From the Archive: The Condo Generation

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s October 2007 issue.

Stan Bochniak was raised in the planned suburban middle-class community of Thousand Oaks, located 30 miles northwest of Los Angeles. This was quintessential postwar Southern California living: a single-family tract home with a large yard, a two-car garage, and a short drive to the nearest store. "It was meant to be neighborly," he says, "but it was actually very isolating." So when he bought a home recently, Bochniak, a regional manager for a parking management company, chose the opposite: a condo in the heart of busy, walkable West Hollywood. It is a home, he says, where residents meet in the common courtyard: "Sometimes you are standing on the catwalk on the top level and talking to a person on the lower one, and everybody’s door faces each other."

Bochniak’s condo is in a complex of 1o units on West Hollywood’s Gardner Avenue, designed in a distinctly modern spirit by Lorcan O’Herlihy for the boutique developer Richard Loring and his company, Habitat Group. "I love the aesthetic of the design," says Bochniak. "It’s not just a cheesy, cookie-cutter Spanish-style knockoff." The units range from 1,200 to 1,700 square feet and feature flowing, unfussy interior spaces with 10-foot ceilings. They also have 120-square-foot balconies and double layers of drywall to enhance acoustic separation, and share a striking exterior of rain wood screen over VaproShield waterproofing with an outside stairwell encased in Profilit glass. "Quite frankly," says Bochniak, "for what I paid for the place I could have gone to the Valley and bought a house with a pool, but I didn’t want that. Part of the reason our generation moves here is because they crave the interaction."

Bochniak is one of thousands in L.A. who are now buying condos in multifamily complexes instead of single-family homes, and contributing, sale by sale, to a major change in the urban form and identity of Los Angeles—from sprawling and horizontal to higher and denser.

For some, like Bochniak, the reason is social. For others it is about security—those who travel have neighbors who will keep an eye out, feed pets, and pick up mail—or a hassle-free lifestyle. "I owned a single-family home, and now I don’t want to spend my weekends manicuring the yard," says Gary Reichard, an administrator in the Cal State University Chancellor’s Office, who is about to move into Habitat 825, another condo complex created by O’Herlihy and Loring. This one is on Kings Road, right next door to the iconic Schindler House.

Conveniences aside, the major reason for buying a condo is financial. Land and construction costs are now so high in Los Angeles that a single-family home is simply unaffordable. A friend who was recently bemoaning house prices ruefully described himself as being part of the "condo generation"—the first generation in the L.A. basin who will not be able to own a house. Kate Bartolo is a senior vice president for the Kor Group, a company that started out building boutique hotels and is now producing condo complexes. Having previously worked on housing policy, she confirms his perception: "The single-family home [in major metropolitan areas] is pretty much out of reach for all first-time homebuyers. You have a whole market segment that may never transition to single-family homes, so you have to think of condos in a different way—as homes."

And the evidence of this shift? Thousands of condos are going up all over L.A. Such a large number of these have been converted from rentals in existing buildings that a city council member recently called for a moratorium on condo conversions to try and staunch the loss of homes for the next generation of renters who will never even be able to afford condos. Other condos are in converted industrial buildings or complexes being built from the ground up. Among these are some that offer an added attraction: great design.

L.A. has recently seen the emergence of a number of striking multifamily condo buildings, like the Gardner 1050 project. They are often constructed by savvy developers who recognize that today’s condo generation leans toward well-designed, clutter-free domestic space. These are nothing like the poky dingbat apartment buildings of yore. These have the class of Old Hollywood apartment buildings and the design and planning reminiscent of midcentury modernism.

John Chase is the urban designer for the City of West Hollywood and helped shepherd the Gardner 1050 project to fruition. "When I first started in this job twelve years ago," he says, "we weren’t getting the caliber of projects we are now. They come out of a vision for a life lived in fully realized architecture in which every aspect of the design—from the relationship of outside to inside and the way the light comes in to the height of the ceiling—works together." Or, as Jonathan Barnett, an interior designer and Gardner 1050 resident, puts it, "We’ve been inundated with great modern furniture and finally we have the correct palette to display it."

Some condos take the form of lofts in adapted commercial buildings, as in the Eastern Columbia Lofts by the Kor Group or the Toy and Biscuit Factory Lofts by Linear City, both in downtown and both featuring communal rooftop gardens with stunning views. Some are infill projects on tight sites, like the Gardner and Kings Road projects; others, like the Kor Group’s new Sunset Silver Lake project, are set on difficult sites near main roads. Some mix housing and shops or offices on commercial strips, like a complex of stark-white, cube-like, high-end condos designed and developed by architect Michael Sant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice’s once boho, now bobo main street. Then there are the Fuller Lofts, in an industrial area near a Gold Line metro station in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Designed by Pugh+Scarpa Architects, the lofts consist of 80 live/work condos in the concrete Fuller Paint Building, with commercial units on the ground floor and basement level. Fuller Lofts, due to be completed in January 2008, was developed by a company called Livable Places, and promises a mix of market rate and subsidized affordable ​​condos, starting at a minimum of mid-$200,000s, and averaging $425,000. Depending on quality and location, a typical L.A. condo will run you anywhere from $400,000 to more than $1 million. At that price, even condos are out of reach for many.

On one hand, these condo developments, especially the well-designed ones, bring a welcome and potentially more sustainable urban lifestyle to L.A., as they are predicated on smart-growth ideas of locating homes near work or mass transit. In reality, though, most condo dwellers are still car-dependent (most developments require about the same amount of parking for residents as single-family properties). And the mass-transit systems promised by planners are not keeping pace with the booming residential construction. So the L.A. region is transforming, before our eyes, from a spread-out, spacious, if isolating place to a highly congested, urban-suburban hybrid. But with the endless demand for L.A. housing, like it or not, this is the only way forward.

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist. 

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