TORONTO – For sale: white two-storey Mediterranean style home with Spanish tile roof on the corner of 52nd Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland, California.
Cost: zero dollars. Also included in sale: US$20,000 paid to buyer once sale is concluded. Location is…well, we’ll get to that.
Sound too good to be true? Before you go calling your real estate agent, there’s a catch – the new owner must promise to move the house off its existing property.
That’s because Children’s Hospital Oakland is looking to build a new outpatient treatment centre on the property, and needs the historic home gone sooner than later.
According to CBS San Francisco, the home was built over 80 years ago next to what was then a tiny hospital complex next door.
Over the years, Children’s Hospital Oakland has grown and expanded until it dominates nearly all the land around the home. But still the original owner, Lawrence Bossola, refused to sell.
“He didn’t want to sell. When the outpatient centre was being constructed in the ’90s, he said, ‘That’s great, but I’m not moving,’” Melinda Kriegel of Children’s Hospital Oakland told CBS News.
When Bossola passed away in 2002 the executor of his will sold the home to the hospital. Now that funding has been approved for a new expansion, the hospital has plans for land the house is built on.
Just one problem: the nearly 100-year-old dwelling is something of a historical artifact, one the hospital has grown attached to it since converting it into an administration office in 2002.
“This was a cherished house, and our staff who worked here and everyone at the hospital does feel a kinship to this house. We’d hate to see it demolished. We much prefer it be given to someone who can give it a new lease on life,” Kriegel said.
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