L.A.’s World-Class Housing Need

“We require from buildings, as men, two kinds of goodness,” wrote 19th-Century architecture critic John Ruskin. “First, doing their practical duty well; then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.”

If ever there was a need in the Los Angeles area for the broad support of an imaginatively operated, sensitively designed affordable, in-fill housing program it is now; a program that is both practical and pleasing.

The pernicious cutbacks in federal assistance, the stringency of rent control, the continued demolition of low-cost units, accelerated by the need to comply with new seismic codes, and the gentrification of select neighborhoods, have in varied ways cut deeply and disastrously into the region’s affordable housing.

Not helping either has been the retreat on all levels of government of a bloated development bureaucracy into paper-lined shells, the avarice of some landlords, the greed of speculators and, generally, in our planning and architecture schools, the inability to address social concerns.

The result has been an estimated shortfall in Los Angeles of nearly a quarter of a million affordable housing units. Not even the increasing, unsafe and unsanitary conversion of garages and back-yard sheds into illegal apartments, nor makeshift recreational vehicles, the overcrowding of tents in the region’s campgrounds, or the homeless shelters or the cardboard boxes under the freeways, can keep up with the demand.

In this respect, Los Angeles is turning into a world-class city in the way Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro and Manila are world-class cities, with a growing underground population. To be sure, there are no sprawling hillsides here of steamy squatter shacks--yet. Our homeless and ill-housed population is harder to see. Like our region, it is fragmented, but it is there (and should get worse this winter when the snowbirds arrive).

Meanwhile, our design consciousness is focused on the monster mansions being overbuilt here, the pricey, over-designed restaurants where the owners of the mansions, and their friends and followers, overeat, and the overtly promoted social events where they promenade.

And let us not forget the overpriced, self-congratulating architectural conferences, such as the one this weekend where for an entry fee of $350 one could have heard a select group of architects and academicians with an Eastern orientation discuss the development of Los Angeles in the 20th Century. The event that also included tours of local landmarks was sponsored by the national AIA, which because of its pronounced programmatic prejudices, is becoming known as the Atlantic seaboard Institute of Architects.

Despite what seems to be these days a decided public and professional bent in design for the banal, a few desperately needed housing projects are being produced. However modest, they are to me much more important than a trendy play by an architect of symbols, typology, metaphors or materiality in some new boutique, eatery or house, offering as they do, some rays of hope for a more humane and livable city.

The projects include in Boyle Heights, a transitional shelter for the homeless; in West Hollywood, the rehabilitation of a 28-unit apartment house; in Torrance, two new senior citizen projects; in Pico Union, an 18-unit courtyard complex, and in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park, a scattered-site cooperative development. What a few might lack in style, a result of stringent budgets, they compensate with spirit.

Making the Chernow House Shelter dedicated last week in Boyle Heights particularly pleasing is that not only will it provide a transitional facility for homeless families with children, but that it also saves a historically significant Moderne-styled structure that adds a sense of style and stability to the street.

Located at 207 N. Breed St., the building had served as medical offices before being vacated and slipping into disrepair. Then along came the L.A. Family Housing Corp., an innovative, nonprofit corporation that for the last few years has been quietly, and efficiently, developing relatively modest in-fill affordable housing projects.

Instead of demolishing the structure, the corporation, under the indefatigable direction of architect Arnold Stalk and with the aid of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and others, undertook a sensitive, adaptive reuse. The result is a modest, 20-unit, 80-bed facility that respects the users and honors the memory of Alex Chernow, a former insurance executive for whom the facility is named.

This is the third and most ambitious transitional facility the corporation has completed; the others being a conversion of a motel and restaurant in North Hollywood, and a vacant apartment building in the Wilshire District. It also has developed three permanent, affordable housing projects, and is working on three more, including a modest eight-unit one next door to Chernow House, to be called Irmas Village.

The idea is that Chernow House is a transitional facility, where families can live up to six months while receiving social services, looking for jobs and, generally, getting their lives back into shape. The long-term solution is for the families to break the cycle of hardship and move into affordable housing.

There are other problems to be solved, but obviously, housing is a major one, especially for families with children. That there are an estimated 10,000 children among the estimated 50,000 homeless in Los Angeles prompts one to wonder why there are not 100 Chernow Houses, and 1,000 Irmas Villages?

Perhaps that question can be addressed by the architects meeting at the design conference today, where they are scheduled to take up the question of whether there should be “a new set of standards for America’s quintessential 20th-Century city,” according to an AIA press release. Perhaps we all should try to address the question.