David Lee Hoffman knows the way he has chosen to live for nearly 50 years is unconventional, maybe even a little bit crazy and likely against the law.
In 1973, after years of travel abroad to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam, Mr. Hoffman bought two acres of land in Marin County, Calif., a lush, leafy peninsula across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
Since then, he’s built a sanctuary to showcase his ideas about the environment sustainability: the Shower Tower, the Worm Palace (crucial to his composting toilet), the Tea Cave (where he has stored more than 50,000 pounds of rare, aged tea), the Tea Pagoda (where he’s hosted tea ceremonies for friends and dignitaries for more than 40 years) and so many more.
He calls it The Last Resort and he never had permission to build any of it. “I’ve been a scofflaw all my life,” said Mr. Hoffman, 78. “I have to recognize that.”
That hasn’t stopped Mr. Hoffman, a team of lawyers and a bevy of supporters from trying to save his property, even as the county government, backed by a court-appointed receiver, seeks to remove him, destroy the structures and sell the land to build a single-family home. To the people trying to help Mr. Hoffman, the heart of the fight is about property rights and what should be considered historic.
“The lack of concern for historic properties, especially those with eccentric features, is staggering, ” said Mr. John Torrey, an urban planner and member of the Lagunitas Project, a nonprofit trying to raise money to buy and save The Last Resort.
Mr. Torrey wrote Mr. Hoffman’s application for county landmark status. “If the property consisted of a group of old Victorians, the county would be doing backflips to preserve them.”
Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court heard an appeal from Mr. Hoffman that kicked the case back to a lower court, gifting him with what looked like his last chance to keep his home and his life’s work intact. But this summer, the court ruled against Mr. Hoffman, and removal is looming. Moreover, the fight has been costly: The court-appointed receiver is owed more than $900,000, and water issues and fines could be as much as $1 million — too high to feasibly bring the property to code.
Dennis Rodoni, a Marin County supervisor, declined to comment because of pending litigation. But Steve Kinsey, the former county supervisor under whom litigation against Mr. Hoffman began, said the county is not opposed to innovation, but has rules to assure health and safety. The dangers of his property include potential runoff from his black water system into nearby waterways. (A gray water system is the recycling of wastewater; a black water system is a wastewater system that uses water discharged from a toilet.)
Mr. Hoffman simply did not follow rules, said Mr. Kinsey, who was in office from 1996 to 2016. “I’m impressed by it, there’s a lot of creativity and imagination there. He’s really pushing the edge of sustainable living,” he said. “But as an elected official, I was trying to negotiate, to find a solution, and he was impossible. He’d say he’d stop building and in a week he’d be building again.”
Most of the structures use recyclable and natural materials and feature Asian architectural motifs — a nod to the good deal of time he spent with Tibetan monks and artisans all over Asia and learned the mysteries of tea and a variety of alternative construction techniques that emphasized sustainability and the environment.
“I hung out with a lot of bricklayers,” Mr. Hoffman said with a wink and a shrug.
According to declarations Mr. Hoffman made in court, when he first began his project, he sought permission from the county, but permits did not exist for the type of structures he was creating, including his composting toilet.
“Back then, it was very laissez-faire here. People did what they wanted,” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “Agreements were made with a handshake. That was the culture.”
That wasn’t unusual, said Daniel Paul, an architectural historian who’s been involved in preserving several sui generis projects and is currently advising Mr. Hoffman.
“California has a very prominent postwar history of very creative, very independent individuals who make art on their properties, whether they’re professionally trained or not,” Mr. Daniel said.
But in 1988, a neighbor formally complained to the county authorities — Mr. Hoffman had inadvertently built a retaining wall 10 feet into his property — and Mr. Hoffman soon found himself hounded by county inspectors who regularly issued fines on his creations. These fines included all sorts of issues — from not enough outlets in a room to ceiling height to a lack of earthquake safety measures.
Mr. Hoffman insists he tried over and over to get the necessary permits, but the timelines, fines and costs were unreasonable. He paid for experts to study and to determine if his water systems were safe and for an architect to draw up alternative plans, but he said county authorities never took them seriously.
Mr. Kinsey remembered the situation differently. What he recalls is that Mr. Hoffman continued to build new structures, both his gray water and black water systems, a storm drain, and modified many of the already existing buildings.
It could have been possible to come to code years ago, said Mr. Kinsey, pointing to the Marin Carbon Project, an undertaking that got a special use permit to have gray and black water systems that are currently outside the county’s building code.
“We did it differently,” said John Wick, one of the project’s founders. “Before we built it, we engaged with all the stakeholders. We organized conversations around our ideas. We talked to the board of supervisors. We talked to all the water agencies — anyone that might have an interest or question.”
Too many decades had passed for Mr. Hoffman to similarly try to start from scratch. Through the years, he tried different tactics to get waivers for his property. At onetime, he argued that his property could be considered a film set and exempt from much of code compliance because his home was the site of a documentary about his home-based tea business. This didn’t impress the county authorities.
Landing a historic designation still appeared to be his best route. Mr. Paul, the architectural historian, believes Mr. Hoffman might qualify for state or federal landmark protection. After Mr. Hoffman appeared in The New York Times in 2012, supporters — and there are many — helped him apply for landmark status to the Marin County Architectural Commission in 2016, hoping the designation would relieve him of some of the fines by applying the more lenient State Historical Building Code. The state code is designed to help preserve historic or unique structures.
The Last Resort became the first community-based project the commission had ever considered. “It provides some latitude,” said Martin Zwick, one of the six commission members who voted in favor of Mr. Hoffman. “David’s property is a great labor of love, but it will be very costly to bring it up to code, even the historical code.”
Mr. Kinsey said that before they could proceed, Mr. Hoffman was still obliged to pay the pre-existing fines — charges disputed by Mr. Hoffman and his supporters because it still had not been determined what was exempt.
After several years of arguing that involved the court-appointed receiver, a judge ruled in 2019 that the state historical code could be applied to Mr. Hoffman’s property.
In 2020, the court-appointed receiver recommended that the best use for the property would be to raze Mr. Hoffman’s work and sell the plots to build a county-approved single family home. Mr. Hoffman would be removed and, because of liens and fines on the property, would not benefit from such a sale.
In the last court decision in July, Mr. Hoffman lost his appeal. His lawyer is appealing the appeal.
So now the self-described scofflaw is awaiting the fate of what he believes is history that he made with his hands, all those years watching and learning from Tibetan monks and artisans.
“Without question David Hoffman dragged his feet for years and ignored all the red tag warnings from the building department,” Mr. Torrey said. “But the focus should be on the property and not David Hoffman.”
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