Creative Residential Design Needed

The successful renovation of old apartment complexes in Hollywood and West Hollywood is the kind of “urban in-fill” approach to housing that San Fernando Valley neighborhood associations have been clamoring for for years. Why? Because by pushing for more dense development in Los Angeles’ urban core, residents who live on the city’s suburban edges hope to keep new houses from crowding their neighborhoods.

OK, so the Valley is known as the epicenter of NIMBYism for a reason. Still, Not-In-My-Backyard selfishness aside, making creative use of old buildings and close-in neighborhoods is a smart approach to both providing housing and fighting sprawl and all its attendant problems: traffic, congestion, pollution and a deteriorating sense of community.

But Los Angeles’ housing needs will not be met by old apartment buildings alone. Creative ways can be found to build more houses even in suburban neighborhoods where the backyard barbecue reigns supreme.

Take an experiment underway in Seattle, another city grappling with exponential growth and shrinking housing supplies.

A developer there built new old houses, creating a cottage community or “bungalow courts,” as they were called in an earlier Seattle. The new development of six detached two-bedroom, one-and-one-half-bath cottages and three one-bedroom, one-bath plus loft carriage houses atop the development’s nine-car garage was built on the equivalent of two city lots in an established neighborhood of single-family homes.

Cottages and carriage houses built atop garages are no longer allowed under Seattle zoning laws, but the Ravenna Cottages development won an exemption as an “innovative residential design solution” to Seattle’s housing shortage.

The developer had looked around to see what kinds of housing people wanted and found vintage cottages and carriage houses in older neighborhoods to be coveted rentals.

He then asked residents in the Green Lake neighborhood what they wanted. At first, they resisted any increase in density, fearing traffic and other problems. Big-box apartment buildings were definitely out. But in meeting with the developer, they came to accept the cottages as a friendlier approach.

Like the old-style Hollywood apartments, the cottages are clustered around a central courtyard. And, although small (only 838 and 970 square feet), they have turn-of-the-century Craftsman touches and amenities such as fireplaces, pantries and French doors, again like Hollywood’s increasingly popular heirlooms.

Would clustered cottages work in Los Angeles? In the Valley? The Hollywood experience signals that it might.

If Los Angeles is to solve its housing crisis, it will take this kind of creative and cooperative effort by both developers and neighborhoods.