Sam Zell Tells Newsday Reporters: 'We've Got to Get Off Our Ass'
On Long Island, Newsday reporters and editors are listening to Sam Zell speak to a packed auditorium--so packed that lots of Newsday folks are spilling over into a sideroom to watch a live telecast of the event. According to a person inside the room--who is BlackBerrying Media Mob with updates--Mr. Zell is wearing a striped button-down shirt without a tie.
When someone raised concerns that Newsday has recently lost a lot of high-quality journalists and asked what Mr. Zell intended to put into the paper, he said, "If the model economically works then we'll produce a superior product...Every company I've ever been with is growing. We've got to get off our ass."
When discussing the internet, Mr. Zell said, "You can do your internet thing. I'm technologically infuckingcompetent."
When someone asked Mr. Zell what he wanted to be remembered for, he replied, "I want to be remembered as someone who lived up to his word."
According to our insider, he curses a lot, he stresses the importance of profits and he is also very wrinkly.
Mr. Zell states, and I quote, "I want to be remembered as someone who lived up to his word." I'm interested to know what that means. What does he believe? It's certainly hard to know what he means when a recent quote from a newspaper stated that his company - Equity Real Estate, had a PR firm send a statement, saying rent control actually "drove up the sale prices of homes" and that it "serves no public purpose and benefits only a handful of people."
I guess as a billionaire he doesn't need to deal with the same issues that most renters do. Clearly he's never rented from one of his properties - like Larkspur Shores, here in Larkspur, CA, where the rents keep escalating.
We renters need to band together against these mega conglomerates who keep buying up rental property from individual owners and raking in the profits.
"Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."– Frank Herbert
We need to wake up and start organizing against this movement, or Marin will find itself in the same predicament as many other"wealthier" areas have - that the rents are too high for people who work here to live here. On Martha's Vineyard, and parts of Cape Cod, they have been so short of affordable rental space that owners of businesses have had to find housing for their employees.
That issue significantly effects the quality of our lives in s number of ways. Proposition 98 looks like a benign enough piece of legislation until you read the second paragraph and learn that it is actually a referendum to do away with Rent Control. Caveat Emptor - let the buyer beware. Get out and vote tomorrow and take whatever pollitical action seems appropriate to keep these Robber Barons out of our county.