SAN JOSE — For months, the San Jose couple who gained notoriety by snatching ownership of a private street in an exclusive San Francisco neighborhood for $90,100 in an online auction have been portrayed as money-grubbing opportunists preying on the hapless millionaires who live inside the gated confines of Presidio Terrace.

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San Jose real estate investors buy mansion-lined San Francisco street But Michael Cheng and Tina Lam insist they are the victims of class warfare, a striving middle class couple vilified by the rarefied because they are outsiders — from the sprawling flatlands of San Jose, no less.

“They just didn’t see us as worthy of being part of that neighborhood,” said Cheng, 40, a Taiwanese immigrant who grew up selling toys and trinkets at the San Jose Flea Market with his father. It’s as though they were saying, “Oh, you guys are from the South Bay. You’re not from the most prestigious neighborhood in San Francisco, so we don’t want you here.”

Now, they’re embroiled in an epic street fight between the 408 and the 415.

Cheng — a real estate broker — and Lam — a software engineer — say they plan to fight this week’s decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to side with the mansion owners and rescind the bizarre delinquent tax sale that allowed the couple to take ownership of a section of Presidio Terrace. The couple say they bought the elliptical-shaped street lined with multimillion-dollar Georgian, English Tudor and Craftsmen homes “fair and square.” The homeowners association failed to pay three decades of delinquent taxes — a total of $994 worth — on the property and the tax assessor’s office added it to the list of 600 city parcels up for an online auction in 2015.

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The battle royale has provided a fresh storyline to San Jose’s long-standing inferiority complex to its neighbor to the north. When this standoff started, it appeared the pair of San Jose upstarts had outsmarted San Francisco’s monied elites.

“They each have their narratives,” San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who failed to broker a deal between the two sides, said Thursday. “But neither side has particularly clean hands.”

It was the second time that the Presidio Terrace homeowners association failed to pay taxes on the parcel over the decades. This time, its members explained that they had changed accountants but the tax bill was being sent to an old address. As for the couple, although they didn’t want to sell, they said they would for $1 million, then refused a $200,000 offer.

After the board meeting this week, Supervisor Mark Farrell called the couple “out-of-town speculators … attempting to extort San Francisco residents that I represent into a quick $1 million payday.”

Not so, say Cheng and Lam, who insist they are still reeling from the maelstrom of international attention — and feel they have been unfairly demonized.

They’re hard-working simple people, they say. He earned an MBA from USC. She immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong as a college student. They have a 5-year-old daughter now, and live in a cookie-cutter two-story house with an attached garage in a subdivision in the Berryessa neighborhood, not far from the San Jose flea market where Cheng used to work four days a week with his dad.

“We are pretty frugal,” he said. “We’re regular shoppers at Walmart and Target and Costco.”

They never wanted to sell the street, Cheng said, and only suggested a $1 million price tag after the homeowners association refused their offer to form an agreement.

“They were pressuring me to just give them a number,” Cheng said. “We repeatedly told them our goal was to own it and leave them alone and to live as they have at no cost.”

When he was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle about possibly charging parking fees, Cheng said he was only musing and exploring options. He insists all they really want is a little slice of San Francisco, the place where they met at a party at the St. Francis Hotel and fell in love — even if that means just putting a photograph of the street on his office wall and strolling through once in awhile.

“It’s just pride of ownership for me, and pretty much having the most exclusive and now most famous street in the world,” Cheng said. “I want to have it. They want the street. Why shouldn’t I want the street?”

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He insists he and his wife didn’t know exactly what they were buying when they decided to bid in the tax sale. With little information except a parcel number in hand, they drove to the stone pillars of Presidio Terrace, which had been home to the likes of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. These are homes with butler’s pantries, billiard rooms and Beaux Arts balustrades. What one homeowner called a “fixer-upper” recently sold for $6.5 million. Homeowners association fees run about $8,000 a year to pay for security and landscaping that line the curving street dotted with four grassy islands and palm trees.

A security guard was stationed out front, so the couple couldn’t get in. Still, “we thought if the parcel is around here, we’re going to take a shot at it. Even if it’s something small and weird like a park, it’s still worth having in that neighborhood.”

Cheng didn’t want to bid above $30,000 for something that was so uncertain, but his wife “got more emotional and went higher than I wanted to go. We just dropped $90,000 into something we had no clue about, just betting it’s a good neighborhood.”

It took them months of searching records — including decoding handwritten notations on microfilm dating back to 1905 — to truly understand what they owned: a common area including the full street, sidewalk, little kidney-shaped islands and walkways.

Homeowners association president Carey Wintroub told the board of supervisors that the group accepted responsibility for failing to pay the back taxes, but argued that the tax collector should have notified the homeowners before the auction.

She insisted that residents have nothing against Cheng and Lam. “We do not have a personal issue with them,” she said. “Our interests are simply not aligned and we do not believe ownership by a third party would be good for us or for the city.”

As Lam sees it, the homeowners have been unwilling to accept them and have conveyed so in a simple message: “Anyone who is not already privileged, don’t even try to come here. It’s not just San Jose. No one outside San Francisco is good enough for them.”

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Cheng and Lam say if they can legally keep the property — despite the supervisors’ vote — they are open to exploring “the best use for the street.”

It could be a street fair, an expanded Halloween party or nothing at all, Cheng said. But “having a street like Presidio Terrace opens up whole worlds of possibilities that really render the idea of just making money to be a bit prosaic.”