PALO ALTO, Calif. — For decades, the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto represented the dream of California living.
Doctors, lawyers, business executives and Stanford University professors lived in charming homes. The houses, an eclectic mix including Craftsman homes and bungalows, were filled with families who became fast friends. The annual block parties heaved with people.
Then Mark Zuckerberg moved in.
Since his arrival 14 years ago, Crescent Park’s neighborhood tranquility and even many of its actual neighbors have vanished. Residents hardly ever see the Facebook founder, now worth about $270 billion, but they feel his presence every day.
Zuckerberg has used Edgewood Drive and Hamilton Avenue like a Monopoly game board, spending more than $110 million to scoop up at least 11 houses. He has offered owners as much as $14.5 million, double or even triple what the homes are worth.
Several of his properties sit empty in a notoriously crunched housing market. He has turned five of them into a compound with a main house for him; his wife, Priscilla Chan; and their three daughters, along with guest homes, lush gardens, a nearby pickleball court and a pool that can be covered with a hydrofloor.
The compound is encircled by a high row of hedges. One of the unoccupied buildings is used for entertainment and as a staging ground for outdoor parties.
Another property has been used for the past few years as a private school for 14 children, even though that is not an allowable use of a house in the neighborhood under city code.
Underneath the compound, Zuckerberg has added 7,000 square feet of space — cavernous areas that his building permits refer to as basements, but that his neighbors call bunkers or even a billionaire’s bat cave. The work has led to eight years of construction, filling the streets with massive equipment and a lot of noise.
Zuckerberg has also brought intense levels of surveillance to the neighborhood, including cameras positioned at his homes with views of his neighbors’ property. He has a team of private security guards who sit in cars, filming some visitors and asking others what they are doing as they walk on public sidewalks.
Aaron McLear, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan, said the couple tried hard to do right by their neighbors. Meta requires heavy security for its chief executive, he said. Cameras are not trained at neighbors, and they adjust them when asked, he said.
The family’s staff provides neighbors with notice of potentially disruptive events and gives them a contact’s phone number to report problems, he said.
“Mark, Priscilla and their children have made Palo Alto their home for more than a decade,” McLear said. “They value being members of the community and have taken a number of steps above and beyond any local requirements to avoid disruption in the neighborhood.”
Zuckerberg’s expansion in Crescent Park was revealed through interviews with nine neighbors, seven of whom would not speak publicly for fear of retribution, as well as a review of building permits, affidavits, certificates of formation of limited liability companies, home deeds, recordings of local commission meetings, and emails between neighbors and city officials.
“No neighborhood wants to be occupied,” said Michael Kieschnick, whose home on Hamilton Avenue is bound on three sides by property owned by Zuckerberg. “But that’s exactly what they’ve done.”
Kieschnick and some of his neighbors are angry with Zuckerberg for taking over Crescent Park rather than building a compound in a nearby town with far more space.
But they are also angry with the city of Palo Alto. In 2016, a key city board rejected Zuckerberg’s application to build a compound, and he withdrew it. But the city then allowed him to create it anyway, just more slowly and piecemeal. The city has been told by neighbors for years that Zuckerberg is operating a private school in a house but has done little to address it.
“Billionaires everywhere are used to just making their own rules — Zuckerberg and Chan are not unique, except that they’re our neighbors,” Kieschnick said. “But it’s a mystery why the city has been so feckless.”
Zuckerberg has been on a big real estate buying and selling spree. But his home base has long been Palo Alto. His entry into Crescent Park began in 2011 when he purchased a 5,600-square foot home on Edgewood Drive. The local heritage society says the house is the oldest one in Palo Alto. It sits just 3 miles from Meta headquarters.
Neighbors grew concerned when Zuckerberg started purchasing more property. In 2012 and 2013, he spent more than $40 million buying four more houses that form an L-shape around his first one.
He resumed his spending spree in 2022, buying six more homes, including four in the past 15 months. The purchases fly under the radar because they are made with limited liability companies. Zuckerberg usually requires sellers to sign nondisclosure agreements, neighbors who are friendly with the sellers said.
In 2016, Zuckerberg asked Palo Alto for permission to demolish the four homes that border his main family house and rebuild them much smaller with big basements. City officials had approved it, but because it involved construction on three or more properties at once, the municipal code required that the project go before the Palo Alto Architectural Review Board.
Peter Baltay, a Palo Alto architect who was then a member of the review board, said he found the proposal odd, so he went to the site to see it in person. He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.
“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”
Zuckerberg did not attend the meeting, but an architect, a builder and an arborist he had hired tried to convince the board that they were not removing single-family housing stock. The board did not buy it.
The board quashed the plan back then, but Zuckerberg moved ahead with it anyway — just more slowly, one or two homes at a time, avoiding going back before the review board.
The city has approved 56 permits for Zuckerberg’s properties, its online permit search system shows.
In all, eight years of construction have ensued. It has largely stopped over the past several months, but neighbors expect more to come. They said their driveways had been blocked, their tires flattened by construction debris and their car mirrors knocked off by equipment.
Occasionally, numerous trucks rumble in, delivering food, decorations and furniture for parties. Sometimes, the street is blocked for days, neighbors said.
Party time usually includes valet parking for partygoers in gowns and tuxedos, or costumes if the theme calls for them, neighbors said. The music is often loud, sometimes prompting complaints to the nonemergency police line. Neighbors said they did not usually get a response.
Peter Forgie, a retired lawyer who has lived in Crescent Park for 20 years, said he and his partner have long had an open-door policy for their neighbors, welcoming them over and giving gifts when people move in or have babies. None of that has worked on Zuckerberg.
“We tried to bring him into the fold,” Forgie said. “It’s been rebuffed every time.”
Zuckerberg’s staff has made some accommodations. The security guards now sit in quiet electric vehicles rather than in louder gas-powered cars. Zuckerberg does not attend the annual block parties, which are very small these days, but he did send an ice cream cart to the last one.
And his staff has sent gifts to neighbors when the racket has gotten particularly loud, including bottles of sparkling wine, chocolates and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
One memorable gift delivery? Noise-canceling headphones.