Hillside Houses on Poles : Building Ban Sought to Protect ‘Stilt Street’

A fragile neighborhood of stilt houses in Sherman Oaks that rode out Wednesday’s earthquake received support Friday against a different upheaval: intense land development around it.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky called for a moratorium on construction of large houses on Oakfield Drive near a world-famous row of houses that are perched on poles above a steep canyon.

Council members said they will decide next week whether to ask city planners to slap strict controls on the hilly site, which is visible to thousands of motorists who travel daily on Beverly Glen Boulevard between the San Fernando Valley and Westwood.

Residents of the 20 stilt houses and others who consider the eye-catching row a Los Angeles architectural landmark have sought such protection since a developer began building large, conventional houses on small, empty Oakfield Drive lots eight months ago.

They contend that huge homes on 20 leftover lots would overwhelm the neighborhood and destroy the architectural integrity of the area, known to outsiders as “Stilt Street.”

“I hope this helps save this mountainside,” stilt-house owner Virginia Hadfield said Friday. “I hope the moratorium will do what it sounds like it will do.”

Yaroslavsky asked that the city prohibit new houses taller than 30 feet and require side-yard and front-yard setbacks of at least five feet. He also asked for a ban on new houses that cover more than half of their lots.

Building rules, Yaroslavsky said, “have resulted in the development of homes out of scale for the hillside community in which they are built.”

Michelle Krotinger, an aide to Yaroslavsky, said the moratorium proposal will undergo four public hearings during the next several months before it comes up for a final City Council vote. She said a one-year moratorium would give city planners time to decide if permanent controls are needed to preserve the neighborhood.

The one-of-a-kind neighborhood was designed by architect Richard J. Neutra and was built in 1965.

Since then the stilt houses have been featured in movies and television shows, usually as examples of the ultimate in wacky Los Angeles architecture.

But Neutra’s pole design is viewed as anything but frivolous by architectural experts, conservationists and those who live in the 40-by-50-foot, one-level homes that are suspended 30 feet above a hillside.

Minimum of Grading

The stilt houses were built with a minimum of grading and designed to blend into the oak-studded canyon that extends more than a mile south of the Ventura Freeway, they said.

“They are integrated into the hillside and into nature,” stilt-house owner Steve Sadd said Friday. “This is a geologically unstable area. We’re very pleased with what happened today. We think it will ultimately benefit everybody by preserving a scenic area.”

Sadd said the small lots on the hillside are left over from a 1930s-era subdivision. A housing tract begun today in the area would have far fewer lots on the same acreage, he said.

Neighbor Ralph Lewis said he was disappointed that the city did not act sooner to protect the area. He said vibrations from recent excavation work and construction trucks have already damaged some of the homes.

“I had just finished patching cracks in my walls caused by the trucks on Wednesday, the day of the earthquake,” Lewis said. “Afterward I checked and none of the cracks had reopened.”

That’s proof, Lewis said, that man is a bigger threat to Stilt Street than Mother Nature.