Inside Tracts
For six years, Susan Hallums called Newport Beach home. But tired of plunking down $2,000 a month in rent, she knew she had to lower her sights to buy a place of her own.
“I didn’t want to compromise and leave Orange County, but in Newport Beach you can’t buy anything new for less than $500,000 to $600,000,” she said.
It turned out that Hallums, 46, didn’t have to compromise much. She fell for a new 2,000-square-foot home in a gated community in Buena Park with a more reasonable price tag: $280,000.
Built on the site of a former drive-in theater, Hallums’ home is conveniently situated near the 91 Freeway, its spacious kitchen is filled with modern appliances and it even sports a second-story laundry room.
“No more lugging baskets of clothes upstairs,” Hallums said. “Now all I do is walk my dish cloths downstairs.”
Hallums’ tale illustrates the benefits of what is referred to in the home building industry as “infill” development.
Rather than furthering urban sprawl by building on the region’s outskirts, hundreds of new homes are built each year on vacant or underused parcels in established neighborhoodsthroughout Southern California.
It was once a game played mainly by a handful of smaller builders, but competition for available sites has grown heated among builders of all sizes.
Brokers drive up and down streets searching for a dilapidated motel, a spacious parking lot or even an old chicken ranch for builders to transform into new homes.
In Southern California, infill is expected to play a small yet important role in easing the region’s insatiable demand for housing, which is being fueled by its fast-growing population. By 2020, Southern California is projected to add the population of two cities the size of Chicago.
“The question is, where is everybody going to live?” said Joe Carreras, manager of comprehensive planning at the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “Infill will play a key role in the equation.”
Infill homes are popular with buyers like Hallums who disdain long commutes and covet the chance to buy something both new and innovative. Perceptive builders have taken notice in a variety of ways.
* In a bold experiment on a 35-acre parcel in Harbor City, middle-class families are snatching up homes built among identical ones that house hundreds of families on public assistance. (See accompanying story.)
* Neighborhoods in Old Town Pasadena, Santa Monica and near L.A.’s Melrose Avenue have been targeted for spacious Soho-style lofts for the young, hip and well-heeled.
* And in the San Fernando Valley, 186 homes priced less than $170,000 are expected to be built across the street from a MetroLink station in an effort to encourage people to commute by train.
Prying people from their cars is also the aim of developers of what is perhaps the biggest and best infill site left in Southern California, if not the nation: Playa Vista.
Situated on 1,087 acres of prime West Los Angeles real estate, Playa Vista is expected to include 13,000 new homes, ranging from low-income apartments to mansions.
Much of the project’s parking will be underground, and a tram, whose location may be computer-monitored, will be available to whisk people to restaurants, shops and offices.
Some observers contend that Playa Vista is too big to meet the classic definition of infill, however. Usually parcels are less than 10 acres and bordered by existing development on at least three sides.
Houses are typically built close to one another on small lots, giving them a somewhat cookie-cutter appearance. And more often than not, they have noticeably small frontyards and backyards, which residents like Hallums don’t seem to mind.
As long as homeowners can buy a single-family home where they are close to their jobs, experts say, they are usually pretty happy. Infill development, according to urban designer Marc Futterman, advances the notion a step further by creating suburban developments in very tight urban settings.
“The typical single-family suburban development has a great place in the mythos of America,” Futterman said. “We identify so strongly with it and it’s so important to us that we have it.
“Good infill development bridges the suburban ideal in our mind with the fact that it’s in an existing urban area.”
Indeed, when Steve Leon, a public relations specialist, began shopping for a new home four years ago with his then-fiancee and now-wife, Jacquela, the couple initially shopped all over Orange County but refrained from buying.
“I wasn’t going to put her through a two- to three- hour commute from Orange County,” said Leon, whose wife works in downtown Los Angeles. “That meant we had to look closer in.”
Attractive Location
Their search led them to a new 2,600-square-foot home on an infill project built by Lewis Homes that adjoins oil fields along La Cienega Boulevard. The home’s nearly $500,000 price tag was more than the couple had hoped to pay, but the Ladera Heights location was hard to beat.
“Not only does our family live nearby, but it’s a 10-minute drive to the airport and 20 minutes to downtown,” Leon said. “And you don’t have to get on the freeway.”
Another attractive feature, which Leon had not anticipated when he bought his home, is the close bonds that he and his neighbors at Ladera Crest Heights Estates have forged over the years among themselves as well as with the larger community.
“I don’t want to say we’re isolated because we’re in the middle of Los Angeles, yet there’s a definite sense of neighborhood here that I don’t think exists in every other community,” said Leon, who is secretary of the Ladera Heights Civic Assn. “We know each other here.”
Hallums, who has owned four other homes, has had a similar experience with her neighbors in Buena Park. Perhaps, she suggested, it’s because the homes are so close to one another. “It seems like we talk more here,” she said.
But plunking down dozens of new homes in an old neighborhood changes its look and feel, sometimes to the chagrin of neighbors.
When an infill project replaced a row of seedy motels in Pico Rivera, it changed the area, said longtime resident Ralph Maese, but not for the better.
Locked inside a gated-community--infill developments often are gated--the newcomers, according to Maese, have done little to get to know him and his neighbors.
“I don’t like it because they think they’re better than the rest of us,” Maese, 51, said. “I’ve tried to be friendly and wave at them as they come and go, but they just give me the look.”
Maese’s 28-year-old son, Anthony, however, believes the homes have introduced stability to a community once overrun with drug dealers and transients.
“I think it’s been a good thing,” the younger Maese said. “And I’m optimistic that it will eventually raise property values.”
Infill development began in Southern California several decades ago when home builders began returning to older Los Angeles neighborhoods in search of vacant parcels of land that were passed over during previous waves of development. But as the region’s borders have expanded, so have the boundaries for infill.
Infill accounts for roughly 10% to 15% of new homes built each year across Southern California, with the figure rising as high as 35% in Los Angeles County, according to Bob Bray of the Meyers Group, consultant to home builders.
Though over the years a number of builders have carved out a niche by focusing on infill, during this decade in particular the field of players has grown. The reasons, according to observers, range from land becoming more and more scarce in Orange County to infill’s ability to sell well even during the recessionary days of the early 1990s.
“Fourteen years ago, there were not as many people wanting to do infill. . . . Back then people wanted to do Valencia, Ventura County and Palmdale,” said Jeff Lee, president of the Lee Group, which has teamed up with the Braemar Group to build the Village Green homes opposite the MetroLink station in the San Fernando Valley.
“But in the 1990s, developers have come to the conclusion that a lot of people want to live close to the community where they work, where their friends are and where they grew up,” he added.
Consequently, competition for available sites has driven up land prices, making infill development slightly less profitable for some home builders. Others have gone out of their way to forge strong relationships with cities that provide tax incentives, cheap leases, fee breaks or density bonuses in an effort to pave the way for new housing.
And though there was a time when builders would usually consider only parcels big enough to build at least 75 to 150 homes, some are now snapping up parcels of 10 to 15 lots.
Builders are not the only ones interested in playing the infill game, however.
The nation’s largest source of home mortgages, Fannie Mae, is also getting involved with infill in a number of ways. Fannie Mae is not only providing financing for construction of the Village Green project, which straddles Sylmar and the city of San Fernando, it is also creating special mortgages for buyers.
The mortgages will take into consideration the savings that Village Green homeowners will reap by being close to a major public transportation source, which they are likely to use, and by generating their own electricity through solar-power technology built into the roofs’ shingles.
“We understand people living out there will be paying less for their energy and transportation and will use that savings to underwrite their mortgages,” said Barbara Zeidman, director of Fannie Mae’s Los Angeles partnership office. “It’s how we use our strength and knowledge to make infill more attractive.”
Though infill homes may be popular among buyers, they pose their own set of problems for builders. Nearly all remaining sites have some sort of problem that must be addressed: One parcel may need to be rezoned, another may need a toxic cleanup and still another project may hinge on the support it can garner from city officials or neighbors with Not in My Back Yard attitudes.
“Most easy sites are now gone,” said Randall Lewis, executive vice president of marketing for Upland-based Lewis Homes. “And yet the demand for new housing is stronger than ever.”
For builders who possess the wherewithal to solve such problems, the payoffs can be handsome, especially if they can get their hands on a good-sized lot. Infill homes often sell for from 20% to 25% more than existing homes in the same neighborhood, and once a site’s problems have been solved, they usually move fast.
Larry Webb, who heads Irvine-based John Laing Homes, said it took his company five years to rezone and obtain permits for the Buena Park project that Hallums bought into. But after that, they were able to build, sell and move people into 224 homes in a year and a half.
“Not every builder is comfortable with infill sites,” Webb said. “A lot of them are put off by potential physical or political issues. It’s much harder to develop than building 100 lots in south Orange County.”
As they cut through the red tape, savvy home builders are carefully studying who their buyers will be, which can affect everything from a home’s layout to the number of bedrooms and even the yard’s size.
Steve Olson, chairman of the Seal Beach-based Olson Co., which specializes in what he likes to describe as “in town” communities, relies on computer software programs to study buyer profiles. When building infill homes, Olson tries to pinpoint where his buyers shop, what kinds of cars they drive and their ethnicity.
“Feng shui is a reality,” said Olson. “It’s one of the things we deal with.” (Feng shui is the ancient Chinese art of placement of physical objects to harmonize with the forces of nature.)
At Playa Vista, one of the first parks to be developed will be a “bark park,” because marketers for the mega-project have determined that residents will have more dogs than children.
And gambling on a need for funky places for young software and entertainment industry executives to live has prompted infill builder Avi Brosh of the Braemar Group to plan Soho-style lofts for Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica and Old Town Pasadena. Brosh has dubbed his creations, which will cost from $300,000 to $800,000, “vertical infill.”
“We’re moving into that niche,” Brosh said. “These are people who want to hang a cool piece of art and have a futon sofa and that’s it.”
