Project Fuels Battle for Building-Height Limits

Jeanne Strahl glimpsed the future of her Encino neighborhood early one recent morning. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

The house behind her home of 37 years was collapsing with a roar. Dust was billowing through her backyard fence and settling over her brick patio and carefully pruned rose bushes.

“I thought it was an earthquake,” said Strahl, 67.

It wasn’t. It was builders demolishing the neighboring house to make room for a four-story apartment building. Or three-story, depending on who’s counting.

“It’s disgusting,” said Strahl’s husband, John, 72. “With a four-story building, we’re not going to have any light or fresh air. We won’t have any privacy. We won’t be able to use our patio or our backyard.”

The apartment project, at Moorpark Street and Firmament Avenue, has become a focal point in a campaign for tough new controls over apartment building in Los Angeles. City planning commissioners are studying a proposal, by Encino and Sherman Oaks-area City Councilmen Marvin Braude and Zev Yaroslavsky, that would for the first time limit the height of apartments next to single-family homes.

Their proposal calls for a “transitional” zone between homes and apartments, mandating that apartment buildings within 50 feet of an existing single-family residence be no higher than 25 feet. Within the next 50-foot zone, an apartment could not be taller than 33 feet. Apartments can now be built next to single-family homes to a height of 45 feet.

That’s how high the $2.3-million project behind the Strahls’ house will be when it is completed in about six months.

What particularly galls the Strahls and their neighbors is that the building will have four floors, but is considered a three-story structure by the city. The bottom floor is defined as an “underground garage” because dirt is piled around its walls.

Privacy Issue Discounted

Builder Aaron Rosen of Sherman Oaks said his 20-unit complex will not have balconies overlooking the Strahls’ backyard, just bathroom and bedroom windows, so their privacy should not suffer.

People have the wrong idea about the height, too, Rosen said. “You can call it whatever you want. We’re calling it a three-story building,” he said.

City officials say Rosen’s apartment meets all zoning requirements. “It’s legal, but it’s a problem for the people who live next to it,” said Lou Robins, assistant city building and safety department manager for the San Fernando Valley.

The “three-story” designation saves money for the developer, Robins said, because the dirt technically makes the bottom level an underground garage without the expense of excavation. It also allows wooden construction, because masonry is required of four-story buildings, Robins said.

Rosen’s lot was zoned for apartments in 1947, when multifamily units were envisioned as a buffer between the Ventura Boulevard commercial strip and single-family houses a few blocks away.

The Strahls were among the first to move into their neighborhood, built in 1950. “It was great here at first,” John Strahl said. “Just like being out in the country.”

Richard Smith, president of the Encino Property Owners Assn., said the tall apartments will “totally destroy the neighborhood.” He criticized the city for not down-zoning the apartment lot from its multifamily designation to the single-family category after houses were built on and around it.

Braude, meeting two weeks ago with Smith’s homeowners group, described the Strahl situation as a “loophole” that he hopes to plug with the proposed transitional height requirement. Brad Rosenheim, Braude’s Valley deputy, said an ordinance written last year by Braude requires apartment heights to be measured from street level, not from the top of artificial berms.