Huge Houses on Tiny Lots Weigh on Community

A hillside divided into tiny plots for weekend cabins in the 1920s by the founder of Woodland Hills is being filled up with large houses.

Neighbors and city officials are casting an unfriendly eye at the trend.

As many as 2,000 parcels, some only 25 feet wide, are tucked into a 1 1/2-square-mile hillside area adjoining the Woodland Hills Country Club. About 500 homes have been built there so far, and landowners have the right to build on most of the remaining lots.

Such development would be “a disaster,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, whose district includes the neighborhood. He said the hodgepodge of hillside lots along a maze of narrow streets is one of the city’s worst subdivisions.

Homeowners in the area complain that tiny lots are being smothered by king-size luxury homes that are destroying native oaks and natural drainage channels.

The neighborhood is about a mile southeast of the intersection of Ventura and Topanga Canyon boulevards. It was created in 1922 by Woodland Hills’ founder, developer Victor Girard, who also built a golf course to lure investors into the fledgling community, which he named “Girard.”

More than 6,000 Parcels

The subdivision is part of a 2,886-acre area that Girard bought and divided into 6,828 parcels, helping to generate $11 million in sales for Girard’s real estate company between 1923 and 1928. The small lots were touted as weekend retreats and were sold for as little as $500. Buyers received membership in Girard’s golf club.

Scattered three-room cabins were built on some of the parcels. But the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Depression struck most buyers before they could build.

A flurry of lawsuits helped wipe out the Boulevard Land Co. in 1931. Buyers of home sites complained that their lots were unbuildable or that Girard had misrepresented the area to them in his advertising and sales pitches.

Throughout the Depression, hundreds of lot owners were unable to meet installment payments and many walked away from their purchases.

Others, however, lost their lots when they were unable to cover the liens that Girard had quietly placed on the property. The buyers complained that they were unaware that the developer had used the liens to back loans he took out to finance streets and water lines in the tract. When the Boulevard Land Co. folded, the land owners had to pay for the improvements.

Community Renamed

Hillsides around the golf course were left largely undeveloped for the next 25 years. In 1941, the community was renamed Woodland Hills because of the 118,000 trees Girard had planted 15 years earlier. In 1945, the Girard Golf Course was turned into a private country club. Girard died in 1954.

The dozens of twisting, narrow streets around the golf course began to echo with carpenters’ hammers after the Ventura Freeway opened in 1958. By then, flatter construction sites in the fast-growing West San Fernando Valley had been subdivided by developers.

Inflation and escalating land values set off a minor land rush around the 85-acre golf course in the 1970s as the area became a prestigious place to live. Old-timers who had purchased four and five of the little parcels to make up a single large residential lot began selling off pieces of their property to builders. Instead of cabins and cottages, five-bedroom homes began springing up.

Longtime residents say the number of houses in the area has more than doubled in the past 10 years. They also warn that the number of dwellings could triple or quadruple unless the city initiates a building moratorium of some type.

“Those lots have been a problem for years,” said Al Landini, a senior city planner who concentrates on West Valley land-use issues. “ ‘Tenting lots’ is the way I refer to them. They were to have been weekend camping sites for people who drove out from the city in their Model A cars.”

City Could Buy Up Lots

As long as the lots have adequate access and are geologically stable, they can be built upon under current law, Landini said. He said a solution to the crowding problem might be for the city to buy up existing small lots “and perhaps consolidate them into larger lots and then resell them as a sort of redevelopment project.”

Braude said another answer might be to restrict development on the small country club-area lots to small houses. He said his office has ordered an investigation into possible remedies by the city offices of planning, building and safety, public works and the city attorney.

“We’ll do what we can that’s legal,” Braude said. “There will be a few people who will squawk mightily. But the public benefit ought to outweigh that.”

Warren O’Brien, executive officer with the city’s Department of Building and Safety, said the current minimum lot size in the city is 5,000 square feet. But Girard’s act of subdividing the land has left the Woodland Hills lot owners with “nonconforming rights” to build on their smaller parcels, O’Brien said. And, because the area is in a hillside zone, lot owners can build right up to the street, he said.

Group Formed for Development Controls

Residents of the area last year created the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization to lobby for development controls. Another organization is being formed, along with residents of other communities, to push for restrictions elsewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Activists said they will call the group “Not Yet New York.”

“Traffic has gotten so bad on these narrow little streets up here that you drive with your heart in your mouth,” said Alice Selzer, 62, a 25-year resident of the area. “People are crowding their houses right up to the road. There’s no place to pass on some of these streets.”

Gordon Murley, a 55-year-old salesman who has lived in the area since 1966, said some homes have already been flooded because of improper grading above them.

“There are places they’ve built 2,300-square-foot houses on 2,600-square-foot lots,” he said. “To do that, they have to cut down all the trees and destroy the natural drainage of the area. There’s not enough parking on some streets. The area’s getting to be a slum.”

‘Spec Builders’

Murley said the low cost of the tiny lots--they now sell for about $30,000, contrasted with the typical $70,000 cost of a flatland lot--attracts “spec builders,” contractors who speculate that they will be able to sell a house for a large profit after it is completed.

“There are a lot of ratty little streets up here,” said Rosemary Woodlock, a 40-year-old lawyer who was has lived in the neighborhood since age 4. “Some of these lots may be 40 feet wide at the front but shrink down in a pie shape to 5 feet in the back. Some are 30 feet by 40 feet or 20 by 20. In the old days, people would buy four and five lots around them just so they would have room.

“A lot of the original residents bought extra lots just to save trees. This was a special place when I was growing up here. People had a close relationship with the existing environment.”

Bill Joyce, 40, a Woodland Hills real estate agent who lives in a remodeled Girard cabin, said the original subdivision “was basically a real estate scam, like the desert lots that are for sale today.”

“These lots were originally subdivided for 700-square-foot cabins, not 2,500-square-foot houses,” Joyce said. “The city should take a more active interest in what’s going on up here.”