Reminds me of a guy near me who bought three already massive adjacent properties. Tore down two of them. One become a pond. The other one was rebuilt into a massive $30M mansion. The third was already a $15M mansion so he kept that as his guest house. The funny thing is that his guest house... has a guest house.

Really? Because it happens everywhere. I've seen it from Chicago to Seattle to South Carolina. Start going to the zoning board meetings of any town with enough people, and you'll run into it.

In London, they tend to expand down, rather than out, but it happens so often there's a term for it there: Iceberg homes.

The richest country in history of the world cannot afford healthcare or food banks, and has millions of homeless people living rough are absurd embarrassments, but can afford to bail out the austerity economic terrorist in Argentina, give bombs and missiles to a genocidal regime to flatten an indigenous population of millions into the Stone Age and man-made famine, bomb random boats claiming they're "narco-traffickers" without evidence, and maintain higher military expenditures than the next nine (9) countries combined.

a legacy of Soviet agit-prop used in a multi-pronged strategy, albeit one that has little traction compared to MAGA and the trad-right stuff.

it is easier and safer to have illegal school and other unpermitted things and all the noise and street blocking and all the other disruptions where regular people live than to piss off a billionaire neighbor.

why do you say that?

I would not call these "regular people"

As far as whether they're "regular people", depends on perspective. Relative to the US / world, a net worth that includes equity in a $3M+ house is an outlier but most of these people live what would have been considered a typical "upper middle class" lifestyle a couple of decades ago [source: me, ex Palo Alto resident, still have friends there]. Putting a couple of kids through college has become insanely expensive. They don't have compounds in Hawaii or fly around on private jets.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Zuckerberg-to-raze-4-hou...