I have a mansion, forget the price
Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice
So sang Joe Walsh in his anthem to excess, “Life’s Been Good to Me.” And if you are living here, life’s also been good to you. But life isn’t equally good to everybody. The line about the mansion came to mind when my brother sent me an article about a local real estate listing. The founder of Rockstar Energy Drink, Russell Weiner, has just listed his home in The Colony at White Pine Canyon for $50 million. Weiner bought the newly built house in 2021 for a reported $38 million. A few years back, he sold Rockstar Energy to Pepsi for $3.85 billion. So the $38 million house was only about 1% of the total. If you make the area median household income of $116,000, a similar sized purchase would be like spending $1,100. That’s a brake job on the Subaru. Your mountain bike cost several times that. So there is that perspective.
The house is not my taste, though certainly deluxe. It’s very modern, and the interior decoration seems to be the result of some kind of mushroom experiment, with built-in sofas upholstered in the shag carpeting from my mother’s 1970s basement remodel. But it has an industrial kitchen, the intimate feel of an airport concourse, a bowling alley, golf simulator, gym, and six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms (the county assessor has designated one of them as a “designer bathroom”). It sits on nearly five acres in the ski-in-ski-out community. There is a stainless steel 60-foot lap pool that looks like a giant kitchen sink. There’s a bunk room that I assume is for grandkids, but could also house the cruise ship-sized staff necessary to run the place. There are a total of 37 rooms, each a little stranger than the other according to the photos on line. Check out the light fixtures for yourself.
The part of the article that jumped out was this: the house has never been slept in.
A house like that requires some attention. Among other things, the property taxes are $174,353 annually (or 3.6 firefighters). That “designer bathroom” really kills you on those assessments. The HOA fees run around $22,000 a year. Zillow estimates the fire insurance to be $8,333, which seemed like a steal compared to mine (in a forested setting with no hydrants), until I figured out that that’s monthly, not annual. Call it $100,000 for Jake at State Farm. The heat is on, the driveway is melted, the housekeepers come in regularly to dust the professionally curated knickknacks. The stainless steel pool requires maintenance, and neither the Himalayan salt room nor the hammam, whatever the hell that is, can take care of itself. It could burn a couple of thousand bucks a day just sitting there. And nobody has ever slept in the place. If there’s a bright spot, the laundry bills aren’t a burden.
And now he wants to flip it for an $11 million mark-up.
I don’t know how to process that story. The numbers all exceed my comprehension and that of my $3 calculator. Shock, amazement, abject revulsion at the excess of it? Yeah, all of that and more. That grotesque level of consumption seems completely at odds with the values of the community, at least of the cherished version of the community from 40 years ago that I still cling to. This house is a little bit unusual because of the price, but $25 million houses are a dime a dozen around here. Is that really who we are now? God, I hope not.
The tax roll shows the house at 14,000 square feet. The listing information says it’s 18,000. What’s 4,000 square feet among friends? At 18,000 it’s almost 10 times the size of my house, which has been quite comfortable for many years. I don’t have 37 rooms, but on the other hand, Weiner only has four garage bays, and I’ve got indoor parking for seven at my house, eight if I really pack the tractors in the barn for winter.
It’s 30 one-bedroom apartments. Vacant apartments.
At the same time I find it so disgusting, I have to look around and see all the families in the area that make their living building and maintaining these places. The countertops alone would have supported a couple of families. Local electricians pulled a thousand miles of wire in there. When it sells, some realtor will become rich enough to buy the guest house off the commission, and the title company staff can take a trip to the beach to celebrate. We all take a piece of the action. The ads for these properties are holding this paper together, and in a very modest way, supporting me. Is that so awful? Well, yes, it is.
If nobody ever stays there, it becomes the ideal kind of tourism — they send us their credit card, which we light up big time, but they never actually come. Shouldn’t we be encouraging that?
“Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice.”