If there’s one residential architectural style most closely associated with the glitz and glamour of 20th-century Los Angeles, it’s California modernism. Today, midcentury-modern residences dot hills and valleys across the Southland, serving as the perfect backdrops for Palm Springs getaways, movie stars diving into azure pools, and summer ad campaigns.

On one Silver Lake hillside, however, stands an alternative modernist vision that emphasizes not opulence and sprawl, but collective living, density, and affordability. Completed in 1948, and designed by architect Gregory Ain, the Avenel Cooperative is a set of 10 town houses, split across two single-story buildings. The units are all clean lines and California sunshine, with clerestory windows running the length of the buildings’ northern faces and glass walls and picture windows to the south. It’s the kind of geometry whose elegance lies in its simplicity, a distinct characteristic of California modernism.

In 2022, my family bought a unit of the Avenel homes, drawn to both its sleek design and its bold history. It’s no longer a cooperative, and the original owners’ idea of collective decision-making and community ownership has given way to petty squabbles over parking and maintenance in homeowner association meetings. Beneath the peeling paint and leaky roofs, however, lies a historical lesson in what’s possible when we decide to consider housing as a collective rather than individualized pursuit—as well as the constant effort it takes to keep such a bold concept alive. It’s a vision of community rooted in shared space, an ethos 20th-century utopians used to address challenges as diverse as housing affordability, residential segregation, density and walkability, and even child care and care work—one that, six months after the Eaton and Palisades Fires destroyed thousands of homes in the area, has never felt more relevant.

An alternative vision for modernism at Avenel

Avenel was commissioned by a group of WWII veterans and their families who, united by their left-wing politics and priced out of single-family lots in the neighborhood, secured Federal Housing Administration loans to hire Ain to design their housing cooperative on a shared plot of land. While new cooperative housing developments are relatively rare today, Avenel was part of a larger movement toward cohousing amid a postwar housing shortage that made traditional stand-alone homes out of reach for many.

A Los Angeles city directory from 1956 gives a sense of the original residents. In the lower building, there was firefighter Finis Sims Jr., who broke the color line as one of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s first Black hires. Next door were sixth-grade teacher and union organizer Serril Gerber in unit 2841.5, and construction worker Carl Brant in unit 2843.

As the Red Scare reached its height in the ’50s, many of Avenel’s residents were investigated and blacklisted for their political beliefs, creating an atmosphere of fear not dissimilar from the federal government’s current attacks on activists, educators, and communities. Gerber was fired by the Los Angeles Board of Education for alleged communist ties, and both he and Brant were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a Cold-War-era congressional committee tasked with investigating communist and other activities viewed as subversive.

Two actors in the cooperative had their careers cut short after being called before HUAC and appearing on the Hollywood blacklists. One of them, Howland Chamberlin, was allegedly reported to the FBI as a suspected communist by none other than fellow actor Ronald Reagan.

Ain’s design philosophy reflected the political commitments of the original co-op members—and his own socialist politics—by balancing the individual and the collective, says architectural historian Anthony Fontenot, author of Notes from Another Los Angeles: Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape. Homeowners entered their units through private entrances on a shared walkway and entertained in their private gardens while their children dug in the sandbox in a shared play yard. Ain went on to build on these ideas in future designs, with plans for developments that included shared gardens, on-site schools and daycares, and park-like spaces for kids to roam without fear of car traffic.

“It’s these ideas that bring people together in subtle ways” across both race and class, says Fontenot. Across all of his major works in Southern California, Ain’s designs allowed residents to “find or develop ways that they might want to not live isolated lives, classically understood as homogenous isolation in the suburbs, but something much more unique where you could build relations and build a larger community.”

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Each of the 960-square-foot units was fitted with sliding walls, allowing residents to modulate their floor plans from one to three bedrooms if needs changed. While some current owners have updated their space with new appliances, fixtures, and furniture, the moving walls remain in place across the 10 units. “To me, this is the ultimate anti-consumerist housing model,” says architect Rick Corsini, who has rearranged his living space several times since he moved into Avenel 30 years ago. “It was a bachelor pad, and then I got married, and then we had a kid, and we’ll probably retire and die here.”

“He is one of the only architects who has been able to actually—not just claim to—make architecture and design relevant to the working class.”
— Anthony Fontenot

Ain was a frequent collaborator with more well-known L.A. modernists, including Charles Eames and John Entenza—until ideological and personality differences sidelined his career. In 1945, Ain was reportedly excluded from Arts & Architecture’s Case Study House Program, which commissioned architects to design model homes, because Entenza, then editor of the magazine, took umbrage at Ain’s commissions for communist clients. The resulting Case Study Homes include exemplars of California modernism, including the Eames House (1949) and the Stahl House (1960). While Entenza’s stated goal for the program was to make high-end design accessible to more consumers at lower costs, the end result did little to make housing more affordable. It did, however, serve as free advertising for the housing industry, furniture retailers, and other makers of consumer products, argues Fontenot in Notes from Another Los Angeles.

If Ain’s vision had ultimately won out, “we would be in a radically different place,” says Fontenot. “Southern California and elsewhere would have been able to manifest a more just landscape, a more just kind of city.” Instead of neighborhoods segregated along lines of class and race, Fontenot imagines L.A. would be full of affordable, park-like neighborhoods that center around care, connection, and community.

As is, Ain’s ethos wasn’t even enough to keep the Avenel homes affordable. In 1991, Avenel owners voted to convert their cooperative into condominiums. “The argument was, ‘It will be easier to sell these places, and the resale value will be higher,’” explains Corsini, who bought his unit in the first wave of new owners after the vote. Corsini says he bought his unit for $107,000. My family bought our unit for more than 10 times that price three decades later.

An ‘eco’ vision for collective living

As Avenel was going condo, coincidentally, an unrelated group of utopians founded the Los Angeles Ecovillage just three miles south. Like the Avenel veterans, the ecovillage was designed as an intentional community built on consensus-based collective decision making. Unlike Avenel, it has maintained its commitment to affordability in spite of rising housing costs in the surrounding neighborhood, offering lessons in how cohousing projects might avoid Avenel’s fate.

Today, the ecovillage sits on land owned by Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust (BVCLT), established in 2007. The largest property in the Ecovillage is Urban Soil/Tierra Urbana (USTU), a housing cooperative that owns the 40-unit building at 117 Bimini Place, which houses a mix of renters and owners who have purchased shares in the co-op.

Both renter and owner members have a formal say in just about every aspect of the community’s decision-making, from the maintenance and upkeep of the building to the fruit trees planted in the shared courtyard. “They can form committees for just about anything,” explains resident manager Jamie Penn. “And I do mean anything. The committee that assessed the number of committees and their function was called ‘the committee committee.’”

Almost 35 years after its founding, USTU still seems to be delivering on its promise for affordable cohousing with low ecological impacts. Monthly costs are as low as $500 for residents of the building, and members meet regularly for community dinners in the garden or “work parties” to harvest its many fruit trees. (Any food scraps are fed to the co-op’s chickens or composted, of course.) The dedication to sustainability is visible throughout the building, from fences made from recycled bike parts, welded together and painted a rainbow of vibrant colors, to the hodgepodge of donated, found, and refashioned furniture in the lobby.

Penn predicts that the ecovillage’s founding mission won’t disappear from view anytime soon. She notes that USTU couldn’t go condo, even if residents wanted to. Under the terms of USTU’s ground lease with BVCLT, the co-op must maintain the 40 units as affordable housing, and they would have to receive permission from the CLT to redevelop the property. “We became the limited-equity housing co-op and the land trust to avoid that fate,” she explains. “We became two entities for the specifically designed purpose of not becoming commercially sold property.

Cooperative building and cooperative action after the L.A. fires

In the months since the January fires, one group of residents has been organizing to establish a community land trust and secure public funding to rebuild the neighborhood of Altadena.

“A lot of traditional vehicles have been very slow or unresponsive to residents, and folks are feeling a little disempowered or ignored in the traditional routes,” says Matthew Vu, BVCLT’s board chair, who has been organizing alongside Altadena residents. “So we’re hoping that we can create a more community driven process that allows for more input.”

For Altadena resident and organizer Sylvie Andrews, that requires centering the needs and experiences of fire survivors. During a recent working group meeting, Andrews, who lost her own home during the fires, offered one look to the future: “This is going to be a trust dedicated to a particular place in a particular time, and we want to honor all those who came before and the unique vibe that is Altadena.”

Among the homes destroyed were 21 of the Park Planned Homes, another of Gregory Ain’s projects in Southern California. Some who lived there have come together to try rebuilding their development according to Ain’s original design and ethos, while introducing new materials to ward off future fire damage.

The Park Planned Homes capture the essence of many of Ain’s ideas about community and affordability, says Fontenot. “Ain spent his entire life at the peak of his career, devoted to the most simple yet amazing ideas about affordable housing. Most architects then and now never really learned the lesson, and Ain died a relatively kind of forgotten architect.”

In wake of the fires, residents interested in community housing models now have an opportunity to fully realize Ain’s lessons—and, by using the land trust model, protect them from future speculative forces. For his part, Ain never stopped encouraging his fellow architects to empower individuals to build communities for the greater good. In 1966, he published an essay as the head of Penn State’s architecture program, urging other educators to “reaffirm the truism that architecture is a social art, and that its aesthetic power must be derived from a social ethos.”

And almost two decades after he built the Avenel Cooperative and his commissions in Los Angeles had dried up, due in part to the political climate, Ain wrote with an enduring faith in the power of collective action to build toward utopia: “There is a corollary to the legend of the Tower of Babel. If men will work together, and speak a common language, they can build a tower that will reach to heaven.”

Top Image: The Avenel Housing Association, as seen in 1949. Photo by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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