For decades, the Crescent Park neighbourhood of Palo Alto represented the dream of California living.
Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors lived in charming homes under oak, redwood and magnolia trees. The houses, an eclectic mix including Craftsman homes and bungalows, were filled with families who became fast friends. The annual block parties heaved with people. Daily life was tranquil, and the soundtrack was one of children laughing as they rode their bicycles and played in one another’s gardens.
Then Mark Zuckerberg moved in.
Since his arrival 14 years ago, Crescent Park’s neighbourhood tranquillity and even many of its actual neighbours have vanished. Residents hardly ever see the Facebook founder, now worth about $270 billion, but they feel his presence every day.
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Zuckerberg has used Edgewood Drive and Hamilton Avenue like a Monopoly game board, spending more than $110 million to scoop up at least 11 houses. He has offered owners as much as $14.5 million, double or even triple what the homes are worth, and neighbours have seen one family after another leave.
Several of his properties sit empty in a notoriously crunched housing market. He has turned five of them into a compound with a main house for himself, his wife Priscilla Chan and their three daughters, along with guest homes, lush gardens, a nearby pickleball court and a pool that can be covered with a hydrofloor. A seven-foot statue depicting Chan in a silver, flowing robe, which Zuckerberg commissioned last year, sits on the property.
The compound is encircled by a high row of hedges, and there is no such thing as knocking on the front door to borrow a cup of sugar. One of the unoccupied buildings is used for entertainment and as a staging ground for outdoor parties.
Another property has been used for the past few years as a private school for 14 children, even though that is not an allowable use of a house in the neighbourhood under city code. Six adults, including four teachers, worked there this past school year.
Underneath the compound, Zuckerberg has added 7,000 square feet of space – cavernous areas that his building permits refer to as basements, but that his neighbours call bunkers or even a billionaire’s bat cave. The work has led to eight years of construction, filling the streets with massive equipment and a lot of noise.
No neighbourhood wants to be occupied. But that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve occupied our neighbourhood
— Michael Kieschnick
Zuckerberg has also brought intense levels of surveillance to the neighbourhood, including cameras positioned at his homes with views of his neighbours’ property. He has a team of private security guards who sit in cars, filming some visitors and asking others what they are doing as they walk on public sidewalks.
Aaron McLear, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan, said the couple tried hard to do right by their neighbours. Meta requires heavy security for its chief executive, he said, because of specific, credible threats. Cameras are not trained on neighbours, and they adjust them when asked, he said.
The family’s staff provides neighbours with notice of potentially disruptive events and gives them a contact’s phone number to report problems, McLear said. Staff members are reimbursed for ride shares to encourage them not to park their own cars in the neighbourhood.
“Mark, Priscilla and their children have made Palo Alto their home for more than a decade,” McLear said. “They value being members of the community and have taken a number of steps above and beyond any local requirements to avoid disruption in the neighbourhood.”
Zuckerberg’s expansion in Crescent Park was revealed through interviews with nine neighbours – seven of whom would not speak publicly for fear of retribution – as well as a review of building permits, affidavits, certificates of formation of limited liability companies, home deeds, recordings of local commission meetings, and emails between neighbours and city officials.
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Zuckerberg has laid claim to the neighbourhood as tech billionaires have made headlines for increasingly brazen shows of their wealth. Jeff Bezos launched his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, and other women into space on a Blue Origin flight before taking over Venice, Italy, for the couple’s wedding. Elon Musk has created a compound in Texas for his numerous children and their mothers, and Marc Benioff has been buying up a wide swath of the Big Island of Hawaii.
But few know firsthand the decade-long disruption, noise, surveillance and uncertainty one extremely rich person can create better than the neighbours in Crescent Park.
“No neighbourhood wants to be occupied,” said Michael Kieschnick, whose home on Hamilton Avenue is bound on three sides by property owned by Zuckerberg. “But that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve occupied our neighbourhood.”
Kieschnick and some of his neighbours are angry with Zuckerberg for taking over Crescent Park rather than building a compound in a nearby town with far more space, as other tech titans have done. Atherton, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley and Woodside are known for large, gated estates for wealthy people seeking space and privacy.
But they are also angry with the city of Palo Alto. In 2016, a key city board rejected Zuckerberg’s application to build a compound, and he withdrew it. But the city then allowed him to create it anyway, just more slowly and piecemeal. The city has been told by neighbours for years that Zuckerberg is operating a private school in a house but has done little to address it.
Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules – Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they’re our neighbours. But it’s a mystery why the city has been so feckless
— Michael Kieschnick
Just the other day, the Police Department provided signs to affix to trees, creating a long tow-away zone on a public road, blocking neighbours from parking their cars there for five hours on a Wednesday evening. The reason, Kieschnick said he learned, was that Zuckerberg was hosting a backyard barbecue and the police had assigned its officer in charge of dignitaries to assist him.
To the neighbours, it feels as if city officials and police officers give extreme deference to Zuckerberg at the expense of everybody else.
“Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules – Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they’re our neighbours,” Kieschnick said. “But it’s a mystery why the city has been so feckless.”
Kieschnick is a co-founder of a cellular phone company and now works as a green energy advocate. His phone company founded a political action committee to support candidates who fight climate change.
He said that Zuckerberg, through his staff, had offered to buy his house. But he said he loved his home of more than 30 years and was daunted by the thought of moving. So far, his answer has been no.
The compound
Zuckerberg has been on a big real estate buying and selling spree. In 2022, he sold his seven-bedroom home near Dolores Park in San Francisco for $31 million after creating a similar disruption with construction in that neighbourhood.
He owns 2,300 acres on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, where he is building a compound with two mansions, tree houses connected by rope bridges and an underground shelter. He is building a third compound on the shores of Lake Tahoe and this year paid $23 million in cash for a 15,000 square foot mansion in Washington, DC.
But his home base has long been Palo Alto. His entry into Crescent Park began in 2011 when he purchased a 5,600 square foot home on Edgewood Drive. The local heritage society says the house is the oldest one in Palo Alto. It sits just three miles from Meta headquarters at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park.
At first, neighbours mostly shrugged. In Palo Alto, heavyweights in the tech industry have long been part of the landscape. Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage about a mile away, and the seeds of Google sprouted nearby at Stanford. Steve Jobs, a founder of Apple, lived a quiet life in Palo Alto.
But neighbours grew concerned when Zuckerberg started purchasing more property. In 2012 and 2013, he spent more than $40 million buying four houses that form an L-shape around his first one.
He resumed his spending spree in 2022, buying six more homes, including four in the past 15 months. The purchases fly under the radar because they are made with limited liability companies, each time with a different nature-themed name, such as Pine Burrow or Seed Breeze. Zuckerberg usually requires sellers to sign non-disclosure agreements, neighbours who are friendly with the sellers said.
His appetite for more Crescent Park property is so well known that in the three most recent home sales, the owners approached him offering to sell, his spokesperson said. Some of the homes are empty and need repairs, while others are housing extended family members of Zuckerberg and Chan.
In 2016, Zuckerberg asked Palo Alto for permission to demolish the four homes that border his main family house and rebuild them much smaller with big basements. City officials had approved the plan, but because it involved construction on three or more properties at once, the municipal code required that the project go before the Palo Alto Architectural Review Board.
Peter Baltay, a Palo Alto architect who was then a member of the review board, said he found the proposal odd, so he went to the site to see it in person before casting a vote. He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.
“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”
Zuckerberg did not attend the meeting, but an architect, a builder and an arborist he had hired tried to convince the board that they were not removing single-family housing stock. The board did not buy it.
Baltay during the meeting said he found it “a real shame” that four beautiful homes were being demolished so a wealthy person could have a giant estate complete with a movie theatre in the middle of an already established neighbourhood.
He’s been finding loopholes around our local laws and zoning ordinances. We should never be a gated, gilded city on a hill where people don’t know their neighbours
— Greer Stone
The board quashed the plan back then, but Zuckerberg moved ahead with it anyway – just more slowly, one or two homes at a time, avoiding going back before the review board.
The city has approved 56 permits for Zuckerberg’s properties, its online permit search system shows.
He demolished three homes completely and built smaller ones in their place, and performed a major remodel on the fourth. He filled in pools, creating one large central garden. The permits show the work includes wine storage, a fountain, a guesthouse, courtyards, a pool house and a storage shed connected by a trellis, and a movable floor on the remaining pool to allow the water to be covered for safety reasons or parties.
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Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a spokesperson for the city of Palo Alto, said there was no preferential treatment in granting the permits, and the work was compliant with city code.
“The city does not regulate who can buy nearby or adjacent properties, whether on the open market or privately,” she said.
Greer Stone, a member of the Palo Alto City Council who lives near Crescent Park, said the city has followed the letter of its own code but not the spirit in allowing Zuckerberg to take over a neighbourhood. Stone said he was working on legislation to address the problem.
“He’s been finding loopholes around our local laws and zoning ordinances,” Stone said of Zuckerberg. “We should never be a gated, gilded city on a hill where people don’t know their neighbours.”
The disruption
When Zuckerberg and Chan first made plans for their compound about 10 years ago, they held a meeting for roughly 20 neighbours in the kitchen of their Edgewood home. They presented their vision of the project and assured the neighbours they would provide off-site parking for workers and would not tear down any homes, recalled Kieschnick, who attended the meeting.
Both of those promises were broken, he said. The couple’s spokesperson said no such promises had been made.
In all, eight years of construction ensued. It has largely stopped over the past several months, but neighbours are still bitter and expect more to come. They said their driveways had been blocked, their tyres flattened by construction debris and their car mirrors knocked off by equipment.
Neighbours said workers regularly parked cars and ate lunch in front of their homes. Zuckerberg, the workers told them, wanted the frontage of his home on Edgewood kept clear.
Occasionally, numerous trucks rumble in, delivering food, decorations and furniture for parties. Sometimes the street is blocked for days, neighbours said. Those on Hamilton said their road was used as the compound’s shipping and receiving dock, and parking lot.
We tried to bring him into the fold. It’s been rebuffed every time
— Peter Forgie
Party time usually includes valet parking for partygoers in gowns and tuxedos, or costumes if the theme calls for them, neighbours said. The music is often loud, sometimes prompting complaints to the non-emergency police line. Neighbours said they did not usually get a response.
Zuckerberg and Chan held their wedding at the property. In October, they held a disco party there, Zuckerberg in white trousers and a gold chain and Chan in sequined gold trousers and a one-shouldered top. “Disco queen wanted a party,” Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram.
Smaller events, including those for Meta employees, neighbours said, take place more frequently. In late July, when police provided the free signs to affix to trees, three big, dark vans stopped in front of the compound. Scores of people, mostly young men in hoodies, filed out and into the compound. Security guards stood outside, eyeing passersby.
Peter Forgie, a retired lawyer who has lived in Crescent Park for 20 years, said he and his partner have long had an open-door policy for their neighbours, welcoming them over and giving gifts when people move in or have babies. None of that has worked on Zuckerberg.
“We tried to bring him into the fold,” Forgie said. “It’s been rebuffed every time.”
Kieschnick said when Zuckerberg bought the home next door, Zuckerberg’s staff members informed him the wooden fence that separated the two homes – and had a gate for children to scurry through – did not meet Facebook standards. It has since been rebuilt twice, thicker and taller each time, he said.
He said the staff also installed security cameras in Zuckerberg’s garden looking into his own garden. When he threatened to install cameras in his yard looking into Zuckerberg’s property, employees promptly took them down.
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Zuckerberg’s staff have made some accommodations. The security guards now sit in quiet electric vehicles rather than in louder fuel-powered cars. Zuckerberg does not attend the annual block parties, which are very small these days, but he did send an ice cream cart to the last one.
And his staff have sent gifts to neighbours when the racket has got particularly loud, including bottles of sparkling wine, chocolates and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
One memorable gift delivery? Noise-cancelling headphones.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
