Photos: O’Herlihy apartments: Allen J. Schaben / LAT
Singapore, Vancouver (bottom)
The LA Times article, “First Sprouts of a Vertical Landscape” discusses how architects are building three and four story multi-family housing here.
Architects Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, Lorcan O’Herlihy and others are creating innovative, low rise apartments to relieve our housing shortage.
Mayor Villaraigosa has appointed a City Planner, S. Gail Goldberg. She comes from San Diego, where she is credited with that city’s tremendously successful integration of new housing with public transit and a downtown revival.
The article says that these developments are a way to add density without creating monster high rises. They fit into neighborhoods and are stylish, light filled and artsy.
But how many of these are going to be built? Can Los Angeles only add a few hundred high priced units of housing a year when our population is still growing by thousands a year?
Other cities around the world like Berlin, Chicago, Miami, Hong Kong and Vancouver are building a lot more than Los Angeles. An overhead view of Los Angeles would still show a city filled with one story mini-malls, acres of parking lots and single family homes. Yet the grand idea of filling in the blanks with mulit-family condos, is too little and too expensive.
One of the projects that the article trumps is a $7,000 a month rental in Beverly Hills! O’Herlihy’s West Hollywood building contains only 10 units!
There is a crying need for bigger plans than these little frivolous vanity projects.
LA should build 30, 40, 50 and even 75 story apartments near public transportation.
There are miles of freeways, that slice through dense urban areas, that could be covered with hi-rises and parks. There is open industrial space in the NE San Fernando Valley that might accomodate tall buildings.
We have the land, we have the capital, but do we have the will?
Here in Van Nuys 
Your point is well taken, yet as long as the nimbys are controlling the
kingdom, you really do not stand a chance at higher than 3-4 floor apt or condo developments, even near transit centers unless you are part of a community redevelopment agency, a la NOHO.
You should have attended the recent S/O homeowner’s assoc. meeting and you would realize what I am saying. The outcries over the potential development on Ventura/Moorpark/Hazeltine and Colbath, better known as the Barone’s site, are unbelievable.
Likewise, there is a big brouhaha over the Best Buy construction project on Van Nuys Blvd at Milbank adjacent to Gelson’s, in that they might be 2 feet or so over the height limit and thus the project should be scrapped totally. The locals think the project will generate toooooo much traffic, in fact far more than the previous 2 screens of theaters that it is replacing – huh! Doesn’t Best Buy wish! What they seldom think about is if they needed to purchase something at Best Buy, they now have to drive to Warner Center or Burbank or Northridge, meaning bringing their traffic to someone else’s neighborhood. Ah, yes….and with the price of gasoline…!
Any way, I loved the look of some of those projects in the article, yet
you also need to realize that there is so much infill land available, yet no more than 2-4 lots might be all, and thus you have to build what the land can accommodate by law, unless you start changing the law.
Personally, that is where we really need to concentrate our efforts, as
that allows everyone to know the rules at the same time, and density must be the chief component. We cannot keep planting our collective heads in the sand and pretending that these millions of new residents are going to be living somewhere else. Likewise, transit planning for that same quantity of new arrivals should have occurred 30 years ago, and may still be many years distant. It should be a now priority.
Con Howe’s arrival from NYC initially gave me hope that we might have
been able to accomplish the changes in planning necessary to get to the next level. Well, now that he is gone and Gail Goldberg is here, we get to look back on his tenure and realize just how little he did in his 16 or so years on the job. Truly a disappointment.
Only hoping Gail can improved on things.
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