‘Expandable House’ Nipped in Bud in L.A.

Gary Squier, a one-time Los Angeles city housing coordinator and now a Santa Monica consultant on housing and public policy, worked with San Diego financier Carl Hanson on a Southern California cousin of the Grow Home--something the two men call “expandable housing.”

If it could be built, the expandable house would be a two-story structure with a finished downstairs and an unfinished upper floor, the better to let people put in their own floor boards and dry wall when they have the money and the inclination, they say.

The expandable house would have introduced a new tier of wage-earners to the housing market--but the two proponents say they ran into a stone wall of municipal regulators, who opposed sales of unfinished housing to amateur handymen, for fear the buyers would build shoddy, dangerous add-ons.

“Los Angeles County said, ‘It’s a great design, but you have to finish the upstairs,’ ” says Hanson, noting that to finish the upstairs would have meant wiping out the main cost-savings of the house. He likes the sound of the Grow Home, but thinks it might face similar opposition.

“Is there a market for it? I’d say yes, there is,” he says. “It would be a good starter home. For single mothers, it would make sense. But communities in Los Angeles are increasingly sensitive to any kind of development at all, and if they see housing coming in as substandard or small, it’s going to be a hard sell.”