The Pioneers : A Tale of Two Families Who Sought Their Share of Real Estate Boom by Building in a Risky Area
To sculptor Woods Davy and his wife, graphic designer Kathleen Dantini, it’s a dream community that unites them in a spacious home and offers clean air, ocean proximity and exposure to a diverse group of people.
To builder Wayne Beswick and his wife, Marilyn, it’s a nightmarish zone of drugs, crime, fear, apprehension and even a mischievous teen-ager who rings their doorbell early in the morning, then runs away.
That two families might see one Los Angeles neighborhood in so different a light may not seem monumental.
But the views of Davy, Dantini, the Beswicks and thousands of Southern Californians like them are significant because they are vital players in the sizzling, speculative real estate market--they are the urban pioneers.
Anxious not to be left out of the boom, they move into and revitalize--some say gentrify--troubled neighborhoods where prices still are relatively low. With the L.A. Board of Realtors reporting that Los Angeles homes sold for an average of $506,115 in August, nearly $108,000 higher than a year ago, it’s little wonder why.
But why and how do such people choose, ahead of trends, to live in certain areas? And, more importantly, why do some of them eventually abandon them, while others decide, happily, to stay? What role do factors like housing affordability and cost, as well as crime, play in that decision? Or is it really made on the basis of a neighbor’s friendly smile?
Certainly the answers to those questions, which can have major effects on the vibrancy of Los Angeles neighborhoods, are as varied as buyers of Southern California homes.
There are, however, some clues in the experiences of just two families, one happy and one not with their adventure in the Venice neighborhood called Oakwood.
Compared with many parts of Los Angeles, Oakwood is a relatively affordable area where a fully remodeled, 3-bedroom, 2-bath home recently sold for $240,000; a 2-bedroom, 1-bath home was on the market for $255,000. Oakwood is where actor Dennis Hopper lives behind a picket fence in a windowless, rectangular, corrugated metal home. It is where renowned architect Frank Gehry has designed three condominiums. It is where an influx of new residents have helped push the average household income from roughly $16,000 in 1979 to about $31,000 today, the National Planning Data Corp. estimates.
Oakwood, a neighborhood of narrow streets and generally neat, small, wood and stucco homes, also has what police say is the highest crime rate in Venice.
It is a neighborhood where angry residents complain they often hear gunfire. They have tried to combat the crime but drug dealers openly solicit drivers on certain street corners.
Oakwood, say Davy and Dantini, is a delightful spot where they plan to live awhile. But it is a neighborhood that the Beswicks hope to flee--as soon as they can.
It was a bright, clear day when Davy and Dantini conducted an animated discussion in the living room of their 2-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home, which has two large doors that open onto a palm-and-banana-tree front garden.
Upstairs, as their 4-month-old daughter, Doniella, slept peacefully, Davy explained why he and his family have been charmed by Oakwood, the area bounded roughly by Lincoln Boulevard, Hampton Drive and Rose, California and Electric avenues.
“There’s a number of things that are constant and one of them is . . . the air, which is really clean. And that will always be,” he said. “And we’re right near the beach. And if you’re going to live in Southern California, we were thinking, ‘Why don’t you live as close to the beach as you can?’ And for us, this is the last affordable area near the beach.”
Indeed, the couple recalls hunting citywide before settling on their current property, seven blocks from the ocean.
When they were newly married, “we still weren’t living together because I had this big studio Downtown . . . and Kathleen had this place (on the Westside) with a roommate,” Davy said. “So we were commuting back and forth, and one of us was on the freeway every day. And after 18 months, it just became unbearable.”
They looked at the lot they eventually bought but it then “was a garbage dump with couches and mattresses,” Dantini said. Still, something about the Oakwood area appealed to them.
“We looked in other neighborhoods and we kept coming back. And so we decided, ‘Let’s buy a smaller piece of property and instead of having a larger section with a house on it and adding a studio, let’s build a home that has a little room where we can do some of our work,’ ” Davy said.
They bought their 5,200-square-foot lot, which they considered remarkably affordable, in February, 1986. A few days later, “there was a fire where someone was cooking some drugs or something and a mattress ignited,” Davy said, noting they immediately had their land fenced even before they had it cleared.
Eighteen months later, in July, 1987, they had built a striking 2-story stucco, 2-bedroom, 2-bath home with a large gallery. They say it is worth $350,000, roughly $135,000 more than they paid for their land and to build their home.
With its off-white walls and coral, lavender and other beach-color touches, the house also is special because it has concrete floors downstairs so Davy can wheel his sculptures around. The roomy gallery diagonally bisects the home so Davy can show his stone-and-neutralized steel sculptures, which also are displayed in the front garden.
Dantini works upstairs on a desk near a bougainvillea-covered balcony. In the airy bathroom, sunlight beams through a skylight to freshen large potted plants.
Their house is unusual among the small, adjacent wood-frame homes. But neighbors wave and chat when Davy and Dantini walk onto their balcony or take their child out for a stroll.
“We don’t hesitate to walk with the baby at night,” Davy said, admiring rather than being put off by the diversity--and eccentricities--of his neighborhood.
“You know, it feels very good being here,” he said. “It feels like we’re at home. You walk out on the boardwalk and you see all those crazy things going on, (you) walk down the street and there’s some old lady ranting and raving, and it’s just a colorful package.”
Davy and Dantini concede they are not immune to concerns about neighborhood crime. They have heard gunshots in the area and acknowledge Oakwood is “not the safest place in the world,” Dantini said. “We really have to be careful.”
But Davy quickly added: “I really think you’d be safe. . . . As soon as we walk out onto the corner, there’s 8 or 10 people that say hello and know us by our names and that we have friendly relationships with. . . .
“Everybody takes care of everybody else and it’s just a real nice neighborhood feeling.”
Wayne and Marilyn Beswick sat at the dinner table in the dining room of their gray, 1,200-square-foot, 2-story home and discussed real estate one recent night as their daughters, Jessica, 5, and Alexandria, 2, watched “Sleeping Beauty” upstairs.
Beswick looked around the home he built and which his family moved into a year ago on Thanksgiving weekend. Now the house is for sale and the Beswicks hope they do not celebrate another holiday there.
“At one stage this would have been attractive,” he said, adding, “when you are young, being near the rock ‘n’ roll and the drugs and the rebelliousness is welcome. When you are 21, it’s exciting to be around a place where something’s going on all the time.
“But I have outgrown Venice. That’s what it is. You go through a change. You find that your mother was right--that those things are not so important and that safety and stability are.”
He and his wife once enjoyed the individuality they felt by moving into a changing neighborhood. But no longer.
“It’s basically because of our children,” explained Marilyn Beswick. “I want them to grow up in a nice environment and I want to be in a nice place too.
“Here, I am always having to shuttle the kids into the house. There are drunks and addicts walking up the alley screaming obscenities and I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep since we have been here.
“It’s either people playing music so loud in cars they are driving up and down the street, or police helicopters or . . . people in the street all night fighting. Or there are gunshots.”
Sometimes the shots are fatal. At 9:20 one night last July, a man in a car fired into a crowd four blocks from Beswick’s home. Jorge Gonzalez, a 9-year-old innocent bystander, was killed in the gang drive-by shooting, police said.
Marilyn Beswick said the gunfire was not that unusual, that she has heard shots in the middle of the day.
“A couple of months ago, at 1 p.m. Friday, I put my daughter down for a nap (when) I heard a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! And sure enough, over at Fifth Avenue and Sunset Avenue a boy was wounded in a gang shooting. It’s frightening with children. It really is.”
Unlike some newcomers in transitional areas, Beswick, a 6-foot-3, 200-pound British immigrant, has not found a sense of caring and sharing in his block. In fact, he and his wife note that they have been the victims of at least one malicious and misguided neighborhood youth, who rings their bell early in the morning, then runs.
Instead, that experience and others like it have dampened his spirit for the neighborhood and darkened his belief in the American dream, he said.
But it was the best tradition of that dream that brought Beswick and his family to Oakwood from Reseda.
“Marilyn does not work, and we did not want to get an enormous mortgage to the tune of $300,000 and not be able to do the things that we like doing,” he explained.
“Especially with Wayne being a builder,” Marilyn said. “To walk into a place that would cost that much and have to be renovated anyway” did not seem to make sense.
Instead, they hunted long and hard for property, settling finally on an Oakwood lot costing $28,000. They took out a $37,000 loan and he built the house on nights and weekends over eight months.
Today, a little more than a year after he built it, the home is listed for $239,000--roughly 3 1/2 times the Beswicks’ original investment.
But rather than stay in the home that already has appreciated so much, the Beswicks have decided to cash in. They have bought another home in Brentwood.
“We have a 2-bedroom house and I’m pregnant and going to have another baby,” Marilyn Beswick explained, adding that the new home they are moving to, they hope will be “a place where we will probably spend the next 10 to 15 years.”
Despite her many complaints about the dangers of Oakwood, she softened for a moment and conceded that for her and her family, it has “never been horrible, horrible. . . . We had (only) one thing stolen from here and that was my child’s tractor outside the yard.”he Beswicks paused as Still, the Beswicks paused as Still, the Beswicks paused as they discussed the neighborhood.
“We realize this area will appreciate. In another five years it will be a great place,” she suggested.
“I doubt it,” he replied.
