Front Lawns in Lawndale May Be OKd for Parking

Lawndale is flirting with its old reputation as “Billy Goat Acres,” with four City Council members and several residents in favor of codifying the city’s time-honored practice of allowing parking on front lawns.

At the direction of the council majority, acting Planning Director Kendra S. Morries is drafting a proposal for the April 20 council meeting that would allow residents to pave a single parking space in their front yards if the property does not otherwise allow the amount of parking required by zoning.

Some residents and planners view front-yard parking as an aesthetic horror, and the Lawndale Planning Commission formally has opposed it.

But among Lawndale residents--many of whom have expressed an unshakable attachment to their cars, trucks and recreational vehicles by parking them on their lawns--there is considerable support for the practice. And the council has steadfastly refused to enact a law that would empower the city to remove junk cars from private property, holding that a vehicle owner’s property rights are paramount.

At a March 16 council meeting, Steve Mino appealed to council members to overturn the Planning Commission’s recommendation against front-yard parking. He said he believes that banning such parking “discriminates against older homes” where the size of the lot or the configuration of structures prohibit sufficient parking.

He said that many older duplexes in Lawndale were designed with a parking spot in the interior of the lot; those spaces often are not used because they are blocked if another resident parks in the driveway. This forces parking onto the streets, he said. Some older single-family properties also do not have enough space for parking, others said.

Residents Favored Plan

Residents Nancy Marthens and Ralph Williams also spoke in favor of allowing residents to pave a parking pad on their front lawns to help solve the city’s serious parking shortage.

Of the five council members, only Dan McKenzie said he opposed the practice. He said that to allow it would bring back the days when “if you said you were from Lawndale, people would say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where people park junk cars on their front yard.’ ”

The issue of lawn parking arose in this small, blue-collar city in December, 1977, when the city sought residents’ voluntary compliance in removing cars from front lawns. By August, 1978, officials conceded that the plea had not worked. In that period, the city handed out more than 500 advisory notices for vehicles parked on front lawns.

The City Council held public hearings in 1980, but opinion was mixed and the council tabled the matter indefinitely.

The issue resurfaced in 1984, when the council passed an ordinance against front-yard parking. In 1985, the council voted to exempt properties where paved front-yard parking spaces existed before Jan. 7, 1985.

At that time, then-Councilman Jim Ramsey said that banning such parking is one way “to clean up Lawndale and get rid of the Billy Goat Acres syndrome,” referring to its free-wheeling, rural past.

Over the years, lawn parking and the city’s installation of plastic grass in the Hawthorne Boulevard median have given jokesters plenty of uses for the slogan “Let’s Keep the Lawn in Lawndale.”

Former city Planning Director Mark Winogrond, now the planning chief in West Hollywood, said in an interview Friday that he knows of no other city that has codified front-lawn parking. People who park on their front lawns in other cities get away with it because of a lack of enforcement personnel, he said.

Among professional planners, he said, lawn parking generally is viewed as an eyesore that detracts from residential neighborhoods.

However, in Lawndale, he said, “there is not as large a constituency for aesthetic support as in some other communities.”

‘Taken by Surprise’

Morries, who is acting planning director while Jim Arnold serves as acting city manager, would only say “this is a step in a different direction” from the city’s 1984-85 ordinance. “It is a step that has taken me by surprise,” she said.

Morries said she has not ironed out details of the staff proposal that will be submitted to the council April 20.

At the council’s March 16 meeting, four members indicated that they favor a return to lawn parking to help solve the city’s chronic parking shortage.

“We need to do some bending” on the issue, Councilman Harold E. Hofmann said. Councilman Larry Rudolph said that lawn parking really amounts to just widening the driveway “to get some of those cars off the street.” Councilwoman Carol Norman said that with proper landscaping, a parking pad in the front yard could be made attractive and would alleviate congestion on Lawndale’s narrow streets.

Mayor Sarann Kruse, a former opponent of lawn parking, said that while she is concerned about aesthetics, she thinks the city needs to provide more parking. Modifications of the city’s ban on lawn parking are necessary to help owners of older properties that cannot accommodate enough parking, she said.