A Moving Experience : Entire Houses Are Trucked to New Sites as the City Sleeps

While Los Angeles slept, a small brown bungalow was carefully pulled out from between tall palm trees on a lot in Long Beach, hauled 10 miles through city streets to San Pedro, to the bottom of Billy Goat Hill.

That was the easy part, an operation so familiar to the men tending their 50-ton cargo that they drove the darkened thoroughfares at 15 m.p.h., slowing only to make turns and to navigate around potholes. The hard part would be scaling the hill.

House moving is common in Los Angeles, say city officials, who estimate that each week as many as eight homes or apartment buildings are jacked up from their foundations and taken to different locations.

But the industry works in the shadows because houses are only permitted to be moved between midnight and 6 a.m. “No one ever sees us,” said Doug Mitchell, the foreman for the crew moving the brown bungalow.

Occasionally, the public sees them, though not always intentionally. In April, a two-story apartment house got stuck in a roadway flower bed on its way from Burbank to Willowbrook. And later, the movers were delayed for weeks when the routes they wanted to use were closed off for Metro Rail construction.

But members of the local house-moving industry have been trying to get more attention from City Hall recently. They say that their livelihood is being threatened by Metro Rail as well as cable television, light rail and electric trolley lines, which increasingly make streets impassable for buildings in transit, known as “move-ons.”

“It’s making it real hard on us,” said Lamar McKay, the 43-year-old owner of Master Housemovers, the Encino-based company moving the brown house. “There are routes we’ve been using for 50 years that now you can’t cross.”

“It really has created a serious problem,” said William E. White, chief street use inspector for the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Maintenance. Washington Boulevard was once a prime house-moving route, he said, but recently became off limits in the downtown area because of tracks for the Blue Line. Other thoroughfares used by movers, such as Ventura Boulevard, have been proposed as routes for electric trolley lines.

“We’re trying to work out certain routes that can remain at a height of 24 feet in perpetuity,” White said.

City officials, acting on a motion introduced by Councilman John Ferraro, are preparing an ordinance to designate certain key streets as house-moving routes. The law would mandate that utility or transit lines be at least 24 feet high, enough for a normal two-story building to get under.

But McKay’s problem with the bungalow wasn’t low-hanging utility lines. It was Billy Goat Hill, named after goats kept on the land in the early 1900s. To reach its destination on Viewland Place, the house had to be hauled 150 feet up the steep, undeveloped hillside overlooking Los Angeles Harbor.

By dawn, McKay had the 1,300-square-foot stucco and frame bungalow-style dwelling at the foot of the weed-strewn hill.

Mark Daser, who had bought the move-on for a lot he owned on Viewland, stood at the crest of the hill and peered down at his investment. Local streets were too narrow, he said, so he had to get a special permit to pull the house up the undeveloped portion of the hill. Then Daser cut a path through the weeds.

“I’ve never done this before,” Daser, a 36-year-old longshoreman, said nervously. He had decided to move the house onto the lot, he said, because he discovered “it’s quite a bit cheaper than building.” The house cost him about $9,500, and the move cost an additional $16,000, plus a few thousand more for city permits. Daser, who lives in Lomita, said he plans to keep the house as a rental investment.

He had stayed up most of the night before watching his house being moved to San Pedro on what resembled giant dollies. Now he watched as McKay and his seven-man crew hooked steel cables from beneath the house to two trucks stationed at the top of Billy Goat Hill.

“We’ve bolted all the steel together, and we’ll have blocks behind each wheel in case it slips,” McKay told Daser.

As the crew started the winches, loud groaning noises filled the morning air as the house inched up the hill. The climb took more than four hours. A small crowd had gathered, including members of Daser’s family, various neighbors and Austin Jensen, 25, the broker who sold Daser the house.

Moving a house up a steep hill was unusual enough that it attracted Jensen’s 77-year-old grandfather, A. Marcus Jensen, a former house mover. The slim, white-haired man said he operated a house-moving business from 1935 to 1955, and recalled: “There were thousands of houses being moved in that era, because of the construction of the Pomona, Hollywood, Santa Monica, San Diego (freeways). . . . There were 28 house-moving companies and our company alone moved 10 a night.”

“It’s recycling you know, moving houses,” Jensen said with a grin.

About half a dozen companies operate in Los Angeles. Like the house from Long Beach, most move-ons are from properties where owners want to build larger homes, McKay said.

“Houses are being moved out of Long Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach,” he said, “1,500 to 2,000 square feet with oak floors, beautiful houses. We take them all over.” In recent weeks, he moved five houses in Costa Mesa that were slated for an Orange County low-cost housing program off land planned for redevelopment. He also moved five Victorian-style houses from Caltech in Pasadena off land needed for university expansion.

Many of the Los Angeles-area house-moving companies date to the turn of the century and are run by families in their third or fourth generation in the business. McKay has been in the business for 10 years.

The former owner of a camping and hiking supply store in Northridge, McKay said he became interested in house moving after he paid for one to be moved about 10 years ago. “I wasn’t happy with the way they did it,” he said, “so I started moving my own. I wasn’t planning to start a business but it worked out that way.”

Finally the house reached the crest of the hill, and Daser breathed a sigh of relief. The elder Jensen smiled. “In house movers’ language,” he said, “the baby is born.”