What’s the most valuable real estate on the planet? Experts say it isn’t the oil fields of the Middle East, or the diamond mines of South Africa. These aren’t even close. The luxury condos in prime spots in New York get us closer, but New York is still sixth on the list. Monaco tops the list on a square foot basis, at just over six thousand dollars a foot. A million bucks there buys enough space to build a bathroom.[i]
But then there’s the Jane Wells CNBC report on an even pricier home site, in, of all places, the heart of Los Angeles, just off Wilshire Boulevard. She interviews Tom Gregory, a seller here, who says the property is “a deal at $10,300 per square foot.”
That’s almost twice the price of Monaco.
What is this place?
The Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
The “home site” is an eight foot by eight foot burial plot, a final home for four, in a manner of speaking. “$699,000 is a good deal,” says Tom, standing next to the grassy flower-bed-lined space just a few steps from the crypt of Marilyn Monroe, and the plots of celebrities like Farrah Fawcett, Truman Capote, and Natalie Wood. Tom is right. “Even at $699,000, the asking price is actually a bargain,” writes Wells, “compared with the $4.6 million paid when the crypt above Monroe’s was sold on eBay in 2009.”[ii]
I think of cemetery plots as pricey for a deeper reason. There, in those graves, are all the books that were never written, the joys never given, the solutions never offered, the gifts never realized.
When we die with unreleased potential, we don’t just take from ourselves. We take from the people we’d love more and serve better with a better life.
“This is the true joy in life,” wrote the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “being used for a purpose recognized as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.”
I want to get as many diamonds out of my pockets as possible, before I go into one of those plots.
[i] Robert Frank, “10 most expensive markets for real estate,” CNBC Inside Wealth, March 5, 2014.
[ii] Jane Wells, “LA’s priciest real estate? Not where you’d think,” CNBC Funny Business, February 5, 2014.
