which was $325,000 less than what he owed on it.

In the months after, though, Ellingwood was graced with what seemed like a bit of luck. The company that bought his home offered to sell it back to him for $100,000 more than it paid to acquire it. He told the company, Strategic Acquisitions, that he just needed a little time to get together a down payment. In the meantime, the company asked him to sign a two-page rental agreement with a two-page addendum.

[The illustration above was this week magazine’s cover. See how the cover came together.]

It was clear from the beginning that there was something a little unusual about his new landlords. Instead of mailing his rent checks to a management company, men would swing by to pick them up. Within a few months, Ellingwood noticed that one of the checks he had written for $2,000 wasn’t accounted for on his rental ledger, though it had been cashed. He called and emailed and texted to resolve the problem, and finally emailed to say that he wouldn’t pay more rent until the company could explain where his $2,000 went. For more than three months, he withheld rent, waiting for a response. Instead, the company posted an eviction notice to his door.

Ellingwood hired a lawyer and reported to the Santa Monica courthouse on his court date with all of his cashed checks in chronological order. When the judge called his case, the lawyer for Strategic Acquisitions asked to have a moment to review the paperwork. After marking each of Ellingwood’s checks off the accounting ledger, the lawyer concluded that the company had, in fact, erred. Strategic Acquisitions had grown so big so fast that it could barely keep its properties straight.

But it would only get bigger. Strategic Acquisitions was but one of several companies in Los Angeles County, and one of dozens in the United States, that hit on the same idea after the financial crisis: load up on foreclosed properties at a discount of 30 to 50 percent and rent them out. Rather than protecting communities and making it easy for homeowners to restructure bad mortgages or repair their credit after succumbing to predatory loans, the government facilitated the transfer of wealth from people to private-equity firms. By 2016, 95 percent of the distressed mortgages on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books were auctioned off to Wall Street investors without any meaningful stipulations, and private-equity firms had acquired more than 200,000 homes in desirable cities and middle-class suburban neighborhoods, creating a tantalizing new asset class: the single-family-rental home. The companies would make money on rising home values while tenants covered the mortgages. When Ellingwood reached out to Strategic Acquisitions in the winter of 2013 to buy his house, it was no longer interested in selling. Ellingwood asked again a year later; the company didn’t reply.

Over the next seven years, Strategic Acquisitions would turn over management to Colony Capital, and Colony’s real estate holdings would merge with a series of companies, culminating in the Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes, making Invitation Homes the largest single-family-rental company in America, with 82,500 homes at its height — and 79,505 homes after Blackstone sold its shares at the end of last year. Ellingwood, however, could hardly distinguish among the various L.L.C.s he paid rent to: Strategic Property Management, Colony American Homes, Starwood Waypoint, Invitation Homes. The offices changed cities, downsized staff, hiked rents and imposed increasingly punitive fees. Ellingwood was required to submit his rent in different ways — online, certified mail, cashier’s check, in person — with slightly different rules, by the 1st, by the 3rd. The leases grew in length from four pages to 18 to 43 as the companies doubled down on strictures and transferred more responsibilities — mold remediation, landscaping, carbon-monoxide detectors — onto the renter.

Ellingwood didn’t know it at the time, but his story was to be the story of millions of renters around the country, the beginning of a downward spiral into the financial industry’s newest scheme to harvest money from housing.

[How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality.]

Wall Street’s latest real estate grab has ballooned to roughly $60 billion, representing hundreds of thousands of properties. In some communities, it has fundamentally altered housing ecosystems in ways we’re only now beginning to understand, fueling a housing recovery without a homeowner recovery. “That’s the big downside,” says Daniel Immergluck, a professor of urban studies at Georgia State University. “During one of the greatest recoveries of land value in the history of the country, from 2010 and 2011 at the bottom of the crisis to now, we’ve seen huge gains in property values, especially in suburbs, and instead of that accruing to many moderate-income and middle-income homeowners, many of whom were pushed out of the homeownership market during the crisis, that land value has accrued to these big companies and their shareholders.”




ImageChad Ellingwood in his home in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. After his home was acquired by a private-equity firm, he was soon paying more in rent than he had paid for his first and second mortgage combined.Credit...Damon Casarez for The New York Times

Sunday, March 1, 2020

FABLE:THE WOLF AND THE LEAN DOG

THE WOLF AND THE LEAN DOG


A WOLF prowling near a village one evening met a Dog. It happened to be a very lean and bony Dog, and Master Wolf would have turned up his nose at such meager fare had he not been more hungry than usual. So. he began to edge toward the Dog, while the Dog backed away.

"Let me remind your lordship," said the Dog, his words interrupted now and then as he dodged a snap of the Wolf's teeth, "how unpleasant it would be to eat me [49] now. Look at my ribs. I am nothing but skin and bone. But let me tell you something in private. In a few days my master will give a wedding feast for his only daughter. You can guess how fine and fat I will grow on the scraps from the table. Then is the time to eat me."

The Wolf could not help thinking how nice it would be to have a fine fat Dog to eat instead of the scrawny object before him. So he went away pulling in his belt and promising to return.

Some days later the Wolf came back for the promised feast. He found the Dog in his master's yard, and asked him to come out and be eaten.

"Sir," said the Dog, with a grin, "I shall be delighted to have you eat me. I'll be out as soon as the porter opens the door."

But the "porter" was a huge Dog whom the Wolf knew by painful experience to be very unkind toward wolves. So he decided not to wait and made off as fast as his legs could carry him.

Do not depend on the promises of those whose interest it is to deceive you.



The Horse Shoe Pit will be destroyed for vehicle access.

Here is an illustration of a "hammerhead turn" that the CSD claims will be done everyday in Marinwood Park. Many of us know this as a "three point" turn.  The trucks will back out of the Maintenance Facility and on to the horse shoe pit to turn around.

This of course will wreck the horseshoe pit that the Marinwood CSD claimed would not be harmed in any way and makes a mockery of the Site Plan submitted by the Marinwood CSD that shows a pedestrian path.

In addition Bill Hansell falsely represented this area as a "gravel surface" when in fact it is a soft sandy area to the planning commission and the county .

The Marinwood CSD has paid Bill Hansell an estimated $50k in architects fees before a single thing has been done to the site.  Hansell has a highly unusual fee contract that lacks performance standards and objectives.  It is a sweet deal for the architect but we taxpayers are stuck with the bill

Had we chosen a pre engineered building as specified in the initial plan, the CSD could install a an entire building for the cost of the architects fees so far.

The Marinwood CSD approved this awful fee arrangement and WILL NOT DISCUSS THE BUDGET FOR THE PROJECT.  We believe they fear public outrage if the cost is truly known.