More Devilish Details

The way the law reads now is, if you advertise your house for sale, and if somebody offers to meet your asking price, you have to sell it to him.  I don't think you have to negotiate the price with him, he has to meet your asking price.  That may be one reason why realtors usually advise you to set you asking price higher than what you expect to get.  On the other hand, if you casually mention to your friends that you might be interested in selling your house, and they informally pass the word around, if a buyer shows up who you don't like, you can just say that the house is not for sale.

I don't think that any of the Bay View homes have ever been advertised for public sale.  The whole property used to be owned by the Methodist Church, which planned to use it as a religious retreat camp.  I don't know if they ever did use it for that purpose but, at some point, they decided that they didn't want to.  If they offered the whole parcel for sale, it would have been long before any of those discrimination laws were passed.  A bunch of church members got together and formed this private association, which was not officially connected with the church, and bought the property collectively.  Then they broke it up into lots and sold each lot to one of their members, with the understanding that they could only sell it back to the association.  The legal term for this is "the right of first refusal", which means that they have to offer it to the association before they can offer it to anybody else.  If the association declines the offer, the owner would then be allowed to sell it to somebody else, but the association never declines the offer.  There is a waiting list of potential buyers, but I don't know if you have to be an association member to get on the list.  If not, you would have to join the association when you bought the house.  I know all this because I once talked to one of the members.  What I don't know is if the agreement covers leaving the house to somebody in your will, which is what this guy has done.  If this was not previously covered and they tried to slip it in after the fact, the guy would seem to have a pretty good case.

I said last time that you had to be a card carrying Christian to live in Bay View but, like the politicians say, I miss-spoke.  The more I think about it, I don't think that anybody actually lives in Bay View full time, just in the summer.  For most of the year, the elegant Victorian cottages are shut down and boarded up.  The streets are not plowed, and they even put up barricades to discourage casual traffic, although there are no permanent gates.  My daughter and her dog used to go cross country skiing in the adjacent woods in the winter.  I don't think the woods are fenced or posted, which they would have to be to make her a trespasser under Michigan law.  Access to residential and agricultural property is automatically restricted, but unoccupied land has to be fenced or posted to restrict public access.  Either way, there was nobody around to tell her she couldn't, so she did.  By the time the Bay View people returned in the summer, there would be no trace of my daughter having been there.

Speaking of no trace,  all the Marina City Board would had to have done about the balcony BBQs was restrict them to gas grills.  I have grilled with gas, charcoal, and firewood, and I found no discernable difference in the finished product.