From the perspective of the Receiver, the punchline for the “Saga of Leonard Powell” would be that moment when he finally gets to sell Powell’s house. At that moment, he could crow, “Pay Day.” He would have taken another man’s house, worth maybe $300,000 in 2015, spent around $750,000 on it, and upon sale, cleared maybe $1.3 million, most of which would have ended up in his own pocket. That is, if he could have sold it.
At least, that was the plan, the way receivership is used. The Receiver inflates the total bill for the job to the point where it pushes the owner’s debt beyond what the owner can pay, and then the Receiver petition’s for the right to sell the house in order to recuperate his expenses (since the owner can no longer cover them). This works especially well to move black families out of a city. Black families generally do not have reserve assets to cover the Receiver’s bill, and it is harder for black people to get loans from a bank than white people.
This strategy was actually seen in action in Powell’s case. The real work on the building had ended in September, 2018. But as long as the "Receiver" is recognized by the court, he can keep adding costs to his bill (legal fees, employee expenses, etc.). This was allowed to happen from September, 2018, until the end of 2019. And it all got charged to Mr. Powell. During that time, the Receiver petitioned the court for the right to sell the house, perhaps figuring it was time to cash in his chips and get out of the game. After all, he had violated the judge’s instructions, though he had transformed the building into a fancy (well, semi-fancy) rental property, a nice income-earner for a new owner.
But it didn’t happen that way. A lawyer entered Powell’s side. And she was a fighter. She won the first round, challenging the travesty of this Receiver’s one-man show, by managing to get it on the record that the judge’s order to "repair" the house did not mean "reconstruct" it. Yet that was no easy trick, because the Receiver insisted that those two terms were synonymous. Yet she had all the facts in hand – from dictionary definitions and the judge’s original instructions to the legal distinction that the Receiver’s work obeyed the state construction code (Title 24) that governs "reconstruction," which is wholly distinct from Berkeley’s housing code, under which the building’s violations were listed.
Apparently unable to discern this difference in jurisdiction, the Receiver acted according to the fiction that the city required the house be restored to duplex status. And he actually hints at active collusion by the city to this end, that is, of transforming it into income property. To return the house to duplex status, the Receiver had the foundation worked on, the house tested for asbestos and lead presence, and new flooring installed – all on his own (or with yet unacknowledged city collusion). It is that extravagance that inflated what could have been a $150,000 job (according to a number of contractors) to $750.000.
But there was the end-game. While negotiations proceeded on the semantic difference between repair and reconstruction, the Receiver kept adding fees and expenses to his bill each month, revealing that his own income is simply a horrendous transformation of people into money. Ultimately, his game prevented the judge from arriving at a final figure, in order to terminate the receivership. The game went on for a few months, and was ultimately halted by the demands of Powell’s attorney. Thus, while the “pay day” punchline remained the same for the Receiver, it was still just a little out of reach when the pandemic hit.
One is reminded of that moment in the movie, "Titanic," when the man guiding the submersible with its cameras down into the hull of the ship on the ocean bottom, and finds, in the captain’s cabin, the "safe." He sees it on his computer screen, broadcast from the "deep," and crows “pay day.” As a treasure hunter, he counts his wealth even before it breaks the ocean surface.
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