After a year of back-and-forth, Silicon Valley tech executive Marissa Mayer has finally demolished three townhouses she bought next to her Palo Alto home to install a backyard pool.
As first reported by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Mayer was legally able to raze the neighboring homes despite a California state law that required any home demolitions to be replaced with equivalent replacement “housing units.”
That law was seemingly the reason Mayer’s request was denied last June, when she filed an initial “pre-application” to tear down three of four two-story townhouses on a stretch of the city near Stanford University that she purchased just over a decade ago.
She filed a second “pre-application” in October. That plan was approved in December, according to the Journal.
“After a closer examination of the rules, staff found that in fact the demolition was permissible as proposed and therefore allowed to proceed,” Palo Alto city spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor told the Business Journal in an email.
That said, Horrigan-Taylor explained to the Business Journal, the rules that let the demolition go through for Mayer changed at the start of 2022 — and anyone who would want to do a similar demolition would likely not get that approved by the city of Palo Alto.
In the townhomes’ place will be a swimming pool and a single in-law unit.
Mayer, the former president and CEO of Yahoo, left the company in 2017 to helm an AI media startup called Sunshine.
She has faced criticism for past ventures into Palo Alto real estate. Most notably, a funeral home she bought in 2013 — and used it to throw Halloween parties. She later attempted to convert the mortuary into a women’s club.
Horrigan-Taylor did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE.
