Land Use of the Rich and Famous
/“And when I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and
Black and white
They don’t look real to me
In fact, they look so strange”
Ready your tiniest of violins. The Hollywood Hills, they weep for such uncounted heads as actor Jennifer Aniston and former CEO of Ticketmaster Fred Rosen, who are both fighting against the encroachment of giga-mansions upon their reasonably-sized mega-mansions.
Jennifer Aniston lives in an 8,500-square-foot "home." Fred Rosen, former CEO of Ticketmaster, lives in what one can presume is a similarly palatial estate. Mr. Rosen: "There's always someone with more. So that's not the issue. We just want a building that's safe." Ms. Aniston, through what we may presume are her $600-per-hour lawyers, has said, "The very idea that a building of 90,000 square feet can be called a home seems at the least a distortion of building codes." Entertainment lawyer Joe Horacek describes the giga-mansion above his mere mega-mansion as a "total invasion of privacy" and bemaons the developer's "total disregard... for the building code..." The developer retorts Horacek can put in "shrub[bery]" to mitigate the view.
An ABC News, Nightline story gives the details.
Massing, permissible building envelopes, height restrictions, and other zoning restrictions are important land-use issues I deal with in my practice. Practicing land-use law in Tucson has exposed me to similar battles on much smaller scales, and one thing that remains constant across land-use legal disputes of all sizes is the passions inflamed on both sides .
Rich people - their land-use disputes are just like ours. We may just feel a little less sorry for them.