Jon Huntsman Sr.’s house in Deer Valley is for sale. The price tag is $55 million, which is a tidy bit of economic stimulus by any measure. The commission on that would be $3,300,000, assuming a full 6 percent. It’s probably not quite that rich, but still, local realtors have to be drooling at the prospect of even a small part of that deal with the market as slow as it’s been.
Fifty-five million is a significant amount of money. I looked under the couch cushions at my house and, despite striking gold, am still a bit short. Just to put it in perspective, $55 million is roughly twice the cost of the Park City High School. Huntsman’s house is a lot better looking, but for that kind of coin, you really don’t expect exposed cinder block and corrugated metal siding. (Of course, for $25 million, some of us didn’t really expect exposed cinder block and corrugated metal siding on the high school either, but that’s another topic.)
So what kind of bliss does that buy you? Well, it’s in upper Deer Valley for starters. The brownies alone probably add a million to the price, the bacon cheeseburger another $3 or $4. Then there’s the skiing, though I’m not entirely sure that this house is ski-in/ski-out access. You may have to use the streets to get to the lifts. The bus service in the Silver Lake area is OK, but not great.
The property is about 40 acres. That hit me as kind of interesting. My mother’s parents lived on a 40-acre farm in Idaho. They raised chickens for meat and eggs. As a little kid, it seemed to me like they had a million hens, each more determined to peck my eyes out than the other. But even if they had a thousand laying hens, I don’t think eggs ever broke a nickel each in their lives. It would have taken a lot of eggs to make a car payment, for example. In other words, though I never thought of them that way, my grandparents were pretty much dirt poor.
If they had been in business 20 years later, it’s possible that their eggs would have been packaged in the foam containers that made Huntsman rich. So rich that his 40 acres in the heart of the ski resort is just forest and a big house that doesn’t have to produce a living. Huntsman isn’t raising laying hens, and the grain to feed them with, and all of the food his family will eat. But the idea that the man who made the packaging for the eggs made a whole lot more money than the man who produced the eggs (with the chickens’ help, obviously), is kind of interesting to chew on.
I hope the county assessor takes note of the asking price. I looked it up online and found that the assessor officially thinks the Huntsman house is worth a paltry $10,609,805 this year. That’s down from last year because of the Great Recession. Huntsman paid $130,954 in property tax for 2008. This year, with values in the tank, he will get off easy, paying only $82,873. I’d like to live on that. If the assessor bumps the valuation up to $55 million, the property tax would be $429,000. In 58 years, Huntsman would have paid for the high school all by himself. We should be nicer to people like that.
As I face a retirement in which cat food plays a prominent role, I admit to being filled with populist rage. Huntsman made his millions by actually making something. His business started out with the foam egg containers that will outlast plutonium and cockroaches, then branched out into other chemicals. That seems OK to me. The likely buyer of his place is most likely to be some weasel from Wall Street, a Goldman Sachs guy who made his millions swapping pieces of paper.
I know that money is as important an ingredient of the stuff we buy as copper wire, plastic, and the cheap Chinese labor that screwed it all together. But there is a difference between money made by making loans and taking business risks, and money made swapping pieces of paper. My guess is the Huntsman house will sell to some paper swapper who has made a lot of money but never actually produced anything. At $55 million, or some reasonable discount from that, we are really dealing with not just rich people but obscenely rich people. People so rich that they can afford to plunk down the entire annual budget of the Park City School District plus Summit County, for example, to buy a place to have vacations.
Forgive me, but I can’t help but hope the buyer ends up raising chickens, trying to meet the payments from the egg money.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.