Tag: Christopher Hawthorne

A Motley Crew: The New ADUs

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“The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) implemented the Standard Plan Program to provide LADBS customers a simplified permitting process for the design and construction of ADUs that are built repeatedly. The use of standard plans reduces the time required for plan check resulting in faster permit issuance.

Under the Standard Plan Program, plans are designed by private licensed architects, and engineers to accommodate various site conditions. Plans are then reviewed and pre-approved by LADBS for compliance with the Building, Residential, and Green Codes. When the applicant selects an approved Standard Plan, LADBS staff will review site-specific factors for your property, including compliance with the Zoning Code and foundation requirements.” -LADBS

Mayor Eric Garcetti and Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer.

Under the authority of Mayor Garcetti’s Chief Design Officer Chris Hawthorne, a whimsical man, a new menu of backyard house designs, produced by various local architects, has appeared like magic. Mr. Hawthorne was previously involved in architecture writing at the Los Angeles Times and in the re-design of our civic lampposts. He is a frequent guest speaker at international architectural events from New Zealand to Miami and a recurring guest on KCRW Frances Anderton’s radio show on design.

Rather than concentrate on coming up with emergency housing for 100,000 unhoused Angelenos who live in trash piles and tents inside parks and along freeways, mayoral efforts were waged to come up with ironic design concepts in lighting.

The International House of ADU Menu seems to be an attempt to inject some fashionable urgency, flavored with irony, into the critical need of providing housing for a city where it is expensive and rare.

Pre-designed and pre-approved, these ADU (Accessory Dwelling Units) are intended to hurry up the construction of the second house in back of the first house transformation of Los Angeles.

Let’s look at what the architects have come up with.

Welcome Projects “The Breadbox”

Is a play on the traditional mission house with an oversized arched roof. Perhaps the closest to classic of all the designs, it has a cute appeal for those who are tired of the box.

Abou

A 1967 Laurel Canyon type intoxicated with rough wood siding and a slanted roof, not especially pretty to look at, but outfitted in white interior with blond wood floors. Picture Janis Joplin in a hot tub drinking whisky out of the bottle with Abby Hoffman and Jimi Hendrix.

Taalman Architects’ IT House

Perhaps the most Bauhausian of the group, this glass and steel box will allow its inhabitants full exposure to sunshine during the day and illuminate inside activities for outside spectators and neighbors at night.

Amunátegui Valdés ADU

Los Angeles zoning allows ADU’s to be built four feet from the back of property line.

So imagine how delightful it will be for neighbors who encounter a 15’ foot high building with an outdoor roof deck allowing partygoers and drunk revelers to float above all adjoining backyards like devilish angels? Here the architect has abandoned all pretense to privacy by designing a house where dozens of people can look down other people’s backyards from the top of a badly conceived back house. Imagine a house of YouTube influencers living here. What fun!

LA Más 

“is a non-profit based in Northeast Los Angeles that designs and builds initiatives that promote neighborhood resilience and elevate the agency of working-class communities of color.”

Here virtue signaling meets up with 1980s post-modernism in gaily painted houses whose designs look like fast food outlets along the boulevard. The golden arches, the multi-colored column (kids eat free?), the decorative woodwork, these are FUN places with bright colors. And even if they are not especially attractive, and look like Walmart brand doll houses, they are immune from criticism by a vaccine of political correctness. 

When Los Angeles is done bulldozing every backyard to “produce more housing” will the net effect be to put more cash in the pockets of those who already own houses?

Why not up-zone the miles and miles of one-story commercial buildings and huge parking lots that blight our city?

Why not leave in place the gardens, which are the only park system we have, and really ramp up the production of moderately priced residential units near public transportation? 

Something to think about. 

Below, in B&W, are current aerial photos of “downtown” Van Nuys.

One Story Town, Again

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Earlier in the year, the Salvation Army store at 6300 Sepulveda went out of business. The lot it occupied, building and parking lot, is some 45,000 square feet.

It sits along a row of Sepulveda that is seemingly zoned for only commercial use, even though it runs along a heavily traveled bus route and is but minutes from the Orange Line.

Salvation Army
Salvation Army, former location, now closed.

Here is an example of a critical issue that somehow escapes the gaze of Councilwoman Nury Martinez, Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne, and Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Why are there unused or underused vast parcels of land in a place which is starved for housing, where homeless people roam without help, and people cannot find affordable housing?

The Mayor recently wrote an open letter to President Trump asking for more help on a variety of issues, including veterans who are without shelter:

“If you and your Administration would like to help Los Angeles and other American cities confront our homelessness crisis, I urge you to take the following actions immediately and work with America’s communities to bring all Americans home:

  • Support the bipartisan Fighting Homelessness Through Services & Housing Act, S. 923 and the End Homelessness Act, H.R. 1856 which further expand the housing safety net with new grants and mental health programs to help cities combat homelessness over the next five years;
  • Uphold the Veteran Administration’s vision to build at least 1,200 units of housing for homeless veterans on the West LA VA Campus by providing capital funding for new housing development and addressing the severe infrastructure needs of this federal land;
  • In your FY2021 Budget Request, build up the nation’s housing safety net and support higher appropriations for the programs that have been proven to solve homelessness and create economic opportunities for hard-working Americans. Some of those critical programs are: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Homeless Assistance Grants, HUD’s block grant programs (HOME, CDBG, HOPWA, and ESG), HUD’s project-based and tenant-based rental assistance programs (including HUD-VASH), capital and operating funds for the nation’s dwindling supply of public housing, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program;
  • Rescind HUD’s proposed rules to evict mixed-status immigrant families from assisted housing and prevent transgender homeless people from accessing federally funded shelters; and
  • Protect critical fair housing laws by upholding the previous administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” and “Disparate Impact” rules.”

Yet nobody in this city or nation imagines that anything will come from President Trump to “end homelessness.” Asking President Trump to accept funding “mixed-status immigrant” families with Federal money? Is it possible Mayor Garcetti actually believes that undocumented immigrants will also find federal housing money from the Trump administration? And transgender persons?

The second largest city in the United States has an extreme shortage of housing and the the Mayor puts the needs of “undocumented” residents and transgenders at the top of his list of federal funding requests?

The tragedy of Los Angeles is that it has no leadership and no courage, and it only pays lip service to trendy, lefty, wacky pleas rather than mounting the Herculean task of building massive amounts of housing through free market methods. We don’t need to house every person from other countries who end up in Los Angeles by using federal money. Is that wrong to say? Does it make sense that American taxpayers are asked to fund the disastrous policies and ideologies of this city and state?

We need, as a city and a state, to get moving to build on land which is badly underused, which sits along public transit lines, which could be remade as many thousand units of housing. It’s called re-zoning, and we need to open up and liberate land so that more development can come in and we can build denser, taller, higher apartments to flood the market in California with cheaper housing.

Our Lost Vitality

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Sepulveda and Erwin, Van Nuys, CA.

Housing, it seems, is everything these days, the foremost topic on the minds of Angelenos. 

Those who can afford it fear those who cannot.

Fearsome, it seems, is our ragtag army of many thousands of un-housed vagrants who have established anti-communities out of shopping carts and tents, and made bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms out of bus benches, trains, bridge underpasses and alongside our freeways. Covered in dirt and tortured by circumstance, pulling three bikes with two legs, they remind our fortunate ones that life often goes bad even for the good.

3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.

SB50, the state proposed override of single family zoning, struck terror into the hearts of many in Los Angeles who feared that the single family home, housing twelve unrelated people, might soon be replaced by twelve unrelated people in four houses on one lot.   

“Leave it to Beaver” (circa 1959) the imaginary ideal of Los Angeles.

“Leave it to Beaver”, “Dennis the Menace”, “Hazel” and the rest of the 1950s and 60s back lots of Columbia and Warner Brothers are how many, now aging, but still ruling this city, think of Los Angeles, and how it should look. 

When Dennis the Menance came home he didn’t enter into a lobby with an elevator. When Dr. Bellows drove up Major Nelson’s street, it was clean, tidy and sunny. 

Home of Major Anthony Nelson, “I Dream of Jeannie” (1965-70)
The cast and crew of the remodeled “Brady Bunch” home in Studio City, CA. (HGTV)

HGTV is now remodeling the real life home in Studio City that was used as the location for Mike and Carol Brady and their bunch, recreating in reality a 1970s home, inside and out, following an architectural blueprint from the set pieces of an inane, 50-year-old television show that seemed saccharine the night it premiered in 1969.

It is heartwarmingly creepy to see the now white-haired kids throw a football in an astroturf backyard, retirees feigning juvenile excitement as a synthetic reality show impersonates their old sit-com and pumps new advertising blood out of Geritolized veins.

____________________________________________________________________________

Woodley Park, 2018.

But life is not a syndicated sitcom. What’s on TV is not what’s beyond our windshield.

We live in Los Angeles, and die a bit here, day by day. The city is getting worse in every imaginable way: housing, health, transportation, taxes and education.

Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016

On the roads, in real life, in 2019, cars are now parked and packed alongside every obscure street because it takes four working, driving adults to afford one $3,200 a month apartment.

Building more apartments doesn’t mean more cars, it simply means less apartments. And less apartments means more rent, so Los Angeles keeps eating itself up in contradictions of cowardice and myopia.

__________________________________

Japan

As I travel around Los Angeles and see all the enormous parking lots and one-story buildings alongside eight lane wide roads, I wonder why we are so unable to build enough houses to house everyone.

California is not nearly as crowded as Japan, yet that country ingeniously designs small dwellings that artistically and creatively provide homes for every type of person.

On the website Architizer, I found the work of a firm called Atelier TEKUTO.

Homes shown on Architizer by Atelier Tekuto are really tiny, but they are built solid, with each dwelling quite individual in style and form, an irony in a country where every black haired man coming from work is dressed in a white shirt and dark suit.

But Japan somehow pulls together the artistic and the structural to provide enviable and well-designed homes in well-protected, spotless communities. Violence is rare, except yesterday, but nobody goes out at night fearing random mass shootings, it is safe to say.

We can’t, or should not, want to remake the depravity of our dirty, violent LA into clean, peaceful, obedient Japan, with its fast trains and scrubbed sidewalks, but we might borrow some of their ideas. After all, we conquered them in 1945, can’t we take home some intellectual souvenirs?

Imagine if Van Nuys took the courageous and innovative step to redo the large, unused parking lots behind all the abandoned shops on Van Nuys Boulevard with a mix of little houses like these and perhaps some larger structures several stories high?

What we have now is this:

  • Near Cedros and Delano.
  • P
  • Bessemer St.
  • Van Nuys, CA 90401 Built: 1929 Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
  • Van Nuys, CA

Don’t we have a Christopher Hawthorne now, Chief Design Officer, working under Mayor Gar[BAGE]cetti? Former architecture critic at the LA Times, he may know one or two architects from his old job. Perhaps Mr. Hawthorne can take action?

What have we got to lose? 

We are so far down in quality of life that we must engage our energies to pursue a remade Los Angeles.

A city that does not harm us but lifts us up.

As Japan shows, you can have enlightened ideas without living alongside mounds of trash and outdoor vagrancy.

There is no logical connection between toleration of outdoor garbage dumps and political tolerance in general. In fact the worse our surroundings get, the more people will turn right and maybe even hard right.

I Don’t Care About Your Identity….

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Woodley Park.

May 13, 2019

Someone recently was very excited because there is a new slate of young, female, diverse people who are running for the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. She is one of the contestants and wanted some input on what I thought about the VNNC.

I rolled my eyes. Nothing good has ever, ever come out of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council, and if you don’t believe me, take a walk up Van Nuys Boulevard today and see the boarded up shops, the homeless, the filth and the neglect.

Maybe I should expand that to the office of Nury Martinez, a city councilwoman who has been in that job for some five years and has presided over the further decline and frightening expansion of homelessness that plagues our city and our district in particular.

Often young aspirants seeking election will roll out first, those labels which they think matter. You are queer, you are a woman, you came from Honduras. And you are under 30. That last designation is the most important because you have “fresh ideas”, ideas which only those people born after 1989 have thought of.  And you care, you really care about this community because you are queer, you are woman and you came from Honduras.

And you are also against: exploitation, triggering, cruelty, bigotry, and policies that discriminate against homelessness, against the undocumented, and against those who have been convicted of crimes and are unjustly punished.

Fine. All fine. All open for debate, though you may not ever agree to debate these issues because you are right and I should know you are right.

But I have one thing to say to you, candidate for political office: I don’t care about your identity.

I know you are angry because growing up you wanted role models and when you looked on TV or in the movies you were given maids and gang-bangers instead of entrepreneurs and philosophers. Pity. You didn’t model yourself after Marsha Brady or Samantha Stephens so you went into a tailspin.

Your identity is your fortress, your crowing achievement, because, after all, you’ve worked hard to acquire that DNA.

But running on a platform of DNA, gender, or preference labels doesn’t stop crime, bad schools, illegal dumping, trash camping, random violence.

Woodley Park.
3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.
3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.

The Cuban-American dad who lives with his daughter near Burbank and Kester takes his Sunday morning off to ride bikes with his daughter through a trash-filled bike path along the Orange Line. Does he care if the representative who neglects this park is Latina? No, he cares if the park is clean and safe.

The Guatemalan born, American history professor who takes the bus from Van Nuys to teach at CSUN stands at a bus shelter where a homeless person has placed six shopping carts and has made a home there for three months.

The lesbian mom from Mexico who lives on Vanowen with three school age children still has to drive them from her bad school district to a better one five miles away and she helps, unwittingly, to contribute to traffic and school segregation. Would it matter if she were Irish-American, born in Indianapolis and married to a man?  

Illegally parked cars on Victory during rush hour.
Empty, weed-filled parking lot within walking distance of mass transit and downtown VN.
Homeless.

The broadcasting of identities is like a theater of the absurd because it presents a chimera, an illusion of a person who comes into the public realm advertising her external labels instead of presenting her internal ideas.

I’m reminded me of Jussie Smollet’s words after creating his hoax, he used his “gay, black” identities to hide the true nature of his fabrications. By trotting out the ingredients on his label he sought the mantle of believability and righteousness. But the content of his true character remains.

I don’t care about your identity. I care about facts, about telling the truth, about pursuing equal justice under the law. And that applies to aspirants for political office as well.

The two little boys, Diego, 5, and Eddie, 7, who live on Delano, whose grandparents emigrated from El Salvador, cannot ride their bikes down to Bessemer, two blocks away, because 20 homeless people, some drug addicts, some mentally ill, live on the street there. 

If Diego and Eddie were named Diego and Eddie Moskowitz and they couldn’t ride their bikes in their own neighborhood would their ethnic identities matter more?

Bus Bench: Sepulveda at Victory.
Sepulveda Bl.
Along Sepulveda at LA Fitness.

I don’t care about your identity.  Nury Martinez has a great duo of identities: female and Latina and really, truly, what does that matter for the well-being of Van Nuys?

Being a Latina, doesn’t make you a more effective thinker, leader, community organizer any more than being a Canadian from Haiti does.

Your identity won’t bring in new investment, it won’t appeal to developers, it won’t clean up the streets, it won’t lessen traffic, it won’t purify the air, it won’t make food healthier. 

Van Nuys needs a dose of old fashioned law and order and political and police muscle to let the law-abiding citizens of this district know that we will not fall apart and disintegrate into factions of identities who then will be unable to come together to work as a community to fight our common problems. 

Van Nuys 2030?
Van Nuys 2030?
Small Homes, Not Homelessness.
Small Homes, Not Homelessness.
Japan
Japan

A Twelve-Acre Parking Lot

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Erwin at Sepulveda, Metro Orange Line Parking Lot.

When the Metro Orange Line opened in October 2005, it was a stunningly different type of transport system which combined a bus only road with a landscaped bike path that ran alongside. It cost about $325 million.

It connected North Hollywood with Woodland Hills, and eventually carried over 30,000 riders a day. Since 2015, due to Uber and Lyft, ridership has fallen to about 22,000 a day.

Hundreds of homeless encampments have sprung up on the bike trail.

But Metro forges ahead!

There are plans to create gated crossings at intersections to speed up bus travel. There are long-term ideas to convert the entire system to light rail and also build elevated bridges over Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda.

In Van Nuys, at Sepulveda and Erwin (north of Oxnard), there is a car parking lot for the Orange Line Metro riders. It is over 526,000 square feet, paved in asphalt, planted with trees and shrubs, and comprises over 12 acres.

Today, over 2/3 of it is used as an outdoor storage lot for Keyes Auto.

Red area is the parking lot of the Orange Line. It is now used predominately to store autos from Keyes Audi. (Source: ZIMAS)

The Sepuvleda/Erwin site is “Exhibit A” in the DNA of Los Angeles, because the right thing to do would be constructing 10-20 story apartments along the public transit route and creating incentives for residents to ride buses, take trains and use bikes for daily commuting.

Singapore Housing Estate with parks and nearby public transportation.

If LA were Singapore, Tokyo or Toronto we would do that.

Instead our city languishes and fights and wishes to preserve a 1950s idea of everyone going somewhere by car. 

And thousands of new cars are lovingly housed on land paid for by public taxes which should be used as housing and parks for the greater good of this city.

Nothing beneficial for Los Angeles ever happens overnight. It takes years of planning and legal battles, for example, to build assisted or low cost housing, or parks. 

One can imagine the fury and fear that might arise if a 12- acre park and housing development were planned on this parking lot ranch.

Imaginery view from Sepulveda and Erwin looking west. In reality, Singapore.

What, by miracle of God, might be possible here in terms of a park or high-rise group of apartments, placed near the bus line, with a buffer of trees, water features, and gardens between the new residential city and the single-family houses to the north of the site?

Yet here, alongside a public transit route, taxpayer funded Metro Los Angeles chooses to rent its land for an auto dealership. How does that benefit the surrounding residents?

For people who are obsessed with traffic, imagine that thousands of vehicles are parked here ready to be turned on and put onto the roads. How does that feel Van Nuys?

If the new planned housing estate were policed, regulated, secure, and it also provided a new park wouldn’t that be an improvement?

Orange Line Metro Parking Lot at Sepulveda/Erwin

Not Van Nuys Blvd at Oxnard

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Why not Van Nuys Bl. at Oxnard?

On Architizer, an architectural website, I found a photo and description of a residential/commercial development built in Mountain Brook, AL in 2014.

Pleasant, as all ideal architectural plans and photos are.

But it also fired up an idea…

Why couldn’t buildings like this go on the NW corner of Van Nuys Bl. and Oxnard St.?

Where currently there is a large, unoccupied glass building that once housed a car dealer (what else?) it is now a yawningly empty welcome to the alleged business and government district of old Van Nuys.

The Mountain Brook, AL buildings (architects: Wakefield Beasley & Associates) anchor the street with ground floor shops, landscaping, sidewalks, trees and diagonal parking. They invite people to walk and to park in front.

276 apartments are built above the stores, with one, two and three-bedroom plans, and are spread between the structures. Various modern amenities, including fitness centers, parks, yoga and meditation areas, wifi, are added to entice renters.

What is it that makes this type of building a dream and not a reality on the main street of Van Nuys? Why, in a city starved for housing, is there not a furious effort by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and the City of Los Angeles to rev up the pace and quality of apartment construction?

Stylistically, the traditional look of this building would probably elicit snickers from the Christopher Hawthorne/Frances Anderson crowd. It is much too literal and polite and pseudo-historic for a cult which takes its abstract, contorted meals at Frank Gehry’s feet.

Frank Gehryism

But Van Nuys is starved for anything that can bring us up from the homeless, trashy, neglected place we are today. An above-average, but suitable design such as the one from Mountain Brook, AL is better than shopping carts full of garbage and people sleeping in cars.

It would work because it cares about the urban context around it.