Palo Alto Confronts Billionaires Over Their Housing Compounds

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/us/palo-alto-billionaire-compound-law.html

https://archive.ph/XChTX

Palo Alto Confronts Billionaires Over Their Housing Compounds
The Silicon Valley college town has changed drastically as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and other tech founders have scooped up multiple properties.
By Heather Knight
Dec. 18, 2025

Life might soon become a little more difficult for billionaires in Palo Alto.

Known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, the town used to house just your average well-to-do people. Doctors, lawyers, executives and Stanford University professors lived in comfortable bungalows on tree-lined streets, and one house per family was considered enough.

Then the tech boom created tremendous wealth, and the billionaires moved in. Some bought several homes on adjacent plots and left a few empty, or turned them into office spaces for their employees. Some hired security guards to shoo people away from public sidewalks. Construction work seemed endless.

Greer Stone, a Palo Alto councilman, has had enough.

He introduced legislation on Thursday that would restrict the way the town’s wealthiest homeowners can operate. To Mr. Stone, a high school teacher, it is as much about protecting residents from neighborhood chaos as it is about addressing the wealth disparity that has forced middle-class residents out of his city.

...

[AllaN01Bear]

1. paywall and secured the archives . so neither way can i peak . hem

[SWBTATTReg]

2. I am sure that this ugly trend is happening in a lot of places, where Ultra-wealthy individuals have concentrated them-

selves. It'll continue to get worse.

[AZJonnie]

3. What's annoying is there's towns very close by that have ALWAYS been like what these dicks want

Seems like they don't even allow any lots to be under a 1/2 acre in the town of Atherton, for example. The whole friggin place is just giant estates, from what I've seen the handful of times I've been there. And it's been like that for a long time there, there are very few "middle class residents" there to begin with, and the residents there are presumably quite welcoming of the kinds of giant billionaire compounds these guys want (again I don't live there but I've been there and that's the vibe I got and what I saw on the ground).

Then again, there's also not a bunch of properties with older middle-class bungalows you can tear down to build your own compound there. You buy in Atherton, you're probably buying a multi-million $ house that sits on the estate that's already there, so there's that.

[DBoon]

4. more..

...
Mr. Stone says his legislation would aim to stop billionaires from taking over the streets with construction equipment and delivery trucks. Demolition, rebuilding and remodeling cannot continue in perpetuity. No more leaving spare homes permanently empty, and no more unmarked security vehicles.

“To see other people take housing out of the housing stock in such a flippant way is frustrating,” Mr. Stone said in an interview. “The growing discrepancy between the top 1 percent and the rest of us has never been more clear.”

Mr. Stone had heard neighborhood complaints for years, but he sought to address the situation in earnest after The New York Times in August published two articles on the ruckus caused by Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto compound. Mr. Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is worth an estimated $226 billion, and has spent more than $110 million on 11 homes in the city’s Crescent Park neighborhood, offering double or triple what the homes were worth to buy out his neighbors.

High rows of hedges encircle his compound, hiding lush gardens, a pool that can be covered by a movable floor and his guest homes. Mr. Zuckerberg also operated a private school for his children and their wealthy friends that was not allowed under city code, but the program relocated after the report by The Times.
...

[drmeow]

5. Be prepared for Mark F**kerburg

and his cronies to buy the next city council election to stack the city council with people who have been hired to support what they want.

[dalton99a]

6. +1