Here in Van Nuys, Martin Wehmann of Modern Outdoor, manufactures a beautiful, contemporary line of outdoor furniture made of such materials as a Brazilian hardwood called Ipe and electro-polished stainless steel. He is also an environmentalist who uses some composite products in assembling his pieces.
Martin Wehmann and Tom Sandonato have put their design expertise to good use, as we saw this weekend, when we were introduced to the new “KitHaus“, a zinc clad, architecturally dazzling modular house. Soaring stainless steel ceilings, bamboo floors and light filled interiors are simple, elegant and calming. The precise workmanship is as finely engineered and tested as a BMW Z8. It was a very windy day, but with the dual glazed windows shut, it was completely silent and air tight. A small white bathroom with opaque windows is in the back of the unit. KitHaus is perfect for a work space, an extra guest room or a (deserving) teen-ager’s hang out.
The Kithaus differs from some modular homes in that it is pre-cut and pre-drilled at the Van Nuys factory, but it is assembled on the buyer’s site for greater flexibility and ease of transport.
While many people might look at these and see a future home office and a place for the in-laws to stay, they are also a partial solution to the social problem of homeless people. Bank of America and City of Los Angeles should join hands to buy some of these Kit Haus homes and create small villages throughout the city where six or eight units can be arranged around a common garden. The vast parking lots behind some banks on Van Nuys Boulevard, now filled with people living out of shopping carts, could make a lovely future spot for a community of Kit Haus dwellers.
Here in Van Nuys 
This is quite interesting to me. I have some land way out in the hinterlands (extreme northeast corner of L.A. county, not far from Castaic Lake), and this looks like a good solution for me to build there. This might be great for vacation/weekend homes for many people, as well as another tool to deal with the homeless quandary.
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Slightlyslack wrote:
“Minimum parking requirements … have resulted in the waste of immense quantities of land that could instead be used for productive purposes.”
This is one the dilemmas of urban theory. Theorists know parking is a necessary and inevitable part of urban planning, but there is also a “value theory of land,” and parking has negative value.
There’s a value to real property, measured either by acreage or square footage, where the price of land is higher the further along you move on the chain of consumption. From lowest to highest: FAM (forestry, agriculture and mining), industry (all manufacturing, processing and warehousing), retail goods, retail services and residences.
This ties in to value-added economics, as loggers, farmers and miners need low land prices to keep their commodity prices low. The price of land rises with each addition. Goods retailers need lower prices than service providers, since there is price competition. Service providers, on the other hand, are willing to pay a premium for a good location. This is why you’ll see many doctors and lawyers in Beverly Hills and many office workers in downtown L.A. and Century City.
Anyway, back to parking. Unless you are Frank McCourt (the Dodgers owner, not the author), you cannot derive value from parking. Since you devote so much land just as a storage space for idle cars, you lose the opportunity to turn that empty space into something that could yield more value.
Of course, people park their cars to go about their business. So, you calculate the entire property and spread the productive activity of the business across all of the land, thereby making the entire area low productivity.
Southern California and the Bay Area are seeing something very peculiar: the suburban land use comes head-to-head with high land prices. The suburban lifestyle is predicated on lots of available cheap land. That has now largely disappeared. This has resulted in raising the price of land. But, zoning and community pressure want to keep everything looking suburban. The market pressure to densify is there.
The problem is that we have several generations of suburbanites who are only familiar with big houses and big-box stores. They associate urban land use with ghettos. When a major development comes in, these people will put on histrionics at city council meetings saying that Santa Clarita will look like South Central once densification occurs.
One of the worst recent examples was in Mission Viejo. The city council wanted to build an apartment complex with reduced rents for the city’s teachers, police officers and firefighters. Much of the community shouted down the proposal, because only low-class people rent housing was the consensual theme that emerged from the meeting.
One area that has adapted well to this dilemma is Washington D.C. The Metro turned out to be the area’s savior. The DC area, which includes Maryland and northern Virginia, is characterized by its sprawl, but there was a high-speed urban train service in place, and the communitites there have seen that people are willing to take the train and are beginning to design their cities around the stations. Even Metro has encouraged building villages around the stations.
This has not happened in the Bay Area, which has a similar system in BART. Many want the trains, but they only want parking lots for commuters while the low-density suburban landscape remains.
L.A. has begun to rediscover itself. Rail transit has started to come online starting in 1990, and forget the question that the Times throws out evey time a project comes up: “Will they ride it?” Yes, L.A. is riding rail. The Blue Line started out modestly but is now the busiest light rail line in the country! The Red Line has about 125,000 riders, which might seem very low considering the astronomical cost, is the third most productive line (measured by passengers per mile per hour) in the country. Even the Green Line, which is probably the worst designed rail line in the country, carries 35,000 despite its setbacks. The Gold Line has disappointed, but ridership is beginning to climb.
Additional projects are going to become even more important to keep Southern California moving. It’s not going to be cheap, but sorry to say, nothing is going to be cheap anymore.
We are witnessing an interesting transition here. And since we have to act first, the metropolitan areas around the country are going to be looking to what we did right and wrong.
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Suggested read: Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking. Minimum parking requirements, which have no rhyme or reason to them (they vary widely across even adjacent cities), have resulted in the waste of immense quantities of land that could instead be used for productive purposes. Instead, we have giant parking lots that only approach being full two days a year.
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Slightly Slack-
Well Wehba or not one agrees with you, the idea of making use of the enormous parking lots that mostly go unused (at least in Van Nuys) and turning them into something better sounds like development with a soul. I think the product I saw today is so exceptional it can benefit thousands, not just dozens of people.
Andrew
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The parking lot as “land bank” idea is one whose time has truly come. It makes absolutely no sense to me that so much usable land within 15 miles of downtown and/or Century City is being used for at-grade parking. I suspect that the Frederick Wehbas of the commercial real estate world would agree with me.
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Douglas-
You can contact them at Kithaus.com where they have more information.
Andrew
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Wow! That is nice! Is it possible to see the house in person or was this a special event?
Douglas
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