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Buying Up the Block and Letting It Rot: Signs of Future Development in Your Neighborhood by Damian Gatto Are you wondering if and when the house down the block—the one with the boarded-up windows, holes in the roof, and sagging awning—will be rented again? Or, perhaps you’re curious as to why your next-door neighbor’s home addition seems to be taking forever, and why they have taken the house utterly and completely apart? Even stranger still, have you noticed the whole block of single-family homes down the street that have been fenced off? This article covers the not-so-subtle indicators of future development in your neighborhood. There will also be mention of certain methods property owners and developers use to expedite their projects, maximize the output of their projects, and even make their projects possible in the first place. CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW I. The "Leave One Wall Standing" Technique You’ve probably heard this phrase before. It refers to loopholes in zoning codes all over the United States. Property owners can disassemble their house to the point where just one elevation—or merely one part of one elevation—is left standing. Yet, the project is classified as a “remodel”, not as a new construction. (Source: TheEastsiderLA) Some homeowners would want to avoid the new construction assessment, since in many cities and towns across the country, fees and exactions for new construction permits are more costly than addition or alter-repair permits. Permits for new construction often have added requirements, such as further environmental review and imposition of exactions. Officially, the LA Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) does not assess property renovations and demolitions in this manner. Official policy dictates that the property be assessed proportionally to the extent that it was demolished. At the end of the day, though, should the owner decide to travel the “one wall standing” route, they do receive credits based on what remains of the structure, effectively lowering their permit fees, even if by a small amount. In any case, once the permit for this “addition” has been approved—and while nobody is looking—the owner may covertly remove the one or few remaining walls, effectively rendering the project a complete demolition. This is probably the most common method by which people “McMansion” their homes. I direct you to Highland Park as our example of this method. This home on Echo Street was remodeled into a two-story residence in 2015. The zoning remained the same as the immediate surrounding area. However, the owners managed to max out the building dimensions by retaining one wall of the garage, at the very northwest corner of the lot, and another of the residence itself, at the rear of the lot. Above: A completely gutted home on Echo Street within Highland Park's historic preservation overlay zone (HPOZ). Highland Park presents a unique case in that unlike a lot of real estate hotbeds in Los Angeles, a large portion of Highland Park falls under historic preservation review, and as such is largely immune to much of the dense re-development that occurs all over the city. (Source: The author) II. Let It Rot Speaking words of wisdom here. An extreme but increasingly common method used to free up space on parcels is to gradually (and often, secretly) cause irreversible damage to the structures. Certain types of damage to a structure can render it uninhabitable, possibly placing the property in a position to be condemned. Examples of this type of damage include damaged load-bearing walls, a failing foundation, a collapsed roof, and dry rot constituting more than 50% of a structure's total surface area. Above: The Barnsdall Park estate of Charles E. Boog, which since 2011 has been left to deteriorate by the developer-owners of the property. (Source: The author) This bungalow court near Barnsdall Park is the 1911-14 estate of Charles E. Boog, an early resident of Los Feliz. The two lots together contain four bungalows, one of which is built in the true Arts-and-Crafts style, and another in the Airplane Bungalow style. As recently as 2009, they were occupied. Suddenly, in early 2011, they were boarded up. The current owners of the bungalows, CEN FED Ltd., also own the adjacent nightclub (also boarded up) and the empty lot facing Hollywood Boulevard. CEN FED is the same company who developed the new Orchard Hardware Store across the street. They also have their eyes on the mini-mall on the eastern side of Edgemont Street. The company owns the better part of the western half of the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Edgemont Street, having slowly acquired the lots over a long period of time. (See Section III of this article below: “Buying Up the Block”) Seven years after being shuttered up, these bungalows remain in blighted condition without any sign of scheduled maintenance. The porch of one bungalow is failing. Three of four bungalows have holes in their roofs and warped exterior clapboards. Of course, they have also become graffiti magnets, as vacant, boarded-up properties tend to be. UPDATE late 2018: The Boog Estate has been demolished. UPDATE 2019: The mini-mall has been demolished and the Orchard Hardware is already vacant. Another example of the “let it rot” method was employed in Everett Park, an old neighborhood above Sunset Boulevard, just outside Downtown LA. Some know of it as teardrop park. By the 2000s, the oldest standing home in the neighborhood was an 1899 bungalow with American Foursquare influences. Below: The oldest house left in Everett Park, a hillside neighborhood north of Downtown Los Angeles. (Source: The author) As late as 2013, the home was occupied, but in poor exterior condition. By 2015, the home bore a severely collapsed roof, a sagging awning, and rotted clapboards. In the summer of 2016, it was approved for demolition. (Frankly, a roof does not collapse in just two-and-a-half years by its own accord, which leads one to wonder whether the damage was intentionally inflicted.) It is a bummer people don’t move more of these old houses, especially the large ones. In some cases, the total cost for an empty single-family parcel (anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000) and a structural relocation ($50,000 to $200,000) could be less than the price of a purchasing a property in most districts of Central Los Angeles—which as of 2018 is $560,000 plus! III. Buy Up the Block The most time-consuming method of development demands immense patience over a long period of time. It involves purchasing multiple adjacent parcels, demolishing each structure entirely, applying for a lot tie, and lastly, applying for a zoning variance. I now direct you to the intersection of Clinton Street and Wilton Place in East Hollywood as a case study of this technique. Over a period from at least 2013 up until 2016, a single entity purchased nine English Colonial and Tudor-style bungalows from the 1910s on the west side of Wilton Place. Once the developer had secured a profitable amount of building space (which in most of Los Angeles’ single-family neighborhoods is at least three parcels) they demolished all of the structures spanning the west side of the 500 block of North Wilton Place. Above: Three of the nine bungalows purchased by a developer in the 500 block of North Wilton Place in December of 2017. (Nein, nein, nein, nein!) (Source: Google Street View) With the developers now possessing a contiguous body of empty lots, they then applied for a lot tie, which conjoins two or more adjacent parents into one, enabling an upzoning of the newly-assembled megaparcel. If developers want to put a cherry on top, they may pursue a small-lot subdivision, which enables them to densify the occupancy of the lot.
This risky method is almost always reserved for very large developments by entities with a lot of capital. It takes years for developments such as the one on Wilton Place and Clinton Street to come to fruition; while the recent example in the vicinity of Wilton and Clinton took a little less than three years, others take over ten years, and a smaller number take over fifteen.
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