Cupertino, CA Limits Property Rights to Protect Neighbor's Privacy

This from the San Jose Mercury-News:

The Cupertino City Council on Tuesday moved to settle a continuing battle over a house in the Garden Gate neighborhood, eliminating a second-story balcony from the design of the 4,200-square-foot home to protect the privacy of neighbors.

The property owners, Homa and Mehrdad Mojgani, can still build their new house and one of the balconies they wanted. But the council agreed with neighbors that the other balcony invaded their privacy.

Like most regulated neighborhoods, the Mojgani's had to get notify and get approval from neighbors before building their own home on their own land.

The Mojganis will also have to plant shrubs or trees to provide privacy for the neighbors.

"We always knew there would be a large house there, but we never anticipated a balcony," said Jessica Rose, who lives next door and had appealed to have the city council review the design.

"This is a bigger problem within Cupertino. The fact that this left the planning department with two second-story balconies without a satisfactory landscape plan is unacceptable to me," she added.

So neighbors who don't like the house will force the home owners to plant shrubs (at their cost) in order to protect the privacy of their neighbors.

Here's an idea, if you don't want your privacy invaded, plant your own damn shrubs, move or shut up!!

This "community" standard sets of property rights movement is just getting absurd. In my old house, my wife an I wanted to put a deck on our townhouse. In order to do so and avoid a hefty fine from the homeowner's association, I had to get "authorization and approval" from the homeowners to either side of me and a majority of homeowners with site lines to my new deck, which amounted to 25 other townhomes. Notifying my immediate neighbors made sense to me since there would be workmen in an around their property and they had a right to know. But just because someone has a view of my deck just did not sit well with me.

Cupertino's action is just another example of how "community rights" are trumping individual rights. Who gets to determine the community rights?

If I were the Mojganis, I would scrap the plans for the second story balcony and put in teh biggest picture windows I could afford on the second story in the area of the balcony and dare my neighbors to complain. I can just hear the complaints--their windows are too big?