[HN Gopher] A Design History of L.A.'S Dingbat Apartment Buildin...
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A Design History of L.A.'S Dingbat Apartment Buildings (2021)
Author : jseliger
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-11-12 04:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Related 99% Invisible episode:
| https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/99-vernacular-volume-...
| catlover76 wrote:
| > known locally as dingbats.
|
| I have never heard anyone call them that lol
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| People who know LA architecture & RE history do call them that
| ;)
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Born and raised in Los Angeles, lived there for 40+ years,
| had family in Korea Town and lived in Hollywood off of
| Cahuenga. I'm very familiar with these structures, I've never
| heard them referred to as dingbats, ever.
| youcantcook wrote:
| Same. Never heard this term before, but the article showed
| the pink flamingo and I instantly understood what they were
| talking about.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| The second I saw it, I knew it too, and then I
| immediately started getting anxiety about parking.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| 3rd generation LA native here - my family has never called
| them anything except dingbats as far back as I can
| remember. Plenty of other people I've talked to who are
| from LA used that term as well (or were familiar with it),
| so I don't think it's a regional LA thing either.
| hifromLA wrote:
| I have, but I've also met some LA natives that have never heard
| the term. It is a real thing, but it's not universal for
| everybody.
| jseliger wrote:
| L.A. should really remove all parking requirements:
| https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-....
| Dingbats were mostly constructed before the '70s constrictions on
| housing development, including severe parking minimums.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| LA is a big place, and includes suburbs. If they're gonna do
| that, they'll have to add more transit to these areas.
|
| But for places with existing transit, yeah I agree.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| Chicken and egg problem, less demand for transit and
| improving it if there's more people driving (and parking)
| jedberg wrote:
| I grew up in LA and have visited many times since. The
| biggest change is from Uber/Lyft. You no longer need a DD or
| nearly as much parking, now that you can just pay someone to
| take you around. It's not as good as transit, but it's a good
| stopgap to solve the problem until there is a bunch of
| housing without parking and the need for transit increases.
| mdorazio wrote:
| FYI, Uber/Lyft are massively more expensive than owning
| your own vehicle or using public transit (3x-4x the cost)
| if you need to go places regularly. They are currently not
| a viable solution for lower income residents of most
| cities.
| jedberg wrote:
| Of course not, you're paying for the driver's time.
| That's why I said it's a viable stopgap for some people,
| but hopefully enough people to drive demand for better
| transit.
| bluGill wrote:
| Taxis (which is all uber/lyft is) are are useful for
| cases where you mostly do not need to own a vehicle, but
| once in a rare while need to go someplace that your other
| alternatives don't work for.
| scottyah wrote:
| Rideshares (aka carpooling, not a separate paid-for
| service) for long distances, and bicycles for short
| distances are great ways to drastically increase mobility
| for cheap.
|
| The only time you don't get a "viable solution for lower
| income residents of most cities" is when you try to place
| a residence stupidly far from work.
| kurthr wrote:
| Well, there is a bus stop 5 blocks away under the I10
| overpass, which has service nominally once an hour. Maps says
| that it will only take 5 hours to get to your job in Culver
| city. Good thing you don't need parking any more.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Already happened, for all of California:
| https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/politics/2023-new-law-cali...
|
| > AB-2097 stops city and county governments across the state
| from implementing a minimum requirement for housing
| developments to provide parking, if those developments are
| within a half-mile of public transit.
|
| Unfortunately the LA Metro has opted for an opt-in payment
| scheme (for "diversity and inclusion", or some such), which
| means the public transit is filled with freeloaders who at best
| take seats and provide no money back to the maintenance of the
| track, and at worst are actively aggressive towards other
| passengers.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| LA Metro is not opt-in. Fares are mandatory, and the police
| can and do issue citations for fare evasion.
|
| The only free fares are for K-12 students, whose fares are
| being subsidized by a combination of public and private
| sources.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Leaving it up to the cops discretion means they will be
| incentivized to enforce it against people who can pay but
| don't. This is what the signs say in San Diego. You CAN be
| asked to show your fare at any time. Meaning consequences
| for me but not for them. Except they don't have anything to
| lose so why bother? It's in their best interest to break
| the law and abuse the transit system for shelter,
| harassment, and committing more crime (spreading the heat
| == less chance of detection). I'll choose warming the globe
| any day over putting myself at risk of violence.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Can, perhaps. Do: not so much. Most stations don't even
| have turnstiles, instead preferring some occasional posts
| you are "suggested" to tap your card at. Those that do have
| turnstiles without fail have handicap-ready turnstiles,
| which look enough like a completely open walkway to pass
| all forms of "plausible deniability" - especially when you
| see everybody in the station lining up to go through them.
|
| The only people I know who do pay are paying from company-
| provided passes. Everyone else is riding off them.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Same thing in San Diego. They spent billions on this advanced
| rail system with towering overpasses and platforms, but no
| turnstile to only allow paying customers. The result is it's
| a de facto homeless shelter. Immediately after it opened the
| neighborhood had a surge in vagrants. The only time I rode it
| I saw a violent assault. It's hard to not believe that the
| system is set up to increase crime. But if a paying passenger
| were to defend himself, they have cameras everywhere and
| would track you down immediately.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I used to live in one in North Hollywood after I moved out from
| my parent's house in 1997. They focus on the utilitarian aspect,
| but they often had courtyards and a pool.
|
| The new standards for cheap living, the 5 over 1 apartments are
| more packed in and don't often have pools.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Really? Most of those 5/1s have an internal courtyard area with
| a pool it seems. A lot even have things like a full gym.
| Sometimes even guest parking.
| atom-morgan wrote:
| Yep. I've lived in a few of these over the years and every
| single one had a courtyard/pool, grilling area, gym, and a
| guest parking section.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I've never heard these called "dingbats" even though I lived in
| such a building in Oakland many years ago. What I do know them as
| is "soft story" apartments, due to the likelihood of collapse of
| the living quarters over the car ports in an earthquake. (In my
| case, I lived in a unit that was not actually over a car port,
| but still would probably have suffered collateral damage.)
|
| Seems odd the article did not mention it, here is one that does
| discuss dingbats and the earthquake risk they pose.
|
| https://www.kcrw.com/news/articles/what-it-will-take-to-eart...
|
| Edit: I see now TFA does mention soft story earthquake risk, I
| didn't see it beause of the web site delay in showing me the
| entire article.
|
| "during earthquakes, there's an unsettling amount of shaking,
| thanks to the soft-story carport construction. (That said,
| dingbats have seen a wave of recent retrofits with strengthened
| seismic codes). "
| bastardoperator wrote:
| If you've been in these neighborhoods there is only one thing
| that matters, parking, and it's virtually non-existent.
| Thorrez wrote:
| Isn't there parking under the apartment?
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Somewhat conceptually related from almost the same era, the
| Vancouver Special:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Special
|
| Take a long, thin lot in a rapidly redeveloping inner city area,
| put a conventional home sideways onto the lot with scarce room to
| spare, change the entrance ways to suit, and bob's your uncle.
| Unlike the L.A. Dingbats, the Vancouver Specials usually had the
| parking overhang at the back, if at all.
| lytfyre wrote:
| I think another notable difference is that Vancouver Specials
| are nominally single family detached homes, but the design does
| lend itself to turning the main floor into a decently sized,
| above ground rental suite. All without requiring the kind of
| major renovations that cause city inspections.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Agreed, and a permutation of what you describe is the
| conversion of side-by-side duplex Vancouver Specials,
| particulary in Burnaby, into four-plexes by doing the same
| upstairs-downstairs split.
| shoo wrote:
| In Australia these are known as six-pack flats.
|
| https://assemblepapers.com.au/2019/07/16/six-pack-living-typ...
|
| > > The six-pack is the unsung hero of Australia's vernacular
| architecture. The humble walk-up apartment building, with that
| distinctive boxy, Lego look in red or cream brick, first started
| springing up in the 1930s around Australian suburbs - wealthy,
| poor and middling alike. The construction of six-packs reached
| its crescendo in the postwar period, when thousands of owners
| replaced the footprint of a detached house on a single lot with a
| long and thin two- and three-storey apartment building, always
| sans elevator.
|
| > Jack Chen has carefully renovated a 33 sqm apartment in a
| modest walk-up block in Richmond, showing what a six-pack flat
| can do.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The one in the photo is probably one of the nicest looking
| "dingbats" in LA I've ever seen. Most of them don't look that
| charmingly kitschy or have paint anywhere near that fresh. The
| typical LA dingbat is a shade of gray brought on by road dust
| covering whitewash with no one to care enough to hose it down
| every now and then. While there are some that actually are well
| taken care of, the majority of are reminiscent of brutalist
| Soviet architecture; although much of said architecture somehow
| manages to be more appealing. They often look as if they were
| built way back when _I Love Lucy_ was still being filmed and
| haven 't seen much if any _love_ since.
|
| Though I just disparaged dingbats, I believe it's more of them
| that we actually need right now, albeit with some modern flare.
| Perhaps they don't even have to be true "dingbats", but simply
| smaller apartment complexes that are simultaneously affordable
| but not decrepit.
|
| Unless I'm simply not seeing it, no meaningful number of such
| apartments are being built around LA. Practically every new
| development is _luxury_ apartments with starting prices in the
| high $2000s, and it 's almost irrelevant what neighborhood you
| look at. The amount of regulatory overhead for development in
| California, from the state down to the municipality, incentivizes
| developers to build luxury apartments because those have the best
| chance of at least breaking even after years of back and forth.
| Municipalities subsidize these developments because they
| supposedly raise the potential value of the area in general,
| bringing in residents with lots of spending money.
|
| And we wonder why fewer young people are bothering to move out of
| mom and dad's home.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| They're ugly trash, and they often go right up to the sidewalk
| as depicted in that picture. They are NOT what the city needs;
| although lies to the contrary drove the passage of corrupt
| legislation to allow developers to build 10 units where a
| single house stands... with no permits needed or local review
| or override possible.
|
| Meanwhile, boarded-up Macy's stores, the dying malls they
| anchor, and the vast parking lots growing weeds around them
| stand empty. Those sites have already suffered the costs of
| density, with every tree cut down and the ground paved over.
| But politicians have targeted already-residental neighborhoods
| for destruction instead, against popular opinion.
|
| L.A. is ugly and barren enough without more Kleenex boxes like
| these "dingbats" lining the streets. This never-ending hysteria
| about "the housing shortage" is an excuse for more graft
| perpetrated by politicians and the developers who own them.
| There's plenty of opportunity to build housing in L.A. without
| destroying single-family neighborhoods. But that just won't
| deliver the easy profits that building permit-free offers to
| developers, and to the corporations that are buying up entire
| neighborhoods.
|
| Which is another problem the state is ignoring. As corporations
| buy entire tracts, already-difficult home ownership is going to
| become IMPOSSIBLE for future generations... denying them the
| greatest opportunity to build wealth throughout their lives.
| Corporations don't die and hand their houses down or turn them
| over to new families.
|
| Disgusting scams all around.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Yeah they're pretty ugly IMO, but perhaps you missed my point
| that we can have "dingbats" without them actually being
| dingbats, if that makes any sense. I agree that the humongous
| cube with barren outer walls and carports under precarious-
| looking stilts isn't what we should want more of. There's
| just something not right about small to mid size apartment
| complexes becoming low-vacancy relics of the past in favor of
| "premium experiences" that can't be afforded by those
| starting out without relying on daddy for money. But that's
| the situation being created by incentives, which those with
| the most influence are turning a blind eye to.
|
| Otherwise, I agree with what you said.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| For sure, and I agree with you that it's possible. But
| replacing actual houses with tracts of these would be a
| sad, regressive mistake that's just not necessary.
| Replacing these with better ones, and even slightly taller
| ones, would be reasonable and useful.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Unless I'm simply not seeing it, no meaningful number of such
| apartments are being built around LA.
|
| FWIW many new developments in CA come with Inclusionary Zoning
| incentives or requirements which require a percentage of units
| to be at different affordability levels. But these requirements
| need to be carefully designed to not make the projects DOA and
| still aren't generating enough units to really make a
| difference yet.
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(page generated 2023-11-13 23:01 UTC)