Actor’s Son Has Devine Flair With His Homes : Affordable North Valley Condos Are Builder’s First Solo Project

Remember “Jingles,” Wild Bill Hickok’s jovial partner for seven years on television during the ‘50s?

Veteran actor Andy Devine, who died eight years ago this Feb. 18, played the part, and now his son, Dennis, is the star, for the first time, of one of his own productions. It probably won’t be on television or in movie theaters, though. It will be showing in Pacoima and Lakeview Terrace--in the north end of the San Fernando Valley, past the graffiti, jerry-built structures and horses in tiny corrals.

It’s called Foothill Homes, and it’s Dennis Devine’s first solo project as a residential developer.

“I’ve been a builder for a long time,” the 46-year-old Devine said. He’s been a builder for 22 years, but 19 of those were with D&S; Construction (now known as D&S;/Wrather), which he formed with Peter Sidlow and sold to Wrather Corp. (with Sidlow remaining as D&S;/Wrather president) last year. And his first three years in construction were spent moonlighting, building apartment houses with Sidlow and a couple of other fellows while he was working as a loan officer for a savings and loan.

“So this is my first project by myself,” he said, “and as the first one out of the chute, I want to make it especially good.”

He has always been a hands-on builder, anyway, he says, but he has been spending extra time and trouble on Foothill Homes.

“We worked hard (with architect James Heaton III) on the design to give buyers in this price range a flair that they usually don’t get,” he said. (About 100 of the 242 detached condominiums are expected to be priced from $97,000 to $108,000 when the project opens for sales on March 15.)

The lots are only 38 1/2 feet wide, but the homes were designed with enough variation so that the buildings do not look like row housing.

Devine is also staggering the zero-lot lines to create more yard areas. (The building area ratio ranges from 42.6% to 44.1% of the airspace on each lot, including the front yard, and floor plans range from 1,334 to 1,522 square feet in size.)

“And look at this!” he said, rushing excitedly into one half-built home. “Here’s a house selling for $95,000 that has a two-story entry and a curved, rather than rectangular window over its front door.”

Not only that but the home will have a vaulted ceiling, master closet in the master bedroom, a bathtub in each of its two full bathrooms (each unit has three bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths), no common walls between the master and other bedrooms, and direct access from the garage into the kitchen. “Most houses for under $100,000 don’t have all of this,” he said. “I’m trying to give people a little more where I can.”

It’s not only a matter of making the most of his first solo development. It’s a challenge, he explained, “to build a box that doesn’t look like a box and to create interesting space that is affordable.”

He’s a frustrated architect. He appeared in three movies as a teen-ager, but he was more interested in architectural design. “I won a commercial art contest at Van Nuys High,” he said. And he studied architecture at USC before earning his degree in financing.

“I wanted to be an architect, but I discovered that if you have the checkbook, you can control the design,” he said with a laugh.

A lot of developers don’t care about controlling design, he added. and a lot of developers don’t care about providing affordable housing.

After D&S; sold to Wrather, Devine set out to do both in the area he knows and loves best: the San Fernando Valley.

“D&S; had projects all over, but I wanted to concentrate on a geographical area. I wanted to stay localized in the Valley because that’s where I was born and raised,” he explained. “Then I wondered where I could build affordable housing in the Valley.”

He drove the Valley’s length and breadth before settling on 24 acres at Foothill and Van Nuys boulevards in the communities of Lakeview Terrace and Pacoima, in the city of Los Angeles.

It is a good location, he determined, because it is close to the Simi and Foothill freeways. As he puts it: “It is 25 minutes to anywhere.”

The property was also one of the last major parcels to be developed in the Valley, he said.

And it is a neighborhood in transition.

Before Devine purchased his property, there were pigs, horses, dogs and cows on it. He bought five farms on which to develop Foothill Homes.

The area was considered economically depressed. Property values were among the lowest in the Valley, and the concentration of minorities was the highest. Of 90,000 people living in Pacoima in 1983, an estimated 35% were black and 40% were Latino.

Then Pledgerville Senior Citizens Villa (a 93-unit, $7-million federally-financed housing project) opened in Pacoima last May, and Kaufman & Broad opened its 231-unit Lakeview Terrace detached housing development in December.

That project started drawing home buyers from all over Southern California, Devine said, “because of the nearby freeways.”

Three reasons have been cited for development interest in the area: the availability of property (the northeast corner has some of the last large tracts of land in the San Fernando Valley); the opening of the last stretch of the Foothill Freeway in 1981, and the comparatively low housing prices--in the $100,000 range. These prices are luring buyers who thought they would have to go much farther from downtown Los Angeles to find housing they could afford.

These buyers may be altering the community’s ethnic composition. “It’s still basically Hispanic,” he said, but an informal survey (which he called an “off-the-cuff assessment”) described home shoppers in the area as 40% Caucasian, 25% black, 25% Latino and 10% Asian.

With the new real estate developments, the neighborhood certainly appears to be shifting from weed-strewn lots, make-shift structures and abandoned cars to new and tidy, well-kept homes, he observed.

For that, Devine gives City Councilman Howard Finn much credit. “He’s been a big help because he wants to promote for-sale (owner-occupied) housing,” he said.

Devine received city bond financing of $5.5 million for his affordable-housing project.

“Buyers will pay one point with 30-year, fixed-rate assumable loans and 95% financing with 5% down,” he explained. “Their payments will be under $1,000 a month.

“This is a price-sensitive market, so we have a swimming pool and Jacuzzi, but we didn’t overdo it (with such amenities).” The monthly homeowners fee will be about $45.

Even for the 52-unit apartment building he plans to build across the street on 3 1/2 acres he has purchased, he figures that the market will be basically families with children.

And that gives him an excuse to indulge his own sense of fun--a sense he might have inherited from his squeaky-voiced dad, who played comedy parts in about 400 films.

“When we open, our theme will be balloons,” he said. “(Interior designer) Beverly Trupp and I decided on that. We’ll call it, ‘Up, Up and Away,’ and we’ll have balloon wallpaper in the models and the salesgirls will wear minature balloon earrings. We’ll have a hot air balloon with a spotlight overhead.

“And our logo will be a boy with a dog, a balloon and an American flag.”