G-CAA General Meeting

Thursday, November 5, 2009

7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

The G-CAA General Meeting is currently being planned for this autumn. We will communicate the details when they are finalized. All G-CAA Board Member positions are up for election. We encourage volunteers to come forward and offer their services for the betterment of our community. Please contact a board member or email us at GreenridgeColdwaterAreaAssoc@gmail.com if interested in serving on the G-CAA Board.

Wood Burning Regulation

On July 9, in order to protect residents from the public health impacts of fine particulate matter, the Air District passed a regulation that makes it illegal to burn wood or firelogs in household fireplaces and woodstoves when the Air District issues a wintertime Spare the Air health advisory. Regulation 6, Rule 3 also bans the sale and installation of non-EPA-certified wood-burning devices in new construction or re-models, among other stipulations.

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Saving the Tract House
Richard Barnes for The New York Times

The way some of the Balboa Highlands houses look today.

By KARRIE JACOBS
Published: May 15, 2005

Frank Nolan, casually dressed in an olive drab polo shirt and blue jeans, occupied a white leather Brno chair set off by the room's gleaming Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One never wants to come across as a design snob, especially as it pertains to one's neighbors,'' Nolan said gingerly. ''We know that having a good neighbor is so much more important than what color they paint their house or how they choose to landscape. But there just seems to be a great disparity between the potential that we see in this neighborhood and then what you actually do see when you drive down the street.''

Richard Barnes for The New York Times
A 40-year resident of Balboa Highlands.
Nolan's house was one of 120 built in the 1960's by the developer Joseph Eichler in a San Fernando Valley subdivision called Balboa Highlands, 26 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Nolan and some of his neighbors want to have their neighborhood designated a historic district, which won't quite create an enclave of unsullied 60's modernity but will keep the threat of McMansions at bay.

It may also confuse some of the neighbors, who may not have thought that buying a 60's tract house would entail accepting a small role in Modernist architectural history. Stuart Frolick, who bought a house that had been radically altered by a previous owner, an engineer, told me, unapologetically, that he can't afford to return the house to its original state. Besides, his wife isn't into Modernism. ''She would like to gingerbread the place up,'' Frolick said, ''and I resist.''

"We clocked over 500 people coming through our neighborhood,'' Adriene Biondo said recently. ''We had vintage cars cruising up and down the street that day. People were tuned into the oldies station. It was a really exciting moment.'' Biondo, a short, roundish 49-year-old with the breathy voice of a chanteuse, was talking about the 2000 ''How Modern Was My Valley'' tour as if it happened yesterday. Sponsored by the Modern Committee, which she heads -- a furiously active branch of the city's dominant preservation organization, the Los Angeles Conservancy -- the tour brought a flood of tourists into the neighborhood. It also focused attention on the architecture about which Biondo is most passionate: the homes, including her own, built by Eichler.

Eichler, who was responsible for the construction of some 11,000 homes, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, was the last and most successful of a breed now largely extinct. In the years after World War II, commercial home-builders all over the country, but particularly in the West, began experimenting with new methods of construction and new styles of architecture. Abraham Levitt and his sons applied mass-production methods to building thousands of tiny ranch houses and Cape Cods on Long Island. Other developers, trying to remake the American dream, combined ideas from European Modernists -- simple geometric forms, functionalism, flexible space -- with a New World elan.

Balboa Highlands was constructed as a solidly middle-class neighborhood -- the houses typically had several bedrooms and measured 2,200 square feet -- at a time when some California home-builders believed that buyers craved the drama of L.A.'s experimental Case Study houses, built between 1945 and 1966 under the direction of Arts and Architecture magazine. The most famous Case Study house -- the one made into an icon by Julius Shulman's photo of two young women, seated in an all-glass living room, who appear to be floating above the Hollywood Hills -- was built in 1960 on a budget of $13,500, roughly the price of a standard tract house at the time.

Eichler worked with a handful of prominent California architects, including A. Quincy Jones, who designed a Case Study house. But Eichler's success perhaps owed less to the architects he employed than to his crack publicity photographer, Ernie Braun, who concocted and promoted a sophisticated but casual lifestyle. Braun's photos of the Eichler houses showed families dividing their time between sunny rooms and perfectly groomed backyards, the adults seemingly as likely to skip rope as the children. What Eichler sold from 1948 until the late 1960's wasn't architecture but happiness.

Each housing development Eichler erected represented a variation on the same program for happy family life. In the Balboa Highlands tract, the clean wood-and-concrete-block facades were designed to conceal the interior from the street. But inside, a whole world opens up: behind the front door of each house is an open-air atrium. Frank Nolan and his partner, Jaime Flores, have transformed theirs into a Zen garden carpeted with smooth round stones. A door from the atrium leads into the house itself, and it is easy to grasp the appeal of Eichler's plan: light-flooded rooms, exposed beams that support an elegantly simple roof and floor-to-ceiling glass intended to further the notion that interior and exterior are one and the same, a central tenet of California Modernism. Out back are a verdant yard with a swimming pool, a giant bronze Buddha and, in the distance, the Santa Susanna Mountains, green from months of rain.

Nolan, an elementary-school teacher, and Flores, a graphic designer, so impeccably restored their house that it probably looks better than it did when it was completed in 1964. Biondo's house is equally well preserved, painted pistachio green to match her 1956 Oldsmobile Rocket. But just down the block are Eichlers that have been altered to suit a more conventional suburban aesthetic. At one address, Eichler's A-frame model, distinguished by an unenclosed peaked roof over the front door -- the architects intended it as a car port -- is covered with a new red-clay tile roof and a line of classical columns out front. Another house has been stuccoed over, the roof turned into a giant gable, like the prop from a lesson about the properties of isosceles triangles.

While pitched preservation battles in most cities are usually fought over beloved public buildings, in Southern California they often center on private homes -- especially when those homes were designed by California's great midcentury architects, like Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. These battles tend to get thorny, pitting as they do the sacred rights of the property owner against equally deep-seated, and often rather abstract, notions of historic value. The city's Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance, which Biondo and Nolan said they hope will protect their neighborhood, tries to split the difference by rewarding, but not demanding, compliance from homeowners.
Enacted in 1979, the H.P.O.Z. ordinance makes it difficult, though not impossible, to alter the facade of a house that is considered a ''contributing'' part of a protected neighborhood; that is, one that preserves the building's original features. But it also allows for the continued existence of ''noncontributing'' buildings in the neighborhood. The owners of ''renovated'' houses don't have to change a thing if they don't want to -- but they get a break on their property taxes if they do.

There are currently 20 H.P.O.Z.'s in Los Angeles County. Some are clusters of Victorian houses or bungalows. Currently, just one consists of postwar architecture: Mar Vista, a tract of 52 modest, rectangular houses just east of Venice Beach, became an H.P.O.Z. in 2003. A 1948 collaboration between the populist architect Gregory Ain and the landscape designer Garrett Eckbo, Mar Vista is a lush oasis of 1,100-square-foot homes laid out as efficiently as cabin cruisers. The little houses originally sold for $12,000 and now fetch as much as $950,000.
 
The movement to preserve and restore Eichler homes has been going strong for at least a decade in Northern California, nurtured by a San Francisco-based organization known as the Eichler Network. But nationally, postwar tract houses are just beginning to receive the attention of the preservation community. As Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, pointed out, ''Only about 15 percent of Los Angeles has ever been looked at.'' The Getty Conservation Institute, he said, is now working with the city planning department to survey the remaining 85 percent.

Bernstein said he strongly believes that the conservancy should back the H.P.O.Z. effort in Balboa Highlands, as it did in Mar Vista. ''Both were examples of really bringing the tenets of Modernism to the masses in an affordable manner,'' he explained. ''And both also are uniquely intact, surprisingly intact, given the vagaries of the real-estate market here in L.A. and the pressures that you see upon individual neighborhoods. And we also felt that if steps weren't taken soon, they could become more significantly threatened in the future.''

Some of the early Eichler-home buyers are still in Balboa Highlands. Edgar Law, who earned his degree in architecture, bought his house in 1969 because, he said, ''it has principles that I believe in.'' He was referring to the openness of the design, though he and his wife, Fay, as African-Americans, also benefited from one of Eichler's political principles: he had a nondiscrimination policy, which was not the norm in 1960's suburban Los Angeles. John Hora, a cinematographer, bought his house in 1966. ''It was so weird-looking that I wasn't going to get out of the car,'' he told me, taking a break from his yard work. ''But I walked in, and I was converted.''

Balboa Highlands was one of the last projects Eichler completed before his foray into urban development in the mid-60's nearly bankrupted him. Within a decade, the neighborhood he had envisioned had begun to change. The Valley's citrus groves gave way to ever more houses. By the 80's, the real money was in newer homes, mostly Mediterranean and Spanish models.

The buyers for Eichlers by this time were mainly immigrants from the Middle East, Asia or Russia. They had probably never seen those Ernie Braun photos, and they dealt with the idiosyncratic look of the Eichlers by hiding it. They wanted their houses to look like other houses in the area: stuccoed and columned.

Nolan and Flores, who bought their home in 1993, were among the first of an influx of design connoisseurs. They were also the ones, together with Biondo, who circulated the petition to have their neighborhood considered for H.P.O.Z. status. Most people, Flores said, even those whose homes had been significantly altered, ''were O.K. with the idea of the H.P.O.Z. as long as it was to improve the neighborhood.'' Hoping that some owners of extreme renovations would try to undo the damage, he tried to stress that ''contributing'' houses in the H.P.O.Z. would receive tax benefits. One couple, Flores recalled, didn't like the implication that houses in the original style were somehow more important: ''They were like, 'Why?''' But for many, the tax breaks just aren't enough of an incentive to pay for restoration.

Though roughly two-thirds of homeowners eventually signed the petition, the H.P.O.Z. status of Balboa Highlands remains uncertain. The ''historic resources survey,'' conducted for the city's Cultural Heritage Commission to determine how many of the houses in the district will be considered ''contributing,'' can't be done because the office in charge of the surveys recently lost its financing. And while Biondo holds out hope that the H.P.O.Z. designation is not far off, she is careful to modulate her zeal. ''I don't want people to feel pressured to do anything,'' she emphasized.
Economics may apply the pressure for her. Houses in Balboa Highlands were originally priced at $30,000. In 1966, Hora paid $42,000 for his, which, he noted, was not cheap. In 1993, Nolan and Flores paid $260,000. It was a pretty good deal. The Eichler cachet, combined with prevailing real-estate trends, has driven prices up to more than $600,000 for a fixer-upper and more than $700,000 for a house that has been well restored.

The H.P.O.Z. is meant to appeal to and attract a new type of homeowner. The designation doesn't just protect the look of the neighborhood; it's also an advertisement. ''I think bringing in like-minded people is really key,'' Biondo explained. ''That's been the change over the last eight years, wouldn't you say?''

''Oh, yes,'' Nolan agreed.
Biondo continued, ''We try very hard, when the house goes on the market. . . . ''

''The word goes out,'' Nolan said.

''It goes out,'' Biondo affirmed, nodding her head decisively.