ARMED WITH SUBSIDIES, MUSK WANTS BOCA VILLAGERS GONE

By Dave Mosher
Business Insider

Turning Boca Chica into a private spaceport was a dream of Musk's as early as 2011.

That's when he had SpaceX employees call the office of then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry about launching a dozen commercial satellite missions a year from the site. Not long afterward, according to The Dallas Morning News, Musk met with officials from the state and Cameron County, where Boca Chica is, and pushed for incentives to bring SpaceX there.

The Pointers and a number of their neighbors doubted the company would actually land in Boca Chica when news about SpaceX's interest broke in April 2012. There seemed to be far more suitable locations farther north in Texas — ones without a cluster of retirees hanging around — they said, as well as in Georgia, Puerto Rico, Florida, and several other places SpaceX was scouting.

But in Texas, SpaceX spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying, donated tens of thousands of dollars to key officials' campaigns, and even paid for politicians to visit its headquarters, according to The Dallas Morning News.

Government officials eventually approved a package worth $15 million in tax breaks and job-creation incentives in 2013. SpaceX then won federal, state, and local approval in July 2014 to build a spaceport. The rocket company finally broke ground in September 2014.

"At the very, very beginning, I saw surveyors outside our windows. I thought, 'Oh god, people here are going to burn me on a cross if I'm not with SpaceX,'" Maria Pointer said. Thus began what she has consistently described over the years as the beginning of "life in a corporate shadow" or a "corporate footprint."

The company's presence expanded quickly.

SpaceX bulldozed grasses and cacti next to the Pointers' home to erect a bustling barbwire-fenced work yard. The company also trucked in enough dirt to bury an American football field 13 stories deep and dumped it atop squishy soil near Boca Chica Beach to help compact it into a launchpad foundation. A few homes SpaceX acquired early on became workshops, storage sites, and delivery centers. Towering spacecraft-tracking antennas from NASA's old space-shuttle program settled in next to an old corner store.

SpaceX might have offered to buy the village early on, but that did not happen — residents say they reached out with few if any offers back then.

"They don't approach you, you approach them," a resident told Business Insider in 2019. Celia Johnson, a Brownsville native and Boca Chica resident since 1992, said she offered to sell her rental house to SpaceX a few years ago for about $150,000 but the company declined.

Most residents interviewed by Business Insider over the past year described the company as being "indifferent" to their existence or even "a non-neighbor."

In 2015, some in the village attempted to open a dialog by asking SpaceX to hold private meetings. The company hosted two. According to several accounts of those meetings, SpaceX told residents they would soon need badges to pass through a security gate to reach their homes and, for safety reasons, be asked to leave for many hours during rocket-launch activities. The company also said it may put up temporarily displaced residents in Brownsville hotels, according to their accounts.

But SpaceX rocket failures in 2015 and 2016, along with weaker-than-expected demand for the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launchers — which were supposed to fly commercial missions monthly from Boca Chica — ground launch-site development nearly to a halt. Though the project's future was in doubt, SpaceX never left the area, the private meetings stopped, and an information vacuum grew.

"They did not like to answer any questions," Sam Clauson told Business Insider in April, when he was still a part- time resident. (County records show he and his wife deeded their Boca Chica property to SpaceX in December.) "They tell their people to basically don't answer any questions."

Those years of relative dormancy ended with a flurry of activity in 2018. Construction workers swarmed the dirt pile to sculpt it into a rudimentary but functional launchpad. Giant tanks for storing liquid propellants were delivered. SpaceX-owned homes became crash pads for workers, and the company even turned one into a recreation center with a bar, the anonymous resident said. Starhopper, a gleaming steel-rocket-ship prototype, appeared seemingly out of nowhere after the new year.

Cameron County eventually began closing off sections of Highway 4 — the only road out to Boca Chica — to permit SpaceX to move equipment and conduct rocket tests. Law-enforcement officials stopped residents on the way to their homes and even threatened to arrest some who expressed frustration at the situation, several homeowners told Business Insider.

Fire trucks rumbled and beeped in the middle of the night. And soon enough, a rocket engine the size of a car began blasting Starhopper into the sky.

Today, development work continues to accelerate as Musk spends more time in Boca Chica to oversee SpaceX's development of the Starship launch system, upon which the company's future success may hinge.

"We can't sleep anymore. It's impossible to sleep," Maria Pointer said. "If you don't hear sounds, you feel vibrations. You feel pile drivers outside your window."

Amid all of this work, SpaceX's attitude to the village shifted, morphing from relative silence into a seemingly generous plea for everyone to sell their homes in the name of safety — and to do it quickly.

On September 12, the company sent every homeowner in the hamlet a buyout offer letter via the real-estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, or JLL. Most bristled at the deal's initial two-week deadline (which was later relaxed). Though the deal offered three times a base appraisal, some residents described the appraisal as a "lowball" and "bulls---."

And even with a three-times offer, according to nearly all the residents we spoke with, the funds wouldn't compensate for "a like property" in a similarly secluded low-tax area within a stone's throw of an undeveloped and pristine public beach.

So two weeks later, while Musk was in town to present progress on Starship, the CEO met with villagers during a brief and "awkward" meeting. Attendees said the group "made it clear we were not happy" and didn't "play nice" with the billionaire CEO.


That meeting brought something of a turning point, though: Musk said that while the three-times figure was nonnegotiable, the base appraisal value was indeed flexible. This convinced some residents to sell in the following months as they found ways with JLL to increase the on-paper worth of their properties.

However, as many as 15 homeowners had their independent appraisals rejected. And as the weeks wore on with slow momentum on sales, many villagers

h: Musk said that while the three-times figure was nonnegotiable, the base appraisal value was indeed flexible. This convinced some residents to sell in the following months as they found ways with JLL to increase the on-paper worth of their properties.

However, as many as 15 homeowners had their independent appraisals rejected. And as the weeks wore on with slow momentum on sales, many villagers ailable to speak to until mid-February.