Sad to have seen a public and vibrant place like the Tied House replaced by a LegalZoom office in the name of preserving .....the facade of a Laundry.

If Mountain View wants to restrict property owners development rights, at the very least it should allow selling and transferring the unusuable development rights. Yes, it could mean more density on adjacent properties but it's a tradeoff we should accept to also preserve the finances of historical poperties owners.

It's truly disheartening to see the retirement plans of George Aviet, a respected member of our community, put in jeopardy due to the failed property redevelopment. Given the impact of these actions, it's high time for Livable Mountain View to step up and launch a fundraiser to support Mr. Aviet in his well-deserved retirement. It's a chance to right a wrong and show that community matters. Surely, they can raise funds necessary to make up the gap. Will the Livable Mountain View steering committee heed the call?

Seems like being put on a historical register is akin to an eminent domain action. If a property owner is subject to eminent domain by the government, they should be entitled to just compensation for that action... in this case, the $7M value of the property that Aviet would have received from the developer.
The government (or the historical society) is welcome to purchase the property for preservation purposes, but if they aren't paying the market rate for the property, aren't they just taking it without compensating the owner?

When I saw this article, I finally registered here, just to make a comment!
I never knew what all being part of the Mountain View Historical Society entailed. I'm like my old friend, George Aviet, thinking that one had to agree to be part of it to be restricted by it.
I helped Chez TJ open, with George and the other original owner, Thomas J McCombie, back in the mid 1980's.
I painted the first signage, designed the first logo and menu art. George was ALWAYS there, even when Tom wasn't. I was always impressed with his kindness and integrity and hard work.
George has worked too well and too hard and done everything right to have to be faced with being unable to enjoy taking it easier after all these years!!!
I've moved to Morgan Hill, about 10 years ago, otherwise I might try to attend the meeting tonight. Although I'm not sure 'out of towners' are welcome to speak?
I've lived in Mountain View for close to 30 years before that.
Respect for History, including Mountain View's History, is something I have lots of. But to keep George locked into his current vocation for the sake of a buildings importance in history is extremely strange and unfair to me. There should surely be some way to give George the profit he's due on the property and I would bet that most people agree and I hope you all speak out and soon.

Who wrote this article, his mom? You wouldn't know it, but George Aviet has some dark history so, in the end, he may not deserve so much sympathy.

The MV paper may not remember his checkered recent past. George Aviet is the guy who continued to serve fois gras after it was illegal in the state of CA because it was, well, force-feeding a duck with a tube is just horrible.

Web Link

To catch you up, back in 2004, fois grois in CA became illegal under S.B. 1520. So what did George do? Switch to alternatives? Nope. He gave it away - if you bought an expensive meal.

So while I'm sorry to hear you can't sell a historic building and pocket $7 million, George but here's an idea. How about donating the restaurants to a rescue organization for a 501c3 tax break? If the organization is fighting animal cruelty it's generally allowed under IRS regulations but check with a qualified tax professional.

I agree with others in this thread. Being on the historical register, in this case, amounts to a "taking". Accordingly, this owner should be compensated.

I vote with the others! The owner should be compensated for the market value of his property. He has worked all these to make this restaurant one we can be very proud of!

I remember eating there the first time after they had been open for a couple of years. I call it a Mountain View secret of which I am proud.

let's figure a way to award him for all his hard work for Mtn. View!

I disagree with other commenters.

I don't like the way historical preservation works and I agree this amounts to a taking for public benefit. But I also wonder why the owner is now dependent on a $7 million valuation for retirement. That property is still massively appreciated over 41 years at $3 million. It was not bought purely as a land investment and the conditions that made it so valuable today were not foreseeable and have nothing to do with the restaurant. They also have nothing to do with improvements to the property since the $7 million offer is for a teardown.

It is good that a 4 story office not be developed there but the reasoning is entirely wrong. We simply do not need more offices and more housing demand. What would the same people be saying if the valuation was less because of zoning and not a historical designation?

Something is off with this story. It is very wrong to continue normalizing passive gains on already massively inflated real estate as a retirement strategy, and one wonders where the income from 41 years of running the restaurant went. I feel sorry for George that this happened to him but the thinking promoted here is only digging our problems deeper. Highlighting this feels like propaganda from those who want to perpetuate the real estate Ponzi scheme.

Excuse me, but didn't Chez TJ for years leverage and highlight the building's historic significance in its marketing to draw customers? But now that its historic distinction doesn't serve the owner's loftier financial goals, it's all of a sudden *not* historic? I believe that's called a double standard. His present, self-serving characterization of the building also overlooks that it was owned by one of Mountain View's earliest downtown business leaders (who was also served as mayor and postmaster), is one of the oldest of its architectural style still standing in/near downtown and, I recall reading, was once the home of the one and only U.S. Congress member to hail from Mountain View. (The Voice covered the historic-status desicions pretty well in this article: Web Link Sorry, but no sympathy that the building generated decades of revenue as a restaurant and is now worth "only" $3 million

Get the property appraised for commercial and residential use. Within the development guidelines. Take the average. The city or whichever historical organization can take over the property for that independent appraised price. Get multiple appraisals of you have to. Done. Let the man retire.

While I'm generally sympathetic to property owners in situations like this, Chez TJ has been making money for decades serving products like Foi Groi, which require animal torture to produce.

I'm not exactly going to cry myself to sleep over the plight of this guy when he made his living torturing animals so rich people could have novel dining experiences.

Property rights. What do people not get about this concept?

His property. His right to do with it what he pleases. If someone wants to preserve it for what little historical value it still has, well, they can buy it at market value. Period.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for historical preservation, but one person’s wishes to preserve a “historic” structure does not usurp the owner’s right to sell, modify, destroy, etc. THEIR structure.

At first I thought "tough luck," but SBR has it right. Transferrable development rights would allow the property to remain historic, the owner to capture the value, and the same amount of development happens downtown, so the city (and all of us taxpayers) get the benefit from it being developed.

Maybe before a fundraiser is organized we need to find out how Mr. Aviet fairs with his bank accounts.
But nevermind that, how about selling the restaurant and collect rent. He can still live in the back cottage, keeps the property and there are no changes to the "historical" home.
Is a win win situation

The argument that this is a "government taking without compensation" is a strong one, and this principle has been supported in some court cases. There is an organization, the Institute for Justice (ij.org), which will represent the little guy in taking these cases to court, which aids people who would be unable to afford to litigate on their own. I suggest Mr. Aviet might want to contact them to see if they can help in this case.

That's quarter acre parcel where the historic portion is on the front 2/3 and the residential cottage is on the back 1/3, which separately has access to an alley that runs behind.

It seems to me that $3 Million is a VERY LOW estimate for sale value at this point. If he subdivides the parcel then the back cottage on 4000 sf of land seems to be worth $2 Million by itself, and it triggers no historical issues. So he could sell the historical part and the restaurant separately from the cottage. I'm thinking he could still get $4.5 Million minimum for the property if it were subdivided to split the residence off from the restaurant.

When Aviet bought the property it was on the historic list with the city, and the price he paid reflected that. His annual taxes are around $9k according to the county records. That's not 1% of $3m.

So he can only make $3m selling it? Boo hoo. He could sell it and roll the money into a 1041 exchange, obtain the same mortgage with a little higher interest, for something worth $3m and end up making $150k a year gross for his retirement. And either live on that property or go somewhere else. And take his tax rate and move it to the new property if he stays in CA.

OR he could rent out the restaurant. Can he make $120k a year gross? No idea who wants to have a restaurant like that in MV. But government rules and upzoning don't guarantee you a payout. Few people in the US or elsewhere around the world get to build their retirements out of selling a long owned property for that much money.

He sounds ungrateful that Google came in an jacked up the property values as they did, and CA has prop 13 and old age moving of the tax basis to a new property. It sounds like he just wants to complain because he didn't get his way even though multiple things are totally going his way.

And for the rest of us living in the real world please resume your life of having actual problems.
How does one have sympathy for someone complaining about not having enough millions to retire?
What planet do you people live on?

Tressa Schaller, well said! It’s a privilege to reside in Mountain View, CA. This city won a lottery because of Serguei Brin and Larry Page. Count your blessings! Help others! Fall in love! It’s your choice to be a grumpy old men. Or a happy, curious, stress-free, and giving person.

It's truly disheartening to witness such harsh responses and attacks on a man who has contributed significantly to our community by building an institution like Chez TJ. Mr. Aviet's contributions to our city should be appreciated, not criticized. It's saddening to see our community engaging in these negative comments; I believe we are better than this. Let's focus on supporting each other and finding solutions that honor our city's history while fostering progress.

The responses are not just negative they are vindictive in some cases, dragging in past menu choices as if they have any bearing on this historical status designation.

I do feel that the problem is not as bad for him as things may appear. He needs some help from some real estate professionals to resolve things. People saying the historical status is a taking of property value have a point. But on the other hand, the city's rules seem to allow for development despite the historical status issue. A lot more complication is coming from the fact that right now real estate values are undergoing an inflection point, just when he's finally getting serious about cashing out. The fact that he had a previous plan to reap $7 Million understandably makes this smart. But on the other hand, a huge amount of income taxes would have been due on that plan. Right now there may be options like an installment sale, partial sale, etc. that can work to his advantage for income taxation. He really needs some professional financial advice.

Considering that he bought the property in 1982, he doesn't seem to have gotten an especially good deal. Property in Mountain View as way cheaper then, when interest rates were at 20%

Clarence Rown and LongResident understate the problem above, of some comments being not just way-off-topic but vindictive. It's worse: The people raising the foie-gras demon didn't even have their basic facts right, they showed it in their phrasing. Migratory ducks form fat livers (foie gras, in French) seasonally for flight stamina. It's cultivated naturally in US poultry farms without "force-feeding" (practiced in some countries, illegal here); just feed the birds as much as they want. The whole topic received distorted spin for cynical reasons after Wayne Pacelle took over the misleadingly named "Humane Society of the US" (unrelated to animal shelters using that venerable name) as a money-raising empire, until the me-too movement forced his resignation over reported sexual abuse. That's whose "talking points" people repeated unthinkingly in the foie-gras comments above. For an "enlightening" summary of that topic, see #3 comment on this 2018 Voice article: Web Link

Those and some other comments say nothing about the article's subject: Personal costs of "historic preservation."

When I arrived in 1995 from the UK and chose Mountain View. It was a dormitory town with most of us supporting the major company in the area which was Lockheed. Such good days where we had happy hours, good schools and very little violence. I still live here having moved from a renter to a home owner. Later on Castro Street grew enormously with lots of different ethnicity restaurants and types of bars. What a wonderful place. Of course we had to move the high school to make room for city hall - what a deal!!. As time went on we became Google Town but we still had some of the best places like Tide House and Chez TJ's. With the wonderous maneuvering of our City we have managed to shut down two of the signature establishments that defined us. Without them we are smaller and lower in stature.
It is time for us to remember who we are and help to keep our past a part of being alive today.

Okay, folks. After reading all the above comments -- some reasoned, others not so much -- this question: should we really feel sorry for the owner of a historic downtown property worth, as he estimates with a wildly low-ball assessment, $3 million? One that houses a restaurant charging $225 per "tasting"? A property that absolutely no one's forcing him to either keep or sell? Sorry, but exactly who, then, is denying him a comfortable retirement?

Regarding the historic designation he so vociferously has opposed, maybe it's a case of amnesia that he simply forgot that on Chez TJ's website it's described as a "...restaurant that is uniquely located in one of the most historic Victorian homes in Mountain View, CA." and adds it has a "storied history." If you buy a nearly century-old house, can't ignore its relative importance. If you capitalize on the fact that it's that old and admittedly historic, then you have no grounds to complain when that same status you promote protects the property.

George: Nobody's taking anything from you; you own the property and no matter your assessment of it, it's appreciated well over the years. Enough, already.

Yeah, everybody wants to get behind "the little guy" fighting City Hall -- or, in this case, the California State Historical Resources Commission (take a look at its deliberations: Web Link but no, this is no such Sampson/Goliath story. George has no foes except the reality of owning a historic property.

The house has certainly gotten older since he bought it in 1982. But people saying that it was historic when he bought it miss the mark. The point is that during the 41 years of ownership, the city and perhaps the public have changed how they view historic homes, and also how they treat them He couldn't have foreseen these changes back when he bought it. So it's different than if he had bought it 10 years ago. This is a reasonable consideration and example thereof that should be considered in any revision of the historic preservation ordinance.

I can remember several other old houses downtown which were operated as restaurants during the 1980's. One was Blue Sky Cafe. Perhaps not as significant as these two, but the way they were replaced is an example that would have figured into expectations of property owners in general in the 1980's and 1990's. People commenting here act like the attitudes were the same, but they are clearly more unforgiving to property owners now than they were before 2000. They were also more respectful of property rights.