Money & Politics | Daily Report

Flickr photo by Colin Robertson

Tales of Jerry Brown's $1.8 million Oakland Hills house have caused quite a stir in the blogosphere during the last few days, but its market value these days is a drop in the bucket compared to what his old digs recently sold for.

About a year ago, a converted firehouse Brown lived in from 1989 to 1995 was on the market for $4.4 million, according to a real estate feature in the Wall Street Journal. The seller was John Traina, an art collector and ex-husband of romance novelist Danielle Steel.

According to the article, the 4,000-square-foot home in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco has four bedrooms, five bathrooms, two salons and comes complete with a guest house.

A little Googling around also reveals some other interesting details about Brown's current estate, which he purchased with his wife, Anne Gust, in 2007. For example:

• Last year he lamented the complexity of the state's mortgage laws in front of a group of Realtors, according to a Bay Area News Group story:

He confessed that he did not read all of the mortgage documents when he and his wife, Anne Gust, recently bought their home in the Oakland Hills and noted that it is located in a fire zone, a slide zone and a mile away from the Hayward Fault.

'I didn’t understand (the documents) and I went to Yale Law School and I’m the Attorney General!' he said, earning a big peal of laughter from a group of people paid to explain all that stuff to their clients. '… The point is, there are too many damn laws.'

• An old admirer of Brown's claimed to be an investor in the house, which she described this way in a blog post:

Although the house is probably over 4,000 square feet, it has only two bedrooms. There is a library, a spa with a sauna, six bathrooms, a large kitchen, living room, dining room, and a wonderful view, all spaced-out over five floors and hanging off the hillside. It’s not a typical house for a family. It's an art project and we were not quite sure who would buy it, but we knew it would sell to the perfect people.

• Finally, the San Francisco Chronicle put together a detailed description of the property back in 2007.