Locking In a Neighborhood’s Character

Helen Sipsas grew more and more frustrated as she gave a driving tour of her northwest Glendale neighborhood.

She stopped her sport utility vehicle in front of a Tudor-style home that sported a pair of crumbling Corinthian columns. West of Cumberland Heights, she zeroed in on a white iron fence decorated with a gold lion and on a neighboring home covered in a multi-tone faux brick facade.

“Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed,” Sipsas said.

She is not alone in her irritation. In response to lobbying by homeowners, the city of Glendale recently eased the process for establishing historic districts that limit changes owners may make to the exteriors of their homes.

Los Angeles already has 16 so-called Historic Preservation Overlay Zones, and efforts are underway to nearly double the number. Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Orange, Redondo Beach and San Fernando either have such programs or are considering them.

But governing architectural taste can be highly combustible, pitting rich against poor and old money against new. The conflicts can also have ethnic overtones, with some opponents asserting that they are being ordered to conform to an aging standard of American beauty that they do not share.

Earlier this year, voters in Santa Monica blocked a developer-backed initiative that would have made it more difficult to designate historic districts and landmarks.

In Hancock Park, one of Los Angeles’ most distinguished older neighborhoods, a proposed preservation zone has divided residents.

Members of the Hancock Park Homeowners Assn. want the zoning change to prevent the demolition of stately old homes and the rise of new McMansions. A survey of the neighborhood found that 104 of 1,171 homes no longer contribute to the community’s architectural fabric, according to Greg Glasser, who heads the association’s Historic Preservation Overlay Zone committee.

“Throughout Hancock Park, the pace of demolitions has increased,” said Glasser, who owns a 1925 Spanish Colonial Revival home. “If we don’t act now, the opportunity to retain an important piece of the history of Los Angeles will be lost.”

Restrictions Opposed

Opponents insist that new rules are unnecessary because most of Hancock Park’s elegant housing stock remains intact. The zoning change could also make it difficult for newcomers to update the neighborhood’s “old, tired jewels,” according to Michael Rosenberg, president of the more recently established Hancock Park Residents Assn., which is fighting proposed preservation zones in Hancock Park and nearby Larchmont Heights and Windsor Square.

“The problem you have is a minority group asserting their taste and wishes upon the rest of the community, which doesn’t need that,” said Rosenberg, whose home was built in the 1960s. In a particularly ostentatious clash of aesthetics in Hancock Park, a self-described entertainer named Norwood Young flanked a reproduction of the “Venus de Milo” with more than a dozen reproductions of Michelangelo’s “David” in front of his ornately fenced, ranch-style home.

“As long as the homes are neat, clean and the yards are manicured, then who cares if they are purple or green?” asked Young, who sported crystal-encrusted sunglasses, as Diva, his tiny, white Maltese with pink highlights, scampered about. Young has lived in the neighborhood about eight years.

But some find it gut-wrenching to see red-tile roofs replaced with composite shingles, aluminum sliders replacing wood-framed windows or, worse yet, older homes torn down.

“I don’t think you can shrug your shoulders and say it’s about taste,” said Catherine Barrier, a preservation advocate for the Los Angeles Conservancy. “It’s about who we are and where we came from.”

Some residents may not understand the history of their local architecture, said Jim Childs, secretary of the University Park Historic Preservation Overlay Zone near downtown Los Angeles. University Park, for example, has a large Latino community that Childs and other board members have worked to educate about the neighborhood’s Victorian homes.

“What they may not understand is how Victorian history is important to the development of Los Angeles,” Childs said. “Once they grasp that, there’s a sense of pride.”

The concerns are multicultural. San Fernando, for example, is hiring a consultant to help draft a preservation ordinance.

“We’re a Latino-majority city, so we’re a very immigrant community, yet we have prioritized historic preservation as a key for us,” said Councilman Steve Veres. “The more historic homes a city has, the more charming it is.”

The first preservation overlay zone in Los Angeles was established 20 years ago in Angelino Heights, a community rich with 19th-century Victorian homes located two miles northwest of downtown. By comparison, an application is pending for the Balboa Highlands, a collection of low-slung homes in Granada Hills built in the 1960s by Modernist developer Joseph Eichler.

If 15 additional zones are approved, the number of structures covered by preservation rules could jump from the current 7,920 in Los Angeles to more than 16,000, Barrier said. Some zones include commercial buildings.

To establish a zone, a majority of homeowners typically must support the plan for the city to initiate the lengthy application process, which ends with City Council approval.

Once such a zone is established, a five-member board, including at least three community residents, reviews proposals for exterior changes and issues approvals. Some approvals would still have to come from the city.

Standards for rehabilitation, established by the U.S. Department of the Interior, are used to evaluate projects, although a process is under consideration to allow communities to craft guidelines to reflect a neighborhood’s character.

In addition to preserving architecture, benefits to owners can include free renovation advice and, in some cases, lower property taxes.

The Los Angeles Conservancy is working with USC researchers to study home values in historic districts in comparison with those in unregulated neighborhoods, according to Ken Bernstein, the conservancy’s director of preservation issues. The group is also taking a count of historic preservation ordinances by surveying the county’s 88 cities.

Sipsas, who owns a two-story Spanish-revival home, said Glendale’s new ordinance was necessary to stop the “uglification” of a growing number of homes with what she described as bad plaster jobs, steel security doors and cheap-looking windows.

She blamed a proliferation of home decorating shows and so-called big-box hardware stores for promoting a quick-fix mentality about household repairs.

“We saw a number of homes changing and starting to lose their authentic look,” said Sipsas, vice president of the Glendale Historical Society. There were Spanish-style houses, she said, “that no longer at all looked Spanish.”

For some communities paint is an issue.

Alofa Anderson and her husband, Anthony, painted their 1922 bungalow in Long Beach’s Rose Park Historic District a vibrant shade of yellow with black trim. They wanted a bumblebee house that would be cheery for the children who attend the day-care center Alofa operates in their home and also would remind her of the brightly colored homes of her native Samoa.

Approval Needed

Typically, homeowners in Long Beach historic districts must obtain certificates of “appropriateness” from the city before making changes ranging from second-story additions to paint color.

“The feeling in Long Beach is that a home’s color can have a very dramatic, visual impact,” said Ruthann Lehrer, the Long Beach neighborhood and historic preservation officer. “I get the most calls complaining about color.” The Andersons said they were unaware when they had their home painted in 2000 that Long Beach had designated Rose Park a historic district in 1996. After the color scheme set the neighborhood abuzz, the city slapped the Andersons with a violation notice and forwarded the case to prosecutors.

With four children and a mortgage, Anthony Anderson said he could not afford to repaint his home and offered to let the city change the color. But he also questioned whose culture he was being forced to conform with.

“The uniqueness of color application is as unique as the multicultural society we live in,” he wrote in a letter to a Long Beach city official. “The character of any neighborhood doesn’t have to be defined as dark, drab, subdued or dreary.”

City prosecutors were ultimately reluctant to charge the couple over their choice of paint, according to Lehrer, so the house remains yellow and black.