The Stucco Wars: an Easy Fix or Eyesore?

Dale Trader’s heart sank when he looked across his shady Pasadena street one day and spotted workers wrapping a classic California bungalow in layers of chicken wire and thick, black tar paper.

Another house was about to be stuccoed.

Trader rushed across the street to dissuade his neighbors from covering their home’s wood siding. “It’s a shame you are doing that,” he told the Vietnamese-born couple, who listened politely before allowing workers to smear a layer of stucco over their 80-year-old cottage.

“We lost another [house],” Trader said later in an interview, “and it’s probably not ever going to be brought back.”

The exchange between Trader--a film executive as well as a preservation activist--and his neighbors on Rio Grande Avenue is only one minor tiff in a much broader conflict being waged in older neighborhoods across metropolitan Los Angeles.

Here in these mostly working-class enclaves, passionate preservationists are clashing with a rising number of lower-income immigrant home buyers. At issue is the area’s dwindling inventory of Craftsman-style bungalows and Victorian cottages--humble abodes that offered an earlier generation a chance to live in single-family homes on a scale never before seen in this country.

Today, sheathed in redwood siding and shingles, these architectural relics stand out in a Southern California landscape awash in stuccoed tract homes and mini-malls. But the upkeep can be so costly that stucco is seen as a good way to cut down on maintenance expenses.

In some ways the struggle against stucco echoes the battles waged decades ago in eastern cities over the installation of aluminum and vinyl siding over old brick houses--a covering widely derided as declasse.

Stuccoing is “a tremendous atrocity,” said Rafael Garcia, who has spent nearly 40 years trying to save turn-of-the-century Victorian-style homes near USC. “I hate people who stucco.”

Although there is no accurate record of how many bungalows in metropolitan Los Angeles have been stuccoed, preservationists believe that the number runs in the thousands. Local building permits are required to stucco a house, but approvals are granted routinely.

As a result, preservationists and their allies have launched concerted efforts to save neighborhoods from the stucco make-overs.

They have distributed bilingual brochures titled “Deberia Emplastar Mi Casa de Madera?” (Should I Stucco My Wood House?) in the heavily Latino neighborhoods of Highland Park, Pasadena and Long Beach.

Their answer: an emphatic “No” in both languages. Instead, the brochure says that a properly maintained house with wood siding will look better and sell for more money than one that has been stuccoed.

The anti-stucco campaign has also illuminated--and in some cases magnified--the differences in race, culture and class that cut across many Southern California communities. The demands of upper- and middle-class residents to preserve old homes often comes across as condescending and meddlesome to many immigrant homeowners.

“How do you expect them to bring [older homes] back to life when they don’t have the cash?” said Robert Silva, office manager for Las Casas Realty, which sells many homes to Latino immigrants in Highland Park and South-Central Los Angeles. “It takes money to restore these homes.”

Old homes have been stuccoed for decades by different groups of people, but the issue has come to a head in recent years as one by-product of the influx of Latino and Southeast Asian immigrants into the Southern California housing market. Plunging prices during the recession made homes far more affordable, and immigrants could find old, two-bedroom homes for under $80,000.

Most of these homes, quite modest in size and design, have little chance of ever being designated historic landmarks. However, some architectural historians argue that they create a unique historic environment and ambience worthy of protecting when clustered in communities such as Echo Park, Angelino Heights and South-Central Los Angeles.

Built by the scores of thousands, mostly before the Depression, these bungalows and cottages permitted people of modest means to own a single-family home, according to architectural historians.

Factory workers could afford a tiny version of a Colonial-style house--complete with Roman-style columns on the front porch and arched windows over the front door--in South-Central for as little as $500 down.

“That’s what set Los Angeles apart,” said Christy McAvoy, managing partner of the Historic Resources Group, an architectural preservation firm. “Working-class people [in other major cities] didn’t have the opportunity to have their single-family house” on such a large scale.

But the historical and architectural significance of these homes is often overshadowed by high maintenance costs. Many are more than 70 years old, and often require frequent paint jobs and other costly repairs to replace rotted or termite-damaged wood siding, window frames and doors. Hiring a professional to repaint the siding and trim of a small bungalow can cost at least $2,000.

Stucco can be a fast and relatively inexpensive way to cut down on maintenance and spruce up a tired-looking old house.

It was the high cost of painting and other repairs that led Lionel Mejia to pay $10,000 to stucco the wood siding of his rambling Victorian-style home in the partially gentrified Adams-Normandie section near USC. Mejia said he had grown weary of spending $4,000 every two or three years to repaint the 90-year-old house, which has been divided into several apartments.

But the stucco work was abruptly halted when a neighbor reported the remodeling to city officials. It turns out that the house is in a protected historic district where it is difficult, if not impossible, to get a city permit to stucco an old home.

As a result, Mejia’s hulking Victorian sits wrapped in black tar paper and chicken wire sans stucco. “I would like to fix it up, but it’s very expensive and I don’t have the money,” said Mejia, who works in a hardware store stockroom.

Preservationists often argue that the costs of maintaining wood have been overblown and point out that stucco also needs to be repainted and occasionally resurfaced to cover cracks. Preserving the wood on an older home not only protects a neighborhood’s historic character and charm but boosts a home’s resale value, they say.

Despite brochures and historic district restrictions, preservationists concede that they have failed to win over many immigrant homeowners.

In Pasadena, real estate agent and preservationist Astrid Ellersieck has used the city’s history to promote and sell homes in Bungalow Heaven, where middle-class families and professionals pay a premium to buy and restore homes shingled and sided in wood.

But Ellersieck said she does not know how to communicate the value of these homes to the many immigrant newcomers who have settled in Pasadena in recent years. She has found that promoting the higher resale value of a well-preserved, old bungalow holds little interest to new immigrants, who often plan on owning their property for a lifetime.

“It’s really difficult to have a major impact on the lower-income families that simply do not have any interest in preserving their property,” said Ellersieck. “They don’t have any particular interest in architecture and design.”

In working with Latino immigrant clients, Pasadena real estate broker Enrique J. Lizarazu said he advises buyers of old homes not to stucco over the wood siding and other features that make them unique. But he said it puts him in the uncomfortable position of telling people what to do with their property.

“It’s like telling you what kind of clothes to wear,” Lizarazu said.

The immigrant buyers blamed for ruining homes with stucco are the same ones who will help stabilize communities, said Fernando J. Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Like all homeowners, immigrants who buy houses are more likely to get involved in their neighborhood activities and take a greater interest in their surroundings.

But immigrants also need to be educated about the historical importance of their homes and neighborhoods, added Guerra, who recently visited Highland Park and was shocked to discover that his family’s old Victorian house had been stuccoed.

“It took all the character out of that home,” said Guerra. “You look at the house now and it’s ugly.”

Highland Park--a predominantly Latino neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles--is one of the few communities in the region where preservationists have succeeded in winning government protections that make it difficult to stucco an old house.

Since 1993, a large section of Highland Park that includes 3,000 properties fell under the control of a historic preservation zone. Any exterior remodeling must be reviewed by a citizens panel to see if it complies with historic design guidelines. As a result, homeowners who want to stucco their old bungalows may find that their remodeling plans would violate the law.

However, preservationists and homeowners have discovered that compromise is the key, said Eduardo P. Reyes, chief deputy of economic development for Los Angeles Councilman Mike Hernandez, who represents the area.

Some homeowners have been permitted to stucco their homes except for walls visible from the street, a solution that minimizes the financial burden on the homeowner and protects the neighborhood’s historic character, Reyes said.

“There is tension. . . . Many people still don’t like it,” said Reyes of the preservation zone. But “we have a rich history in this city that should be preserved.”

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Back on Rio Grande Avenue in Pasadena, Trader, the preservationist, has seen how his neighbors have split over his anti-stucco crusade. “It’s a touchy issue. It puts people against each other,” said Trader, who lives in a wood-clad, Colonial Revival-style cottage.

Neighbor Gary Lindt sides with the preservationists.

“Stucco sucks,” said Lindt, a steel foundry manager who lives across the street from the Vietnamese couple who stuccoed their house. “They are nice people, but it should have been left the way it was. It changes the whole character of the neighborhood.”

Down the block, Frank, a Mexican immigrant and maintenance worker, said a coat of stucco will improve the appearance of his wood-shingled house and cut down on costly paint jobs and other maintenance. Trader has tried to talk Frank--who would not give his last name--out of remodeling the exterior of the 80-year-old house. It didn’t work.

“I thought he was crazy,” Frank said while gardening in his front yard. “It’s up to each person to do what they want to their house.”