Neighbor refuses to grant easement for powerline to new home next door.

[hunter]

13. Dumb-ass first world nation problems all around.

The house under construction is plenty visible on google maps if you want to be a voyeur. (Zooming in made me feel dirty...)

It seems entirely possible the property once belonged with the previously existing house and was later sub-divided out and sold.

Nevertheless, overhead power lines running through backyards are long obsolete.

Most weird about this story, there's a fucking freeway in the backyard. That can't be good for property values. Power lines seem trivial in comparison.

I think if we went back in time to the 1930's and showed some San Fernando Valley resident this article they'd probably hang themselves in utter despair for the future. Where are the flying cars? Where is the glittery emerald city lit by electricity too cheap to meter, with lush gardens irrigated by unlimited desalinated seawater? "

It's simply not possible to pick sides in this story. There's just too much 21st century world-gone-mad in it.

Disclaimer: I've lived in the San Fernando Valley. I escaped once, then returned briefly, and then escaped again. My parents and all my siblings have similar stories. My parents are hard-core isolationists now. They live in a tropical rain forest and drink and bathe in water that falls on their roof. They eat local pigs, goats, and produce. If this civilization ends they'd first notice their telephone wasn't working, their internet was down, and there was no mail in their Post Office Box. Other than that, life would go on.

That's my own imaginary refuge. My wife's sailing skills are much better than my own, and maybe I could learn too, but I do own an accurate plastic sextant and a few very robust timekeeping devices for navigation.

Our family was in the San Fernando Valley because some of my ancestors liked horses and Hollywood. Later, one of my grandfathers was an aerospace engineer who built titanium stuff for the Apollo project using skills he'd somehow absorbed by osmosis from the bad-boy geniuses of World War II. His World War II job, as an officer in the Army Air Force, was keeping "eccentric" people deemed essential to the war effort out of jail.

Eccentric was the "nice" word for alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, non-whites, non-Christians, uppity brilliant women, socialists, people with suspect national loyalties, and any other non-white-male-protestant who could do science or technology or be a pretty face in war propaganda.