If you want further proof that the One Percent have a bit of a PR problem, look no further than Clark and Sharon Winslow, the Marin couple who bought the $4.2 million house next door so they could tear it down and improve the view of San Francisco Bay from their own $19 million home.
I don’t mean to pick on them. (OK, a little.) The One Percenters are constantly pulling stunts that could be seen as arrogant, self-absorbed, wasteful, unjust, mean and, well, loopy. But what things seem are not always what they are. The problem is the One Percenters don’t explain themselves. They’re rich and explaining themselves is one of the many things they don’t have to do because they are rich.
Look at Larry Ellison. The guy is scheduled to close on his latest real estate deal Wednesday. He’s buying Hawaii. OK, just one island, for something like half a billion dollars. But because he hasn’t exactly explained what he wants to do with Lanai, he’s left it to bleeding-heart 99 Percenters to write the narrative: “The guy’s got more money than he knows what to do with.” “He needs a whole island. How else is he going to find a place big enough to take his ego on vacation?” No truth to the rumors, by the way, that Ellison plans to tear down Lanai to give himself a better view of the Pacific from Maui.
Anyway, the criticism is silly. It’s not true that Ellison, worth $36 billion, has more money than he knows what to do with. He knows exactly what to do with it. In fact, over the years, he’s shown he’s got a list: Buy an 80-room yacht with a movie theater and basketball court, in case company stops by; build a Japanese estate in Woodside reportedly worth $200 million (we’re a little short on comps); buy a yacht-racing team good enough to win the America’s Cup. And now, of course, buy an island paradise.
But never mind all that. The truth is that Ellison could have avoided the tsk-tsking about his latest shopping therapy if he’d just come up with a plan. How about saying he was buying Lanai to create a preserve? Yeah, a preserve for the One Percent. I mean if you read The Wall Street Journal and watch Fox News you know that no species today is more endangered than the One Percent.
But we get silence on the Lanai deal. You would think Ellison, one of the richest people on the planet (word is he’s in escrow on the planet as we speak) would know better concerning public relations. The Winslows, on the other hand, you could forgive. Presumably, they haven’t been around the block as many times as the Oracle (ORCL) CEO. (Oh wait. The Winslows can’t go around the block anymore. They just turned the block into their yard.)
But the Winslows could have put a whole different spin on this “tearing down a multimillion-dollar house to make yourself feel better” story line.
In case your moral outrage is on summer break and you haven’t really followed this story, here are a few particulars: Clark and Sharon Winslow of Belvedere bought their 11,200-square-foot house, complete with health spa, pool the size of Sicily and ample stone terraces, for $19 million in 2008. It came with sweeping views of the bay, though the sweep was interrupted by their neighbors’ $4 million fixer-upper. The neighbors’ house was built in 1909 as a stable for the early 20th-century horsey set. The home’s most recent owners apparently hit a rough patch and fell behind in payments to Bank of America. The bank foreclosed.
And this is where the Winslows missed an opportunity to write their own narrative. Never mind that by tearing down a house and converting the lot to a garden, they were creating green open space. Never mind that they were reducing the carbon footprint of all of Marin, while reducing visual pollution.
The Winslows’ big contribution is that by picking up the foreclosed house, they are cleaning up the mess of 99 Percenters who reached beyond their means. No doubt the vacant place would have been turned into a crack house in no time. (It would have been really, really good crack, but still.)
And consider the house that the Winslows are tearing down. I mean, a $4 million house might pass as a dream house in your neighborhood or my neighborhood. But if you’re living in a $19 million dollar place next door, it’s a nightmare, a serious drag on property values. So in the end, the Winslows are on the side of neighborhood improvement.
And who, when you think about it, could be against neighborhood improvement?
So, good for them.
See, One Percenters. When it comes to PR, that’s how it’s done.
Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.
