The Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) is a second house built in the backyard of a first house to provide additional income for a “single family” homeowner.
Los Angeles has now legally liberalized the lawto allow these types of dwellings to go up all over the city. The moral reasoning: this will increase the supply of housing in a city where rents, not to mention costs, are skyrocketingly expensive.
The so-called maximum square footage of the ADU is 1,200 SF but the one on this page is 1,600 SF.
One can imagine less beautiful and less artful types of ADU’s going up all over this city.
The $99,000 vinyl and stucco ones that will go up in Van Nuys will be built without architects. Hector and his crew will dig, hammer and nail and the Home Depot and Ikea will supply. Four recent college grads from film, acting, and comedy schools will move in and split the $4600 a month rent with parental assistance.
So the tenants will not be someone’s granny.
What will likely occur is a kind of typical Los Angeles situation. Property owners will build in the backyard and in a slapdash way shove driveways in front, destroying trees and lawns to create more parking. Security gates and cinderblock fences and concrete will serve as front yard landscaping.
More renters will mean more cars, so almost every street that once was clean of vehicles, will have bumper-to-bumper cars belonging to renters who live in the backyard house. Curbs will be full of McDonalds wrappers and discarded beer bottles.
That’s the Van Nuys way.
I don’t, ironically, object to ADU’s. If every ADU looked like the one on this page, it would be wonderful for architecture in Los Angeles to see a proliferation of fine design.
But the bottom of the barrel ugliness that is the norm, not to mention the cost of construction, ensures that the homely, crowded, poorly thought out ADU will prevail.
And the ADU on this page will never become the home of a working family. It is, most likely, a guest house for an affluent owner, or perhaps an $8,000 a month rental. So increasing the ADU supply will hardly affect the supply of normal, affordable rentals in Los Angeles.
“Next week, the South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission will consider an appeal of Buckingham Crossing, a proposed small lot subdivision near the Expo Line.
The proposed development from Charles Yzaguirre, which would replace a single-family home at 4011 Exposition Boulevard, calls for the construction of four small lot homes. The houses would each stand four stories in height, featuring three bedrooms, two-car garages, and roof decks.
Los Angeles-based architecture firm Formation Association is designing the project, which is portrayed as a collection of boxy low-rise structures in conceptual renderings.
The appeal, which was filed by residents of a neighboring home, argues that the project does not comply with the City of Los Angeles’ Small Lot Subdivision guidelines, and have bolstered their case with a petition signed by nearby residents, as well as a letter of opposition signed by City Council President Herb Wesson, who represents the neighborhood.
However, a staff response notes that the project was filed with the Planning Department before the new regulations were adopted, and are thus not subject to them. The staff report also rejects claims that the four proposed homes would increase traffic congestion and create a “‘wind tunnel’ spreading toxins” through the passing of Expo Line trains.”-Urbanize LA
As this blog has shown, many times, we live in a city of homelessness for those who cannot afford a home, or are too sick to attend to the normalcy of paying rent.
At the same time, the dire need for housing continues to be opposed by vast segments of the city who will take any proposed multi-family dwelling, even one as small as four stories, and attach some fear-mongering lawsuit against it.
The condition of Los Angeles in 2018 is comedic in its insanity, with ostriches of all sorts screaming about “overdevelopment” inside the second largest city in the United States, a spread out sprawl of parking lots and shopping centers where residents complain about lack of space, lack of parking, and too much traffic. Yet lack the political and moral will to remedy an ongoing tragedy.
These same NIMBYs oppose even the tiniest increase in density, along light rail lines and public transport, refusing to allow the city to progress economically and logistically, and also, quite cruelly and callously, perpetuating the expensiveness of all housing, by limiting its supply.
One-hundred years ago, Los Angeles was a much more modern and progressive city than today, a place where tall apartments were welcomed, possibly because they looked aristocratic, well-proportioned, and they brought economic growth and well regarded architecture to a growing city starved for development. They wore their best European tailoring, even if they were overdressed, because they had pride and self-worth and a city which respected those qualities.
By contrast, many of today’s multi-family dwellings are self-effacing, timid, obsequious, broken up into many little pieces to ward off attackers, erased of any individuality or identity. So even when the architects surrender to the bullies, that cannot mollify the attackers. The NIMBY mob wants the city to stay exactly as it is, even if that means that 100,000 people sleep on the sidewalk every single night.
Imagine the screaming in Encino or Palms or West Adams if anybody proposed the old styles seen below next to any existing single family homes. (source: LAPL)
Chateau Elysee
Ravenswood and El Royale, Hancock Park, Los Angeles.
I recently spent a few days in Cleveland, OH on an exploratory trip, visiting a city I’ve never been to before to see how I liked it.
Cleveland has had a long, slow, drain of population, and it is now about 270,000. Less than the size of Glendale (200,000) and Pasadena (142,000) put together.
I stayed in Cleveland Heights, outside of the city, in an AIRBNB run by two guys who bought a half acre estate for $146,000 four years ago, and make some extra income hospitably renting out rooms in their home.
For me, I relished the time away from Los Angeles in an environment of lush greenery, green lawns, deer, and clean streets.
Overlook Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
$599,000 asking price for home in Cleveland Heights, OH.
Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
Sign in window on Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH.
Homes in the Mayfield Heights section of Cleveland Heights.
Mayfield Heights section of Cleveland Heights.
Cleveland Heights is also a historic city, full of blocks of homes from the 1880s to the 1940s, a rich, well-maintained, lovingly cared for collection of architecture, punctuated by churches, parkways, and museums. Case Western University and Cleveland Clinic are just outside its borders, to the south is Shaker Heights, an elegant town developed in the 1920s, laid out with nature preserves, winding streets, gracious mansions and a languid Midwestern grace.
There are many homes for sale in Cleveland Heights and you can buy one for as little as $79,000 with most in the $140,000-$250,000 range. If you are starved for a Hancock Park type mansion there is one I liked for $599,000.
Many miles of interior Cleveland are empty. They were abandoned, bulldozed and cleared away. And what’s left are vast green spaces where the grasses and woods are reclaiming the land.
Even in the poorest neighborhoods, I did not see garbage dumps, shopping carts full of trash, littered streets, graffiti, or dumped furniture.
Lakewood Park, Lakewood, OH.
Lakewood, OH.
Wedding in Lakewood.
In Lakewood, OH, just west of Cleveland, a little town on Lake Erie has rows of neat bungalows, leading up to a gorgeous park on the lake where a wedding (between a man and a woman) was taking place in the sunshine overlooking a bluff. I walked around the park, full of bicyclists, walkers, joggers, tennis players and people sitting on benches socializing. Nobody was intoxicated, high, homeless, destructive, or neglectful. And if someone were, I have no doubt they would be arrested.
Lakewood is also “gay friendly” with rainbow flags, anti-Trump posters, tolerance banners, welcoming immigrant signs. I saw liberalism all over Cleveland, but it did not need to co-exist with uncared for mentally ill camping out on bus benches, mountains of debris, urinating and defecating and injecting.
You can hate Trump and still have a clean park system.
Anti-Trump demonstration in Market Square, Cleveland, OH.
Tremont section of Cleveland.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
You can champion diversity and still enjoy people who say hello to you on the street and sweep their sidewalks every single morning.
In Cleveland, they still prohibit using the sidewalks and parks to sell old underwear and moldy shoes and sweat stained t-shirts and rancid socks on blankets. Nobody calls it discrimination to adhere to a standard of sanitation and order completely absent in cities such as Calcutta and the MacArthur Park district of Los Angeles.
I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I ate cannoli in Little Italy. I visited the historic West Side Market with its food sellers and ethnic hawker stands. I went to Ohio City, a restored section of Cleveland with brick houses, and Victorian mansions, loft buildings and yoga studios.
I didn’t step over feces, walk down alleys that smelled like toilets, stare at intoxicated men on the ground. And nobody asked me for money.
How cruel to enjoy such freedoms away from the rot of Mayor Garbageciti’s Los Angeles.
West Side Market, Cleveland, OH.
“The Black Pig” pub and restaurant in Ohio City.
Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
6/22/69- Fire on the Cuyahoga River.
Cuyahoga River
Ohio City.
Spotless streets in Ohio City, Cleveland, OH.
Bridges and Parks and Skyline: Cleveland, OH.
I walked down to the Cuyahoga River, a body of water that infamously caught fire on June 22, 1969, spurring a cleanup.
In September 2018, I watched a race of college rowers in the now sparkling waters.
Crossing the river are many bridges, a spectacular symphony of rail and road, steel and concrete, which once provided Cleveland with efficient delivery systems of raw materials and finished goods.
Today the industries are gone. One might expect decay, litter, neglect, and illegal dumping to move in.
Yet the parks were pristine. They were clean. There were no visible homeless. There were no mattresses, sofas, or piles of garbage as one sees in every single neighborhood of Los Angeles. I did not see tent cities of despondency in Cleveland.
I was impressed with the civic pride of the city. I was taken with the normalcy of expecting that parks, streets and neighborhoods would be well kept and looked after.
Urbanize LA is a website showing new development around our city. I get updates from them and see what architecture is going up and what it looks like.
In residential multi-family buildings, modernism is triumphant.
Today, every building is uniquely ahistorical, without any reference to past classical styles, which, in a way is good. Los Angeles, especially in the San Fernando Valley, suffered from 20 years of Neo-Mediterranean buildings, a style that still afflicts much of residential, single-family Beverly Hills.
But the modern styles going up are nervous, jittery, full of multi-colored sections of various colors, so that many buildings do not exude calm or confidence but insecurity. Sections of four, five, or eight story apartments are broken up into light/dark/red/green/white/blue/wood/yellow/purple….. sometimes on one building.
I’m not sure how to psychoanalyse the stylistic quirks of mediocre apartment architecture. I think some of it is due to trying to sell buildings to neighborhoods which are hostile to them. By dividing up larger buildings into many colors, the effect is to reduce the apparent total size.
An apartment building with 40 windows on a wall 160 ft. long in one color appears large. 40 windows in 8/20-foot long sections with 8 different colors seems smaller.
Compare these two examples below. The new Expo Line is 7-stories, while the older one is 5-stories.
Sycamore apartments, northwest corner of North Sycamore Avenue and Beverly Boulevard
An Ugly Example at a Prominent Corner
One of the ugliest of the newer buildings is the retail/apartment built on the SE corner of Wilshire/Labrea which is not only multi-colored but cheap looking as well. LA Curbed called it “possibly LA’s most hated” in 2013. “The building’s facade is a jumble of balconies and discordant frontal planes with the northern and eastern faces designed differently, united by a central tower that seems to lack any elegance or even much design,” wrote Julie Grist of Larchmont Buzz. “It’s a shame the design team couldn’t at least try to borrow some of the sleek lines from other streamline or deco architecture still standing along Wilshire Boulevard.”
Tragically, it occupies an important corner of Los Angeles but has an H&M quality where a fine building belongs.
LA architects and builders built one color apartments from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s with no degradation to the aesthetic fabric of the city. How was that possible?
Southwest corner of Pico Boulevard and Union Avenue
Sycamore apartments, northwest corner of North Sycamore Avenue and Beverly Boulevard
On these torrid July days, when the temperature is 105 degrees, and a walk down Van Nuys Boulevard near the Orange Line Metro stop brings you face-to-face with people sprawled out on the sidewalk, living in tents, sleeping on dirt, it is instructive and bracing to think of other civilizations, such as Japan, where human beings live under more benevolent and intelligent rulers.
Instead of parking lots furnished with the shopping baskets of homeless people, instead of garbage piles on the sidewalk, instead of empty streets filled with only the cries of mentally ill men and women, Japan offers low-rise, modern houses where children are cared for, and people work together to make contributions to society.
Every day we live amongst a remarkable level of filth, violence and rampant barbarity in Los Angeles; thinking it normal that a Trader Joes manager is shot dead walking to her store entrance to see what the commotion is; or that a camping father with his family is murdered, randomly, in Malibu State Park; or accepting as “normal” the idea that 100,000 people sleep on sidewalks, and RVs and cars, and live in tents in the city of the Kardashians, the Cruises, the Broads, the Carusos and the Spielbergs.
How can so much money, so much power, so much fame do so little for their city? How obscene it all is.
Near Cedros and Calvert, Van Nuys, CA.
Empty Buildings on Delano near VNB.
Slum Housing on Cedros. Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
There are places where guns don’t kill people every single day, and children live in clean, well-cared for apartments and houses next to spotless streets, where the trains run on time and people stand in line to wait for the next one to arrive.
We can’t completely transform what Los Angeles is, but we ought to engage our imagination to other places where they do a far better job of taking care of people and emulate those finer qualities of faraway lands.
Architects: HIBINOSEKKEI
Location: Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan Project Year: 2017
For almost twenty years I’ve made a home in Van Nuys, CA.
And since 2006, I have published this blog: walking, photographing and writing about a peculiarly blessed, and unjustly afflicted section of Los Angeles.
Here are some 11 ideas that I am proposing to better Van Nuys, especially Van Nuys Boulevard:
Kjellandersjoberg_salabacke_view-courtyard.
Create Walkable, Garden Court Housing
We need, desperately, little, affordable, small housing units that share common garden areas. These were built all over Los Angeles up until the 1960s when dingbats took over with their car-centric designs.
Such garden courts would be most effective within walking distance of major bus and light rail streets.
LAPD Koban (Japanese Style) booth at The Grove.
Relocate the Van Nuys LAPD to Van Nuys Boulevard
The Van Nuys LAPD is buried deep behind the Erwin Street Mall, way back from Van Nuys Boulevard. What this accomplishes is removing the police from active interaction with pedestrians, shops and the action, good and bad, on Van Nuys Boulevard. Putting the police station back on the boulevard where it belongs would send a message to the community that law enforcement is on active duty: watching and patrolling, enforcing the law.
Reduce the Size of Wide Streets and Plant Trees
When drivers see five lanes of road in front of them, but every single lane is packed with cars, or conversely, when there are wide-open lanes with few vehicles, both scenarios create frustration. The speeding, the road rage, the frustration of having so much space for cars and hardly any for bicycles or light rail, has caused the decay and decline of Van Nuys Boulevard, as well as Victory.
The heating up of our climate, the constant hot weather, is creating a meltdown of mood, with more anger, more violence and more irrationality. Trees would help cool down the street and provide shade. Narrower streets, lined with cafes, pedestrians, activity, would build a sense of community decency.
58277232 – singapore – march 18, 2016 : maxwell food center is the maxwell road hawker food centre is well known for its affordable, tasty and huge variety of local hawker food.
Hawker Centers Like Singapore
Singapore has “Hawker Centers” which are groups of different food merchants housed under one roof. A Singaporean can get off a train and within a few feet find delicious, cheap food in clean areas which are protected from the elements but still open air.
By contrast, Los Angeles has nothing like this other than Grand Central Market which is not next to a train stop. Van Nuys Boulevard would greatly benefit from one, large, enclosed, regulated building full of food sellers. This would bring the pushcart under control and provide a clean, reliable, fun, sociable place to eat and meet.
Billboard: Sepulveda at Victory
Give Commercial Buildings Without Billboards Tax Breaks
Billboards are so ubiquitous that we have wearily come to adjust our eyes to them. Yet their ugliness, their cheap, desecrating, looming presence brings down property values even while providing landlords with some income.
On every corner where there is a mini-mall with a billboard, the property owner who removes the signs should get a tax benefit because they are helping the community improve aesthetically.
A Monument When Entering Van Nuys
Why is there no marker, like an arch, an obelisk, or a gate when one enters Van Nuys Bl. at Oxnard Street?
Imagine a Washington Monument type obelisk in the center of Van Nuys Boulevard to make evident, proudly, commemoratively and architecturally, the fact that Van Nuys is a historic and proud area of Los Angeles deserving its own marker of identity and purpose.
Seen for miles, an obelisk perhaps 150 feet tall, should stand in the center of the boulevard, a booster of morale and an instigator of commerce and civic pride.
Santa Barbara, CA.
Pick a Unifying Style and Stick With it.
Paris, Santa Barbara, Charleston, Savannah: certain cities have an archetype of architecture which provides the base for how a city is constructed and designed.
In recent years, we have seen the onslaught of non-conforming, strange, computer-generated frivolities in architecture such as those which have marred and destroyed the beauty of London, England.
Yes, it is great to have one Disney Hall, but a street of melting blobs, narcissistic designs, starving-for-attention buildings, does not engender a district wide identity.
Strange Shaped Building: Vienna, Austria.
A classical Van Nuys would actually be revolutionary because it goes against so much architectural dogma these days and restores the primacy of community standards and group identity.
Tear Up the Parking Lots and Plant Orange Groves
One of the tragedies of Van Nuys since 1945, indeed of all of Southern California, has been the loss of agriculture.
Once we all lived near local fruit groves, and their soothing, healthful, beneficial trees provided not only big business for the state, but gave a mythical, blessed countenance to Los Angeles which was exported around the world.
There are hundreds of acres of unused asphalt sitting behind empty stores along Van Nuys Boulevard which could be torn up and planted with citrus trees.
Perhaps an innovative architect could design housing that is combined with citrus groves?
Kester and Aetna
Kesterville
This blog has actively supported the preservation of an area of 33 acres, containing light industries, near the corner of Kester and Oxnard.
“Option A” would have destroyed 58 buildings, 186 businesses and thousands of jobs in a walkable, affordable, diverse district and replaced it with an open air, light rail service yard.
It would have been disastrous for the revitalization of Van Nuys. If it had succeeded it might have been the final nail in Van Nuys’ coffin.
Instead, happily, the Metro Board, with the support of Councilwoman Nury Martinez and others, objected to the Option A proposal. “Option B” was chosen, near the already existing Metrolink train tracks, thus preserving the Kesterville area.
So now is the time to put Kesterville on the map and make it a harmonious, vibrant destination of little apartments, stores, restaurants, cafes, all along the public transit corridor next to the Orange Line.
Pashupatina: Ivan and Daniel Gomez in their shop which they completely renovated with their own hands and money in 2015.
Create Gateway Signs to Welcome People to an Area. Kesterville could use one of these!
9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle Blanc
Paris-Housing-by-Vous-Etes-Ici
9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle Blanc
9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle Blanc
Remove Onerous and Expensive Regulations on Housing
Builders are required, by law, to do so many expensive things that they are dissuaded from building.
One example is parking. The average building must spend 30-40% of its construction costs to provide space for vehicles.
Thus we have the paradox: not enough housing. And the housing we have becomes more expensive because there is not enough of it to bring prices down. And each rentable unit only becomes affordable if four working adults, with four vehicles, split the rent!
So now we have less housing, more cars, more cars parked on side-streets because we have, by law, made the construction of apartments so expensive.
Remove parking minimums and stop catering to the car as if it were the ONLY important thing in city planning.If a building were built with 200 apartments and only 100 parking spaces, would it really harm Van Nuys?
Is NYC harmed by scarcity of parking?
Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
Regulate Homelessness
California is often the destination for anyone living unhappily in any part of the world. Thus our state, because of its warm weather, attracts people coming here to escape.
Van Nuys, long considered the unofficial dumping ground of Los Angeles, is now under onslaught from homeless men and women sleeping everywhere, on bus benches, under boxes and tents, behind buildings and in RVs parked along the street.
We need to regulate where people can sleep by providing safe, clean, sanitary areas, to park RVs and where people can wash themselves, and get help so they do not have to sleep outside.
To talk about this is not to attack people who are in need. Rather, it is to assign us the proper legal and moral task of ending homelessness by not permitting it to exist in the first place.
Here in Van Nuys 
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