Urban Design, Housing, and Real Estate
Real Estate Booms in Los Angeles
In order to understand the significance of how extraordinary the real estate boom that took place in Los Angeles truly was it is necessary to briefly outline the city’s foundation and the population growth from a historical perspective because the real estate explosion is intrinsically linked to the city’s historical circumstances. The history of Los Angeles begins with the founding of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reyna de Los Angeles Rio de la Porciuncula (The River of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of Porciuncula) which was established by the Spanish in 1781. This was largely pushed forward by Spanish Governor Felipe de Neve who wanted to establish a town for the purposes of providing food for Spaniards residing in southern California. In an effort to accomplish this, he enlisted 46 people from the state of Sonora in northern Mexico and ten years later there were only 139 inhabitants living in the town, by 1820 the population residing there was only 650. [1] After the United States gained control over a large portion of the Southwest United States following the Mexican American War in 1846, including the great state of California, the town of Los Angeles was still rather small with less than 2000 people and only roughly 8000 in Los Angeles County overall. This population consisted of mostly Spanish speaking persons and half of whom were actually Native Americans.
The building of the Southern Pacific Railroad coupled with the persuasive writings describing the exotic frontiers of California to the West, was when the population of Los Angeles really began to soar. In 1876, seven years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Los Angeles finally became connected to the nations vast railway system, when the Union Pacific put it a line from San Francisco. [1] Then in 1885 the Santa Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles with a line connected directly to the Eastern United States which set off a fare war between them and the Union Pacific which sent railroad fares plummeting to as low as one dollar a trip west from St. Louis, Missouri. With these low fares and the intriguing description of the new frontier land out west, complete with a mild Mediterranean climate and clean air, migrants began to flock to Los Angeles by the hundreds of thousands. It was around this time, in the late 19th to early 20th century, that the town of Los Angeles began to transform itself into a booming American city complete with a city hall, schools, newspapers, and city services to provide the social infrastructure needed to support the growing populace.
First Real Estate Boom
In order to support this surging population a real estate boom took effect sending land prices through the roof. For example, in 1886 an acre of land in Los Angeles county went for $100 but by the next year in 1887, when the real estate bubble finally burst, the same plot of land sold for $1500. Following this boom bust cycle towards the end of the 1880’s prices eventually recovered and continued to rise into the 1900’s. During this same time period, from 1890 to 1900, the Los Angeles population grew from 50,000 to 100,000 and then five years later it doubled again pushing 200,000. The county of Los Angeles also became to encompass roughly 100 new towns and in 1889 Orange County broke off from Los Angeles County due to population growth of its own allowing it to support itself.
Second Real Estate Boom
A second real estate boom coupled with an oil boom took place in the early 1920’s following World War I. By 1925 there were more automobiles per capita in Los Angeles than any other city in the nation causing suburban growth to take place. [2] This suburbanization was spurred by economic activity within Los Angeles County where numerous companies began to open up manufacturing facilities resulting in the creation of thousands of jobs. Also the film industry began to take interest in Los Angeles as it providing a variety of dramatic backdrops to utilize in outdoor filming techniques with desert wilderness and snow-capped mountains both fairly close by. They claimed the Hollywood community as their home base and soon turned it into a regional economic power of its own. With these and other sources of employment spread out over Los Angeles it provided people the opportunity to purchase homes and by 1930 an astonishing 94 percent of all dwellings within Los Angeles were single family homes (this is especially dumbfounding when compared to 52 percent of all Los Angeles County residents living in rental housing in the present day).
Third Real Estate Boom
A third real estate boom took place in the 1950’s after the end of World War II and it prompted an explosion of suburban housing establishments. Following the war, subdivision housing became a mass production industry thanks in large part to the building techniques that became streamlined in the war then turned into a business strategy most famously in the form of Levittown’s. In 1955, Los Angeles with a population pushing nearly a million became the biggest city in the West. [2] This provided lucrative business opportunities to those in the real estate industry but by the 1960’s cheap and available land became to grow more and more scarce resulting in land prices to steadily rise. Due to this trend by the mid 1980’s affordable land was for the most part impossible to come by and the attention of developmental activity shifted to metropolitan areas and to infill intercity pockets.
Los Angeles Suburban Sprawl
The city of Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs may seem like an unplanned mass of urban sprawl but it was actually the product of a conscious planning strategy put together by policy-makers, industrialists, design professionals, community builders, and home buyers. In most cases these suburban enclaves were largely located within close proximity to employment opportunities. Greg Hise is the assistant professor of urban planning and development at the University of Sothern California and he argues that the, “edge city”, is not a new urban types but rather it has a genealogy that can be traced back to the “garden city” model which was popularized and articulated by Sir Ebenezer Howard. In Hise’s book, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, he offers an in-depth history of Los Angeles regional planning and development from the 1920’s through the postwar years making him a relevant source of information regarding the great city of Los Angeles. He states that home-building in Los Angeles was a analytically planned out phenomenon which was directly tied to the location and proximity of industry and jobs. [3] In the book Hise profiles the historical foundation of these suburban sites with a case study of Leimert Park, which he sees as one of the earliest examples of modern community planning within Los Angeles. The project was developed by the Walter H. Leimert Company in the 1920’s and within the confines of the project were plans for a civic park, commercial center, schools, and homes all located within central Los Angeles.
The Leimert Company acknowledge the need to provide and incorporate the principle of community based planning already utilized in more affluent places such as Westwood Village and Beverly Hills but the purposes of Leimert Park was to attract wage earners through its residential pricing. [3] To Hise, Leimert Park exemplified modern community planning with its design, construction, and marketing strategies. The suburban nature of Los Angeles was a product of the Los Angeles Planning Commission whom had a long-range plan which called for a gradual and orderly expansion of well-planned, moderately sized communities of reasonable density, that were separated by agricultural buffer zones. This long term plan is the byproduct of coming to the understanding that Los Angeles would not be able to meet the needs of its inhabitants without breaking the extremely large megalopolis into smaller suburban entities that all fall within the confines of the Los Angeles city limits. This effectively allowed these entities to divide the necessary services into sizeable pieces which were much easier to work with to accommodate the formidable population of Los Angelinos This strategic planning objective is what gives the City of Los Angeles its suburban sprawl demeanor, but contrary to popular belief it was a calculated move that was deemed necessary to break up the largest city in the west into smaller suburban communities to provide the necessary services to its population.
Affordable Housing in Los Angeles
Affordable housing in Los Angeles is not being offered to the extent to which bit should be given the population size and demographic of the city. It falls short on a number of fronts and some scholars and people familiar with the situation taking place in Los Angeles have attributed its shortcoming toward public housing availability to various political factors. Don Parson is one of these scholars whom wrote a book entitled, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. Within the confines of this book he examines the public housing policies that were carried out between the 1930’s up until the 1950’s. He starts off by focusing on the conflicts that arose during the Great Depression period in the 1930’s between the supporters of President Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal plan whom he refers to as the Los Angeles’ “New Deal Coalition” and the conservative opponents that did not support the New Deal or its rhetoric. Parson’s contends that the combination of New Deal federal housing policies coupled with the actions taken by the, “popular-front coalition of liberal-left supporters”, gave rise to Los Angeles’ first social housing programs towards the end of the 1930’s. [4] Further in his exploration Parson’s notes that following the end of World War II as the nation began to prosper again following the aftermath of the Great Depression era Los Angeles fell victim to a series of unfortunate events. A conservative populace began to see the state-sponsored public housing policies of Los Angeles as a form of socialism and this was a time of the Red Scare where all things deemed to be possibly communist were met with severe criticisms. These anti-communist organizers put together a fierce public campaign filled with communist propaganda that was dragged out for several years during the 1950’s at the height of the McCarthyism movement. [4] Unfortunately, the false accusations that the Los Angeles public housing authority was infiltrated by communists was enough to end the construction of public housing in Los Angeles in 1955. This caused Los Angeles to shift its resources from the construction of affordable public housing facilities and focus more on urban renewal as well as developing a support structure to help local businesses within the community thrive. [5] Since that time until the present day Los Angeles has built far fewer public housing accommodations than it had in its past especially when compared to other major cities within the United States with large populations.
Los Angeles being the largest city in the western United States has had a need to provide affordable housing for its population from the early stages but lately it has been a struggle for the city to provide enough low-income residences for its citizens. In order to grasp the affordable housing situation in Los Angeles it is beneficial to compare it to a similar megalopolis where Los Angeles is the largest city in the United States recorded by population with over 8 million residents, Los Angeles is the second largest city with almost 4 million people. New York city is quite similar to Los Angeles in that they are both cities with enormous populations, have many new residents at the low end of the income and wage scale, both are experiencing rising prices in the rental and ownership sectors of the housing market, larger groups of people having to devote a larger portion of their own personal income to pay for their housing, and more people actively searching for low-income housing vacancies. But these two cities often differ in the opportunities that they offer people seeking affordable housing; New York City has approximately 2.2 million rental units available where Los Angeles has only 800,000 and the average date of construction of these rental units in New York is 1949 as opposed to 1960 in Los Angeles. [6] Over the two cities history New York has built about 430,000 units of affordable housing while Los Angeles has only built about a tenth of that. So from this comparative perspective Los Angeles has a lot of catching up to do. The problem for Los Angeles lies in the fact that they are running out of places to turn into low-income housing residents and they are also having trouble preserving the existing stock of affordable housing within the city limits. There are between 200,000 to 250,000 privately owned units that are publically subsidized that are in jeopardy of being lost. [6] This stock is at risk of losing its subsidized status in the next few years as a result of an expiration limit set on the housing units which will also result in the loss of the regulations that go along with them. As a means to combat the loss of thousands of low-income housing units within Los Angeles mayoral advisory groups and city planners are devising ways to create mixed-income housing to meet the city’s pressing housing needs. In order to accomplish such goals landowners and developers are suggesting that the government look at specific Los Angeles neighborhoods where zoning limits and local plans could potentially be ignored in order to construct taller and overall larger apartment complexes.
Los Angeles being the largest city in the western United States has had a need to provide affordable housing for its population from the early stages but lately it has been a struggle for the city to provide enough low-income residences for its citizens. In order to grasp the affordable housing situation in Los Angeles it is beneficial to compare it to a similar megalopolis where Los Angeles is the largest city in the United States recorded by population with over 8 million residents, Los Angeles is the second largest city with almost 4 million people. New York city is quite similar to Los Angeles in that they are both cities with enormous populations, have many new residents at the low end of the income and wage scale, both are experiencing rising prices in the rental and ownership sectors of the housing market, larger groups of people having to devote a larger portion of their own personal income to pay for their housing, and more people actively searching for low-income housing vacancies. But these two cities often differ in the opportunities that they offer people seeking affordable housing; New York City has approximately 2.2 million rental units available where Los Angeles has only 800,000 and the average date of construction of these rental units in New York is 1949 as opposed to 1960 in Los Angeles. [6] Over the two cities history New York has built about 430,000 units of affordable housing while Los Angeles has only built about a tenth of that. So from this comparative perspective Los Angeles has a lot of catching up to do. The problem for Los Angeles lies in the fact that they are running out of places to turn into low-income housing residents and they are also having trouble preserving the existing stock of affordable housing within the city limits. There are between 200,000 to 250,000 privately owned units that are publically subsidized that are in jeopardy of being lost. [6] This stock is at risk of losing its subsidized status in the next few years as a result of an expiration limit set on the housing units which will also result in the loss of the regulations that go along with them. As a means to combat the loss of thousands of low-income housing units within Los Angeles mayoral advisory groups and city planners are devising ways to create mixed-income housing to meet the city’s pressing housing needs. In order to accomplish such goals landowners and developers are suggesting that the government look at specific Los Angeles neighborhoods where zoning limits and local plans could potentially be ignored in order to construct taller and overall larger apartment complexes.
References
1. http://www.museumca.org/picturethis/timeline/early-statehood-1850-1880s/rise-los-angeles/info
2. http://www.tierraproperties.com/short_history_of_los_angeles_real_estate.htm
3. Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-century Metropolis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.
4. Parson, Donald Craig. Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005. Print.
5. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/usr/2011/985264/
6. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_47.htm