Real Estate Boom Arrives in 3 Working-Class Cities
It should come as no surprise that Los Angeles County’s fastest-growing cities, Palmdale, Lancaster and Santa Clarita, saw big increases in assessed property values last year.
But Hawaiian Gardens, Lawndale and Pico Rivera?
The three working-class towns reported double-digit growth in assessed property values, according to a new report from the Los Angeles County assessor’s office, placing them among the top gainers in the region.
These cities don’t boast the best material for real estate brochures -- they lack sparkling new housing tracts, and some areas struggle with crime and poor schools.
But as the region’s housing-price boom -- some say bubble -- stretches into its fifth year, it has reached into even these long-overlooked corners.
Cities such as Hawaiian Gardens have things that home buyers are looking for, said county Assessor Rick Auerbach: central locations, easy freeway access and relatively affordable prices.
“These are homes people can get into -- people who didn’t have a home before, people who are trying to get into a little higher-priced home,” he said.
Frank Amaro is one such buyer. Two months ago, he bought a three-bedroom house in Hawaiian Gardens for $360,000. He knew about the city’s reputation as a poor community with serious gang problems. Just after he closed escrow, a sheriff’s deputy was fatally shot in the small city just north of Long Beach, allegedly by a gang member.
But Amaro, a 42-year-old public works employee for Hawaiian Gardens, said he had no second thoughts. He was impressed driving through the city and seeing so many people fixing up their houses, he said.
The relatively low price gives him and his four children a full house with a backyard, rather than a unit in a condo complex. The city is right off the San Gabriel River Freeway and is a short ride from the beach -- both key selling points.
As for the crime and blight, Amaro is confident that Hawaiian Gardens will improve as more new residents move in.
“We have a few bad apples,” he said. “The city’s not all like that.”
With home prices rising, Hawaiian Gardens has taken steps to spruce itself up. Those include a “white picket fence program,” through which the city pays most of the cost of replacing chain-link security fences around frontyards with faux wood models that look less prison-like.
Acting City Administrator Ernesto Marquez said the program had prompted homeowners to make their own improvements, such as painting their houses and planting gardens.
The influx of new residents is also helping spur a revival in commercial development in Hawaiian Gardens and elsewhere. Retailers are drawn in part because rising property values mean that higher-income residents are moving in, the kind of demographic shift that attracts developers and chain stores.
Marquez said the city was working with developers to build on two commercial parcels that had been dormant for years. One property, the site of an old HomeBase shuttered about five years ago, will be turned into a shopping complex with two anchor stores. The other will probably have retail stores and a gasoline station.
“We have people coming in all the time for a listing of vacant properties -- two or three calls a week,” Marquez said.
Similar changes have come to Pico Rivera, a predominantly Latino community of apartments and tidy one-story stucco bungalows about 12 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
The city spearheaded a redevelopment project that brought a shopping center complete with a Lowe’s and a Borders bookstore to the site of the long-vacant Northrop Grumman aerospace plant. City leaders are about to break ground on a 14-screen movie theater and shopping complex.
Residents have watched with amazement as real estate prices have exploded in the last year and a half. Manuel Robledo, 42, said that more than half the residents of his block had moved in over the last two years and that most of them had immediately begun fixing up and expanding their homes.
Robledo’s house still has peeling paint and bare-bones landscaping, but many of his neighbors on Calico Avenue have given their houses major face-lifts, planting palm trees and beds of blossoming flowers and installing swimming pools out back.
He has lived on the block, lined with modest tract houses, more than 30 years but has never seen such extensive renovation, let alone luxuries such as tropical landscaping.
“Back in the day, they couldn’t afford it,” Robledo said.
Even though the improvements have left his house the block’s eyesore, he is excited about the changes. Some of his new neighbors, fresh from their remodeling projects, have offered to help him install tile flooring in his house.
“I try to compete, but my money flow isn’t as good,” said Robledo, a warehouse worker who is on medical disability at present.
Land-use experts say Pico Rivera’s experience is being duplicated across the region as buyers search for any single-family home they can afford without incurring a killer commute.
Lawndale, a South Bay city of 32,000, has long lived in the shadow of its more expensive neighbors. Straddling the San Diego Freeway between Hawthorne and Torrance, it does not conjure up images of surf and sand. No one is going to confuse Lawndale’s main drag, Hawthorne Boulevard, with Pacific Coast Highway.
But as home prices in seaside communities such as Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach have skyrocketed, some buyers have begun taking a look inland to the modest tracts of Lawndale.
Don Ruane, associate broker at Real Estate West in Manhattan Beach, now touts Lawndale’s virtues to home buyers, noting that it is close to upscale beach cities and is less than four miles from the ocean. The pitch appears to be working: Ruane’s firm has sold 12 homes in the city in the last year.
“They have been outstanding,” Ruane said. “There’s a lot of pent-up demand. I don’t see an end to this anytime soon.”
Assessed values in Lawndale grew 13.1% in 2004, while Hawaiian Gardens’ values went up 16.7% and Pico Rivera’s 12.7%. (Lancaster had the highest increase in assessed value in Los Angeles County, 20.8%.)
“In the past years, the high-end homes had some great increases. Now the sales activity on the high-end homes has slowed down,” Auerbach said. As a result, “these cities that have more moderately priced homes are showing greater increases.”
Despite the sudden rise in home values, long-time residents of these cities note that their problems have far from disappeared. In Pico Rivera, for example, Robledo and his neighbors point to graffiti, drag racing, gang crimes and the security fences that line many yards.
And even as newcomers arrive, some longtime residents see the rise in home values as their ticket out.
Yolanda Santos, 57, has lived on Columbia Avenue about 40 years, but has long dreamed of moving to San Bernardino County because of the “hoodlums” who wander her neighborhood causing trouble.
Pico Rivera’s new housing boom has her thinking seriously of cashing out the $500,000 she now believes she can get for her small bungalow.
“I think it’s great,” she said. “I can sell it.”
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Property values
Three working-class Los Angeles suburbs made the county assessor’s list of fastest-rising property values.
*--* Top six cities % increase, 2004 Lancaster 20.8% Palmdale 19.2 Hawaiian Gardens 16.7 Santa Clarita 14.9 Lawndale 13.1 Pico Rivera 12.7
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Source: Los Angeles County assessor
