It’s been two weeks since this terrible cold lay both Karen and I low, but I think we’ve turned the corner and are on the comeback trail. In the beginning, you try and stay up with everything, but after a few days, you begin to turn the world off and stop looking at the news eight times a day. Strangely, even though you feel like hell, there is a certain peace that settles over you as you disengage. Trump’s daily silliness no longer seems that important and because we have a good crew at The Malibu Times, the newspaper continued to get out on schedule and I spent my day laying on the couch, watching Netflix.
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Meanwhile, when I wasn’t looking, Malibu City Council scored a major triumph and was able to pick up three parcels of land owned by the Malibu Bay Company, amounting to nearly 30 commercially zoned acres for $42.5 million—which averages out to about $1.5 million per acre. The city was required to pay a competitive price and close the deal in a short period of time of about 30 days. It scrambled but managed to do it. It’s not yet clear how it’s going to pay for it all, but council members feel they have it under control. It’s not that there weren’t a number of others interested. There were a number of local billionaires sniffing around but the city was able to grab the prize. Jerry Perenchio, the principal in the Malibu Bay Company who died last year, had an eight-parcel portfolio in Malibu consisting of about 71 acres, leaving 41 acres or so after this 30-acre sale to the city.
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Our real estate market at the very upper end seems to be going wild. We just broke the Malibu record with Peter Morton, the Hard Rock Cafe co-founder, selling his Carbon Beach estate for $110 million. The sale broke the old record, which was a miserly $85 million set in 2017 by David Geffen for his Carbon Beach estate. Morton’s estate is a 7,000 square foot compound with a two-story main house and a guesthouse. The explosion of values at the upper end skews everything. Many, if not most, of the deals are for cash. Malibu is apparently one of those places where the richest people in the world want to be. People feel personally secure here and the demand has produced some bidding wars. There is fallout from this growth in value. For one thing, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District School Board simply doesn’t want to let us go with the potentiality for all the money in the future. They appear to be willing to do all sorts of things, like giving us our own deputy superintendent, or perhaps our own school board within the school board, provided they get to keep most of the money.
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Apparently, Vice President Mike Pence blew into town last weekend after the usual inspection of our Southern border with Mexico and its problems. He went on to the Malibu Colony for a major fundraiser at the home of Marc and Eva Stern ($10,000 to $100,000 per couple). The Sterns are heavy hitters in Republican circles.
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The Civic Center sewer is just about completed and I’m guessing as people hook up to it, we’ll be seeing some of the treated water discharged into Legacy Park in central Malibu. I’m a Legacy Park regular and before, when it was dry, it wasn’t much to look at—kind of a dried-up mud hole. But once we started adding clean water, that all changed. The place has come alive with ducks, birds, ground squirrels, rabbits and lots of other wild life, although the bigger ones like coyotes only come out at night. I was told there is a new family of baby ducks.
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Earlier this week I was talking to Brad Norris, one of the owners of the Malibu Health Gym, who was raised in Los Angeles. We were remembering what LA was like when we had heavy smog here in the LA Basin in the ’60s and ’70s. They had to check the smog status every day to see if it was possible to play ball outside. Sometimes, schools were closed down because of smog alerts. Earlier, there had been a political battle over backyard garbage incinerators and all the smog they produce. There were all sorts of terrible health side effects like asthma and COPD. So it’s difficult to listen when the EPA talks about reducing standards—or what they call reducing regulations—when it really means reducing health.