A vacant lot there would be a bargain at $50/SF. Let the sellers and buyers hire separate appraisers, and split the difference. The sellers will still come out $millions to the good, and the homeowners will have no more tax bills. Everybody wins.
This kind of thing must happen all the time in private developments with publicly-accessible private streets running through them.
“The sellers will still come out $millions to the good, and the homeowners will have no more tax bills. Everybody wins.”
Not so, the problem here is that instead of the street being apportioned to each adjoining property so that each resident pays his share of the city and county of SF’s property taxes, evidently the street was a separate taxable property. It does blow me away that the property taxes were only $14 per year. Looks like they have had a “special deal” on taxes for many, many years. Here in our neighborhood in the East Bay we live on a private road (seven homes) and each of us pays property taxes on the roadway which is simply an easement on each lot. On our acre and a half lot with a good-size home, property taxes are around $20,000 per year.