Research notes: The hidden cityscapes of informal housing in suburban los angeles and the paradox of horizontal density

Building and Landscapes

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2015, Pages 89-110

  Jake, Wegmann ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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EID: 84949431577     PISSN: 19360886     EISSN: 19346832     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5749/buildland.22.2.0089     Document Type: Note

References (66)

1. José is not his real name. Some interview respondents in this article have been given pseudonyms, at their request, to protect their anonymity. For classic examples of this argument
2. See Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; repr., Santa Barbara, Calif.: Gibbs Smith, 1973)
3. later, Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971)
4. As of the 2010 Census, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA) ranked second to the CBSA surrounding New York City in terms of raw population density. Some argue that population-weighted density, which measures the population density of the census tract in which the average resident lives, is less subject to distortion according to the definition of the boundaries enclosing CBSAs (which, in the case of the CBSA around L.A., are drawn to include vast areas of almost uninhabited desert and mountains). By this metric, L.A.'s CBSA ranks third, narrowly trailing the CBSA around San Francisco
5. See Paul E. Groth, "Workers'-Cottage and Minimal-Bungalow Districts in Oakland and Berkeley, California, 1870-1945," Urban Morphology 8, no. 1 (2004): 13-25, for a description of similar practices in workers' cottage districts of the nineteenth century
6. In most instances a residential code enforcement action begins with a reported complaint of suspected violations of the local zoning ordinance, not the building code. This is because the former tend to be visible from the exterior, whereas the latter are usually hard to detect without entering private property, including building interiors. Typically, inspectors do not enter residential lots or structures until an enforcement case is well under way, and then only after obtaining permission from the property owner or, in contested instances, securing a warrant from a judge. Building codes often come to play an important role in enforcement actions, however. This is because they regulate conditions that most directly affect health and safety and are therefore the highest priorities for code enforcement officers coping with heavy caseloads
7. An up-to-date, comprehensive history of code enforcement in the United States has yet to be written. For a i96o sera overview
8. See Richard L. Sanderson, Codes and Code Administration: An Introduction to Building Regulations in the United States (Chicago: Building Officials Conference of America, 1969)
9. Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, "Viewpoint: Latino Vernaculars and the Emerging National Landscape," Buildings & Landscapes 20, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1-18 (quote is on page 4)
10. This, of course, begs the question of to what extent the cityscapes that I describe in these research notes are characteristic of Latino cultures and not simply a byproduct of the demographic dominance and economic position of Latinos (and especially Mexican Americans and Central Americans) in Los Angeles. To be sure, I learned that similar informal housing patterns crop up in communities with high levels of Vietnamese immigration, such as some of the cities of north Orange County, and one of the people whose story is told herein (Sharon, who will be introduced later) is African American. There is undoubtedly some commonality among these experiences due to some common circumstances, mirroring the argument in favor of labeling these practices as ethnurbanisms as a means of avoiding the pitfalls of ethnic essentialism
11. See Clara Irazabal, "Beyond 'Latino New Urbanism': Advocating Ethnurbanisms," Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Place-making and Urban Sustainability 5 nos. 2-3 (2012): 241-68
12. Nonetheless, there is a strong case to be made, particularly from the work of James Rojas (discussed extensively in the conclusion), that what I describe in these research notes exhibits some patterns that emanate directly from Latino cultures
13. The concept of enacted environment and its application to Latino cityscapes was originated by James Rojas, "The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles," in Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson, ed. Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, 275-92 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)
14. The ten incorporated cities are Bell, Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Compton, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Maywood, Paramount, and South Gate. The four unincorporated communities are East Rancho Dominguez, Florence-Firestone (as it is known to its residents despite the official census name of Florence-Graham)
15. Walnut Park, and Willow brook. Thus, what I am referring to here as Southeast L.A. does not coincide with the City of Los Angeles, even though at its closest point it lies only four miles from L.A.'s city hall. Such are the conceptual and nomenclatural complexities oftrying to make sense of a vast metropolis of over i7 million people that is divided into hundreds of separate cities and unincorporated communities and in which locals variously apply the term "Los Angeles" to the central city, the largest county, and the entire region
16. See Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, "Manufacturing: Still a Force in Southern California," LAEDC website, 2011, http://laedc.org/ reports/Manufacturing_20ii.pdf, for support of Greater L.A.'s status as the largest manufacturing agglomeration in the United States
17. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), for a classic account of postwar suburban expansion
18. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)
19. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)
20. William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis (Point Arena, Calif.: Solano Press Books, 1997), describes Southeast L.A.'s past as the region's "Little Akron."
21. See Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, Latino Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
22. Edward W. Soja, "Los Angeles 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis," in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, 426-62 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), for classic accounts of the still underappreciated reindus-trialization of Greater Los Angeles
23. See Mike Davis, "The L.A. Inferno," Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 57-81 for a similar account with a particular focus on Southeast L.A. and the adjacent "single-purpose" industrial cities ofVernon and Commerce and for discussion of the source of investment capital of many of the enterprises that powered reindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s
24. See Social Explorer Tables T13 and T15 (1980 data) and T55 (2010 data) summarizing U.S. Census Bureau data, accessed via www.socialexplorer.com (subscription required). U.S. Census data prior to 1980 does not allow for a clear differentiation between the Latino and the non-Hispanic white (referred to in this article simply as "white") populations
25. See Manuel Pastor, "Maywood Not Mayberry: Latinos and Suburbia in Los Angeles County," in Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs, ed. Christopher Niedt, 129-54 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), for a discussion. However, historical accounts of the area, in particular
26. Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), make it abundantly clear that, outside of small preexisting barrio areas and the few tightly delimited areas open to African American home buyers, the vast majority of Southeast L.A. was reserved for whites by deliberate policy and custom. For a discussion of the worldview of the area's original white settlers
27. See Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven. For a description of the subsequent wave of Latino migration and immigration to Southeast L.A
28. See Pastor, "Maywood Not Mayberry."
29. J. S. Onesimo Sandoval and Joel Jennings, "Barrios and Hyper Barrios: How Latino Neighborhoods Changed the Urban Built Environment," Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemak-ingand Urban Sustainability 5, nos. 2-3 (2012): 111-38
30. See Cecilia Giusti and Miriam Olivares, "Latinos, Planning, and Incremental Construction," in Dialogos: Place Making in Latino Communities, ed. Michael Rios and Leonardo Vazquez, 98-110 (New York: Routledge, 2012), for a view of self-building in Texas as a Latino cultural practice that reinforces a sense of belonging in communities where it takes place
31. See also Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, for an in-depth account of the culture of self-building and self-provisioning in early- and mid-twentieth-century Southeast L.A. Andrew Wiese, Places ofTheir Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), in describing a settlement outside Cleveland, reminds us that African Americans participated in self-building in this era as well
32. Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), makes a compelling argument that prior to World War II self-building on the urban fringe was commonplace in scores of North American metropolitan regions. For a description of the Lakewood Plan and the effect of the invention of the "contract city" model on suburban incorporation and governance in 1950s Southern California
33. See Michan Andrew Connor, " ' Public Benefits from Public Choice': Producing Decentralization in Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1954-1973," Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (2012): 79-100
34. Mike Davis, "The L.A. Inferno." Fulton, Reluctant Metropolis, has a helpful discussion on the historical roots of Southeast L.A.'s peculiar local governance structure and the weak capacity of its local governments
35. Tom Hogen-Esch, "Failed State: Political Corruption and the Collapse of Democracy in Bell, California," California Journal of Politics and Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 1-28, delves into the backstory of the municipal corruption scandal in the City of Bell, which made national news in recent years. By comparing U.S. Census housing stock estimates with building permit data, I made an order-of-magnitude estimate that between i980 and 20i0, 55 percent of the housing units in Southeast L.A. that either were new additions or replaced units that had been lost were created without building permits. The informal housing share from 2000 to 20i0 was even higher, at 80 percent
36. See Jake Wegmann, "'We Just Built It': Code Enforcement, Local Politics, and the Informal Housing Market in Southeast Los Angeles County" (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014), for a full discussion of the methodology behind these estimates
37. For example, see Deirdre Pfeiffer, "Retrofitting Suburbia through Second Units: Lessons from the Phoenix Region," Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, published online 2014, 1-23, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17549175.2014.908787
38. For a media account of the widespread phenomenon of unpermitted units created within apartment buildings in the City of Los Angeles
39. See "Give Illegal Apartments Amnesty? Landlords and Tenants, Often at Odds, Are Unified in Urging L.A. to Ease the Way to Make Them Lawful," Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2014, AAi
40. My use of the term tactics in this context owes a debt to Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). As part of this research, I conducted twenty-seven interviews with a variety of people who interacted with informal housing in and near Southeast L.A. in various capacities. They included everyday homeowners and renters (5 interviews), code enforcement officers (6), real estate agents (2), a real estate lender (i), a building contractor (i), activists (2), an attorney (1), appraisers (2), city and county elected officials and staff (5), and local housing experts (2). I made contact with interviewees via several means: asking code enforcement officers responding to a survey for interviews; referrals from personal acquaintances who lived in Southeast L.A. or who knew people who did; and "snowball sampling" (i.e., getting referrals from pervious interviewees). Note that some interviews included multiple participants; they are counted only once for the purpose of the tallies listed above. In all, I collected detailed information on sixteen properties spanning the six categories from interview informants. These results are also informed by having seen dozens more properties in Southeast L.A. via walking and driving tours (both alone and in the company of code enforcement officers) and having systematically analyzed 158 online rental advertisements and 6,717 sales listings of Southeast L.A. residential properties
41. For example, see Martin Gellen, Accessory Apartments in Single-Family Housing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1985)
42. Anna Hardman, "Informal Additions to the U.S. Housing Stock," in Under One Roof: Issues and Innovations in Shared Housing, ed. George C. Hemmens, Charles J. Hoch, and Jana Carp (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)
43. For self-building on the fringe of Toronto in the early twentieth century, see Harris, Unplanned Suburbs. For a description of self-building and informality in a town of mostly farm laborers in California's San Joaquin Valley
44. See James M. Buckley and William Littmann, "Viewpoint: A Contemporary Vernacular: Latino Landscapes in California's Central Valley," Buildings & Landscapes 17, no. 2 (2010): 1-12. For one of the definitive accounts of informal homestead subdivisions on the metropolitan fringe of Texas cities
45. See Peter M. Ward, Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). Of course, scholars from various fields, including urban planning, geography, and architecture, have built up a voluminous literature on informal settlements in the developing world for more than a half century. But scholarship on informal housing in the United States and other developed nations has long lagged and has only recently begun to come into its own, hindered perhaps by a mistaken perception that informal housing in the developed world is but an insignificant holdover from the era that preceded the advent of comprehensive building and land use regulation
46. More recently, urban theorists such as Ananya Roy, "The 2ist-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory," Regional Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 819-30, have issued a call to break down the epistemological walls between the First and Third Worlds. Part of my hope for this research is to contribute to that important project. Code enforcement officers were a useful source of information in this research, including for the referenced assertion about the prevalence of partitioned houses, for several reasons. First, because of the lack of virtually any official data on unpermitted housing and the near-total absence of informal housing as a focus of attention in local civil society and in the local political sphere—both of which greatly surprised me and which I have written about at length elsewhere— code enforcement officers were the group of professionals whom I found to be best equipped to offer both a broad and an in-depth perspective on informal housing issues
47. See Wegmann, "'We Just Built It.'" Second, although some Southern California code enforcement offices are housed within police departments, none of the officers with whom I interacted worked for public safety agencies or assumed, or identified with, a strictly law enforcement role. Rather, they saw themselves as problem solvers whose objective was to encourage homeowners with code violations to bring their properties into compliance rather than to punish them for transgressions. Finally, all of the code enforcement officers with whom I spoke were Latinos who had themselves grown up in working-class Southern California communities and, perhaps as a result (and to varying degrees), expressed sympathy, if not always agreement, with the motivations of people who engaged in self-building activities. With all of the foregoing said, a wide variety of perspectives is always beneficial, and this research could be fairly criticized for relying too heavily on the enforcement perspective. I intend it only as a starting point
48. Sharon is not her real name
49. This observation was made by Vinit Mukh-ija, "Outlaw In-Laws: Informal Second Units and the Stealth Reinvention of Single-Family Housing," in The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (Urban and Industrial Environments), ed. Vinit Mukhija and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, 39-58 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014)
50. This intriguing observation appears in the conclusion of Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven
51. For a description of the fraught political dynamics that thwarted a concerted attempt led by several Los Angeles City Council members and city staff to pragmatically loosen the tight zoning code restrictions on garage apartments
52. See Andrew H. Whittemore, "Zoning Los Angeles: A Brief History of Four Regimes," Planning Perspectives 27, no. 3 (2012): 393-415. As I have argued elsewhere, if such a progressive reform could not take hold within the sophisticated machinery of local government in the City of Los Angeles, its prospects were and remain dim in weakly governed Southeast L.A
53. See Wegmann, "'We Just Built It.'" This person-to-bathroom ratio ofi0 to 1 is close to the typical ratio of 12 to 1 seen in cheap lodging houses in San Francisco a century ago (Paul Groth, personal communication)
54. This argument is made in a study of "recovery houses" in Philadelphia in Robert P. Fairbanks, How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-welfare Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). The neighborhoods described have experienced severe levels of housing abandonment and population decline for decades and, consequently, are a world apart from crowded, bustling Southeast L.A. Yet there is a curious similarity between the informal group home economy in both places, despite the vastly different built environments and economic contexts
55. In an era in which aerial photography is as instantly available to code enforcement officers via popular tools such as Google Maps as it is to anyone else, this might seem odd. However, a legal principle known as a homeowner's expectation of privacy governs how code enforcement officers go about their work. It means, for instance, that if a code enforcement officer notices an unpermitted structure in a backyard by climbing over a neighboring fence or via aerial photography, that evidence will likely be deemed inadmissible if the case against the accused homeowner goes on to be contested in court. If, however, the officer notices the structure in the course of investigating an anonymous complaint from a neighbor or happens to see it from a neighboring yard while conducting official business and without climbing a fence, as happened with José's neighbor in South Gate, then the evidence will likely stand. This seemingly obscure legal quirk appears to have widespread consequences for the urban form in Southeast L.A., shunting informal structures to the portion of residential lots that cannot be seen from the public street. It recalls the distinction between the orderly and public front face versus the haphazard and private rear façade of the vernacular workers' cottages that sprang up adjacent to industrial districts throughout the United States a century and a half ago, but arguably for reasons of enforcement rather than custom
56. See Groth, "Workers'-Cottage and Minimal-Bungalow Districts in Oakland and Berkeley, California." Roberto is not his real name
57. Today, Roberto is pursuing a doctorate at a highly regarded California university
58. Inhabited RVs parked alongside lightly trafficked streets, whether in residential areas, within parks, near beaches, underneath overpasses, or in industrial neighborhoods, are a common sight in California's coastal metropolitan areas, owing perhaps to these regions' combination of high housing costs and mild climates. Of course, people living in this manner risk hostility from local residents and crackdowns from parking enforcement officers. The pattern described here of parking mobile homes on residential lots arguably provides a higher degree of stability to the people living within them as a result of the vehicles' placement on private property rather than along public streets
59. According to five-year American Community Survey Data from 2009 to 2013 (Social Explorer, Table T97, "Units in Structure"), 2.9 percent of all housing units in Southeast L.A. either are mobile homes or fall in the "boat, RV, van, etc." category, with the values ranging within individual communities from effectively zero in Walnut Park to as high as 8.7 percent in Paramount and even 7.3 percent in tiny, very densely populated Cudahy. These figures, however, are of limited usefulness. They are likely underestimated for the same reason that informal housing tends to be un-dercounted by the census in general (i.e., many occupants are fearful of speaking to census enumerators). It is impossible to tell from census data, however, how many of these dwellings are located in mobile home parks (which can be found, even in densely populated Southeast L.A.) versus (extralegally) placed on residential properties
60. In general, zoning ordinances in force in Southeast L.A. cities and in L.A. County prohibit people from dwelling within mobile homes on residential properties, with few exceptions
61. For rural California, see Vinit Mukhija and Paavo Monkkonen, "Federal Colonias Policy in California: Too Broad and Too Narrow," Housing Policy Debate 17, no. 4 (2006): 755-80. For peri-urban Texas
62. See Ward, Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico. Quintana is a pseudonym
63. Wegmann, "'We Just Built It.'"
64. A lot coverage standard enforces an upper limit on the proportion of a residential parcel's land area that can be covered by buildings. The 9 percent figure applies to the 66,297 parcels in Southeast L.A. that are zoned for one to four units and smaller than an acre in size. In all likelihood, the proportion of residential building footprints that are out of compliance with either zoning or building code standards in Southeast L.A. is much higher than 9 percent, since, for instance, extralegally converted space cannot be detected using this method, nor can structures or additions that comply with lot coverage standards but are not built to code, nor those that violate other zoning standards such as parking requirements. Lot coverage standards simply have the virtue of allowing actual existing buildings to be measured for compliance using direct observation with aerial photography. That even this limited estimate is 9 percent is suggestive of a much higher proportion of the building stock that is self-built and unpermitted
65. To be sure, these results imply nothing about the proportion of horizontal densification in these two neighborhoods that has occurred without permits, but when considered with other evidence, including the point-i n-t ime analysis and the overall growth of the informal housing stock in Southeast L.A. described in note 2i, we can safely assume that informal construc- tion has played a major role
66. Rojas, "The Enacted Environment," 276