INTERVIEW WITH FRANCES
ANDERTON ON MULTIFAMILY HOUSING
IN LOS ANGELES

Hadrian Predock: Frances Anderton, congratulations on Common Ground: Multifamily Housing In Los Angeles. It's a fantastic book and it's something that I share a strong interest in. Housing has returned to the center of architecture in a big way, so your book is super-timely in that regard. And I think of your book as a medium to argue for multifamily housing. Your thesis seems to be saying we are culturally taught to understand apartment living, especially in our country as a kind of stigma or trap, versus the more liberating and wealth-building case for single family home ownership. But you come to challenge this construct by asserting that apartment-living – especially well-designed apartment living – offers, potentially more in the way of compact, socially-based living with an ethos towards density, communities, social structures and environmental consciousness. How would you speak to this inversion of thinking about the single family house and multifamily housing that underpins your book?

Frances Anderton: Well, first of all, thank you so much for the summary and if that's what you took away, I'm thrilled. But yeah, after struggling for a while over whether apartment living was going to be my permanent condition, I realized I'd gone to a different stage in life where it was almost too late to start thinking about trying to do the single family home thing, irrespective of the fact that [I] wasn't so keen on it. But to unpack your question, when I came to LA I just sort of assumed that ultimately I would find my way to a single family home. But we found ourselves living in an apartment  close to work and our daughter’s school. Plus the apartment itself truly, as I've described in the opening of the book, is delightful. It has a very well planned interior that garners the best advantages of Southern California living, with plentiful sunlight coming through the building from multiple aspects And then ours also has personal [exterior] space, as well as being arranged around a small court area. Everybody approaches their apartments from that court area. So it serves as a natural social condenser. And that combination, I found to be extremely appealing. It isn't social on the level that you might find in somewhere like coliving. It was more of a sociability or neighborliness enabled by the plan.

And then what happened – and I’ve told this story in the book – is that as our daughter entered her teens she got increasingly embarrassed about where we lived, to the point where she refused to bring her friends back to the apartment. This was fascinating to me. It coincided with my years at KCRW where I was doing numerous stories on housing, as well as on DnA. And what persistently nagged at me about these stories is that even when we would hear from both sides, I would hear that somehow the multifamily housing – the greater density – was the problem that had to be somehow accommodated into this fabric. I would hear how high density housing would negatively impact the “character” of the existing neighborhoods. There was this implication that the single family home was somehow innate, it was the natural DNA of LA, and multifamily [housing], especially when it was rental, was somehow an invasive species.

I'm probably being a bit extreme but I think my sense was borne out by the fact that you'd find that even people who are advocating for density, would rarely be living in anything other than a single family home. And that's because anyone who can afford it pretty much gets themselves on that track of buying that house. There are obvious financial benefits, there are political benefits, there's some lifestyle benefits. There's all these benefits that have been built into that, which is incredibly unfair given that probably more than half of Angelenos are living in some form of multifamily and more than half of Angelenos are renters so this region has been structured to elevate, exalt the single family home and diminish the multifamily. Of course, there's a racial element to all of that. So there I am living in my apartment building that I think is lovely, meeting architects, yourself, others, many others who are doing what I consider to be lovely multifamily buildings that are offering up a delightful lifestyle, and yet they're completely culturally overshadowed. They get dissed in movies – invariably playing the home of the bad guy or poor family – and they get ignored in shelter publications.

HP: That's a great introduction. So let’s get into some of the content of the book itself. There are specific things about housing in Southern California that emerged in the early 20th century, like the bungalow court, which you explore in the book. And these include making something that looks like the California Dream with certain kinds of architectural references that reinforce all of these ideals and fantasies, European Mediterranean references in particular. This era to many of us seems like an incredible time to be in LA , but also one that was embedded with all of these other things like colonization, privilege, redlining, and racism. So for many others, the housing that we don't see in the book was substandard, which was really dreadful and inhumane – the kind of opposite of the California Dream  – and these things existed simultaneously. So these artifacts, which are still very much part of our present landscape, emerged in the teens, 20s and 30s of the 20th century, and are both fantastical and dreamy, and oppressive and dreadful. So I wonder how the book begins to evaluate the fantasy based courtyard housing now 100 years later. How do we contextualize those kinds of architecture and the more fantasy-driven versions of housing in the present?

FA: Well, it's interesting because the bungalow court grows out of the house courts, which are bungalow court versions of a tenement – sort of tar paper shacks on an alley and very impoverished standards. The social reformers of the late 19th century and early 20th century wanted to improve upon those conditions but also observed that in Los Angeles, this low rise housing enabled cross ventilation. They saw that this could be a good form of housing that was then picked up by the builders in the early 1910s. Yes, and then they built a fancier version of the house court and it became extremely popular. In the early days, according to Laura Chase,  a scholar of bungalow courts, before World War 1,  there was less racial restriction in L.A.. People of color, African Americans who were moving here, could also invest in bungalow courts.

It definitely appealed to the tourists who came to Pasadena and Santa Monica and then in West Hollywood, Hollywood and Los Feliz where it morphs into those really elaborate Mediterranean fantasies that are appealing to actors. They're appealing to Hollywood, which loves nothing more than a stage set and you have set designers working on those buildings. For example, Nina and Arthur Zwebell, who would build El Cabrillo and Villa Primavera and other really fantastically elaborate Spanish style courts in Hollywood and West Hollywood, wound up going into production design after the Depression killed their business. But you had the studios forming relationships with builders who build that kind of housing near the studios.

HP: Shifting to the introduction of modernism we have a really important era of experimentation that is centered around certain European immigrants like RM Schindler. And we get, for example, the Schindler house, which is strange to think of as a housing project. I think most people think of it as a house, but I definitely see it as a kind of housing project. It was a kind of early, and maybe radical, example of coliving. And it seems to be one of the most relevant projects in the book to what we might be seeing in architecture studios today, where there's a lot of exploration about coliving and cohousing going on. A lot of [the present work] is unaware that it has a much deeper past. What other forms of housing that happened during that introduction of modernism do you consider to be more experimental and might inform some of the present shifts that we're seeing in housing?

FA: I think it was you, Hadrian, who prompted me to go deeper into Schindler, and see the house  essentially as a modernist duplex. Kathryn Smith, a historian who lived there for a while and then subsequently wrote a book on Schindler, points out that Rudolph Schindler came from Europe, where one is used to more condensed living. Moreover, in the 1920s Vienna, his hometown, went through this radical socialist period, albeit he had left 10 years before that. The Red Vienna period produced the most extraordinary public housing that still prevails today.

So certainly, Schindler and Neutra came from this city and we have to assume that it must have impacted them. Schindler builds the Schindler house which lives on to this day as a local architectural monument. Meanwhile in that same decade in 1927, Neutra, with help from Schindler, works on Jardinette [Apartments], which I think is completely fascinating. It is over in East Hollywood near the freeway, sadly boarded up and hopefully to be restored. Jardinette is commissioned by Joseph Miller who comes racing into town and announces to the LA Times that he's going to build a whole number of luxury buildings, and they're going to be ultra modern, and they're going to have this ultraviolet, special glass. And they're going to be the super innovative version of the historically styled, luxury apartment buildings that are going up in those roaring 20s.

And so Neutra’s doing what turns out to be the most stringent, essentially International Style apartment building. It is a U-shape around a shared open area – interestingly the plan you now see popping up over and over again in Hollywood – and inside you find light-filled, incredibly compact spaces. Some of the units open out onto these cantilevered balconies, which are the “jardinettes,” or the little gardens. In the drawings of the day, they're filled with plants, overflowing with plants, and this really is a new way of living multifamily in Los Angeles.

HP: When you say compact do you have a sense of how small the flats were?

There were 43 units ranging from 400 to 700 square feet. They were small, organized according to the German concept of existence minimum. When I moved into our apartment building, I lived upstairs in the one bedroom that was 700 square feet, and then we moved downstairs to 1200. And I have to say that I hold in the highest esteem, the architects, past and present, that make a great interior out of a tiny amount of square footage.

HP: I find that we're working even smaller than that, and we're kind of shifting the balance of collective space but you mentioned a detail, which I find really intriguing: the violet colored glass. I know Neutra had theories about atmosphere and color and the kind of psychological effect of things. Was it along those lines?

FA: Yes, absolutely. It was totally along those lines. Miller wanted ultra modern buildings that would reflect the era's belief in the health-giving potential of fresh air and sunlight, which of course, Neutra completely believed in. He promised at least two panes of “violet” ray glass in the windows of each apartment. And this was essentially single pane glass. It was introduced in the late 1920s and was touted as a transmitter of the beneficial ultraviolet rays of the sun, catnip for Neutra and many of his generation who believed sunlight was bound up with health and could help cure TB, and other ailments of the age. I did quite a lot of digging around in the LA Times and other publications of that decade and this glass pops up quite a lot.

HP: So let's move on towards the postwar era where you start to talk about garden apartments and green commons like Village Green, where housing begins to offer up a kind of safe, pastoral campus-like quality, maybe to combat the harsher cityscape that surrounds those projects. Again, they're totally appealing, and yet also very artificial constructs of imported landscapes, especially a project like Village Green. So what I wonder is, how do you begin to deal with those kinds of contradictions – on the one hand, the pastoral ideal, and then the realities of the climate and environment that we actually live in, which is a desert.

FA: Well, I certainly acknowledge that is a fact. But I don't necessarily argue that they need to be ripped up and replaced. And the reason for doing that was because I thought, if I'm going to repudiate garden apartments on those grounds, then I also need to do a wholesale repudiation of the single family home and its yard. Because to reject the garden apartment is actually saying that poor or working people should not have the same bucolic, pastoral experience that 1000s of more affluent Angelenos are perfectly allowed to enjoy.

The other thing that's super interesting about the garden apartments is that urbanistically, they do raise a question, which is that they are a kind of island within the urban fabric and self contained. And that is open to question as a way of planning a city. However, what really comes through is the power of the island effect to enable a sense of connection to place, and that manifests later when there were these massive struggles to save Lincoln Place, Chase Knolls, Wyvernwood in Boyle Heights and then some of the publicly owned, publicly developed ones which never became  as bucolic and ideal as some of the privately developed ones. But even there you get this tight community that forms and then fights tooth and nail over what happens next to these projects – and I'm saying projects not in the pejorative, I'm saying projects in the affirmative use of the word. When they're Village Green, they've got old growth trees, which are absolutely marvelous, and the residents have become incredibly protective of them.

HP: Very protective, and there's heritage conservation at that level.

FA: To be honest, that's a whole other discussion, about how far you want to go with your heritage conservation. And Village Green has decided to go full bore. It became condos and is very well kept and does have that slight feeling of Pleasantville, but you know, it's a very pleasant Pleasantville.

HP: So tied also to some of those projects is the question of self-governance. Can you talk a little bit about what you discovered about self-governance that relates to these projects like Village Green or even Park La Brea – whether that is something that worked or didn't work, was it a failure? What are the different models? 

FA: Well, I could have spent just pages on that. The self-governance thing is incredibly interesting, because it's a mixed bag. I briefly touched upon the fact that when HACLA, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, was formed, Frank Wilkinson, [an] idealistic, driven assistant director brings in some of the big names of that period to work on these really large superblock developments of garden apartments. These are partly an architectural idea, partly a planning idea, and partly a social idea. The social idea is, okay, the residents are not going to own their places, they're going to be tenants. However, there is a communitarian idea, that’s come partly from Europe, that the residents are going to share laundry, they're going to share childcare, and they're going to have some level of self-determination.

These housing efforts ran up against the Red Scare, this fear of creeping socialism. But there's a difference when those residents' self-determination becomes condo ownership, as happened with Village Green. For the most part, the book is about housing at that intersection of connected living plus rental, but I do explore some of the adjacent typologies because one does have to think about this ownership issue and the asymmetrical relationship between the tenants and the owner. But then what happens when you have something like 630 households all becoming owners, as happens with Village Green?

HP: Absolutely, everything that emerged during that kind of communitarian, socially- based era is back, it's back on the table now. Of these more “community” and “modernism”-based projects, I wonder which ones have really stood the test of time and proven to be a successful community, not just a great piece of architecture – and could even deal with the radical shifts we're going through right now? 

FA: Well, I guess until I looked deeper, I had always assumed Village Green. I'd always assumed that was the absolute optimum of all of them. It pushes the cars to the side, it's genuinely gorgeous. And it certainly has morphed and evolved as a community. As with those other private ones, in its early days, it's whites-only but over time it becomes genuinely racially mixed. For a while, children are not allowed, but then the children come back. So on the face of it, it seems just ideal, but actually, I wound up really liking Park La Brea.

In its current state, it has a fence around it so it does feel more closed off. But it actually is more embedded in the MidWilshire community around it. And also it does have a difference in scale, showing that you can have jumps in scale to meet density needs. And a former resident told me that people describe Park La Brea as being for “the newlywed and the nearly dead.” I mean, how many intentional communities managed to encompass the entire age spectrum? So I think that's really great and I did come away feeling like Park La Brea was really interesting. Also, I love Lincoln Place, which I've lived near for years. It went through a mega fight (against new owners that wanted to demolish and redevelop the site) and it wound up being saved through a compromise that involved replacing  some of the buildings with new, denser  ones, albeit they  are very modest in scale. Then  you have Wyvernwood in Boyle Heights, which does offer working people a really good place to live, but they are in a struggle. It's in a struggle against the forces of today. So they are probably going to have to be these compromise arrangements to accommodate changing needs.

HP: Well, they have persisted in impressive ways. As we move deeper into your book, and into the post war era, we start to see capitalism in full swing, with much less emphasis on design and the needs of the populace, and much less communally oriented. So I wonder if you could talk a bit about the various groups, laws, etc, that emerged to combat and respond to the developer-driven housing models that began to populate the LA basin in very aggressive ways in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s.

FA: I should say that the book is not comprehensive and there's certainly going to be some gaps in the book and gaps in my knowledge. But yes, the public housing gets kicked in the teeth. Chavez Ravine, which people can read about, is tragic, bringing together the forces of the Red Scare and the idealism of that housing project comes to an end.

When the building that I live in is completed in about 1962, Frank [Gehry’s] office gets a letter from the mayor of Santa Monica, praising Gehry for an “outstanding example of what our free enterprise system can achieve, when the building of our neighborhoods is in the hands of enlightened private developers and architects who will accept the challenge to create buildings which not only meet the economic needs of the builder, but also meet the comprehensive needs of our population.” That tells you all you need to know about that decade, which is that working Angelenos who need housing, by which we mean probably some form of rental housing, are going to be provided for by the private sector.

Obviously, there is an inherent conflict there. The developer, the private owner, is generally not doing it for altruistic reasons. And we get into the 70s and there's the battle for rent control that happens in LA and it happens in Santa Monica institutes rent control, and then West Hollywood, which is formed as a city on the back of its rent control struggles along with gay rights. Then there's pushback from the developer, property owner community and in comes the Ellis Act. And so we're in this constant struggle now, a push-and-pull between the private sector and the rental sector and that's going on today.

Into this steps a growing number of well-intentioned groups that decide to build housing. It's the Reagan years. And you have these groups, many of them with real moral purpose, some religious-based, some secular, progressive-based, looking to deploy tax credits to build affordable housing. And this takes off in Santa Monica and it takes off in Venice, and it takes off in West Hollywood, and it takes off in LA and we all know their names now in the architecture world: Community Corporation of Santa Monica and Venice Community Housing and West Hollywood Community Housing and Skid Row Housing Trust and Clifford Beers. There's a whole bunch of them and they enter this space but they're not doing it on a scale like the garden apartments where you can get 38 acres and build Lincoln Place. They're doing it piecemeal, it's infill. Sometimes it's adaptive reuse of existing buildings. And sometimes it's a new build, but it's project by project by project.

Interestingly, some of the early players in this picture, say Community Corporation, came from the UCLA Architecture and Planning Department, and they reach out and bring in some of the innovative or experimental architects who are just cutting their teeth in the late 80s and early 90s. We start to see some really interesting architecture emerging in the realm of affordable housing. The reason why it is in the book  is because the throughline of this book is about more socially-oriented housing, and these affordable housing developers are typically centered units on shared open space, for environmental reasons, and also for social reasons.

But this kind of courtyard housing is much higher off the ground, 3, 4, 5 stories, and it is by many of the names in architecture that we know. And I find it to be a really interesting arena of activity, that now seems to have aggregated into a recognizable kind of period of time, with a recognizable kind of aesthetic. But every project is custom and that brings with it a whole bunch of challenges. 

HP: There are obviously many examples of market-rate housing that offer a lot to architecture and to people; you cover many of these projects. But let's get to the present where massive shifts in culture are taking place related to social movements, climate change, the pandemic, and a total reconsideration of how we live and work. Through my lens, I'm seeing many student projects and seminars focused around housing. Housing seems like an experimental site for architecture right now, as it was during prior significant cultural and technological shifts that we've alluded to. All the parts of housing and how they come together are being reconsidered and new social arrangements are emerging. We've mentioned co-housing, co-living, we now have co-working, micro dwelling. There's even a new term that has emerged called “codividuality.”

FA: That is great.

HP: There's an entire book now called Codividuality – and how space is distributed and how it's organized is very much up in the air. I personally think it's a really exciting time to be working on housing, much like some of the more intense periods historically, like the worker housing movements, and even the utopian communities that were explored in the discipline of architecture, and then translated into certain built forms. So your book, obviously, is super timely. Maybe you are starting to see the future, and the rapid pace of change and transformation that housing is undergoing. Or were changes already taking place within housing that you were recognizing, and which informed your decision to work on this book? 

FA: Definitely at KCRW we covered the emergence of micro units and of co-living. As I embarked on the book, I knew that I was going to want to touch on those, even though I didn't know the word codividual, which is brilliant.

In 2020 in anticipation of the passage of the expected passage of SB 9 and 10, the mayor’s office with Christopher Hawthorne, then the design chief, launched a competition to get people to think about lower rise density. In that competition people were asked not only to think about the physical design, but also the living models, and the financial models. And what kept coming up in that conversation was the idea of the Community Land Trust. So I was very aware of that movement too, and to some extent, those can start to overlap.

In the book, rather than try and include every project out there, I tried to find certain individual projects that illustrate the general. So I chose two projects that are at that intersection that you've raised. And in terms of co-living, I focused on Treehouse, extremely interesting in terms of the co-living movement. And then in terms of taking on ownership models, I looked at an older one from the early 90s, the LA Eco-Village, which is a Community Land Trust where they make all the decisions together and are co-living.

The co-living thing is really interesting. It’s built on the emergence of micro units. We start to see micro units in the early teens. At that point, they weren't this fully developed notion of the tiny apartment offset by radically abundant amounts of shared space, proposed by Co-living – as in, we're going to offset your 150 square foot bedroom with the shared cafeteria and the shared garden and art-come-laundry room and on and on and on. I found that to be manifested in a really interesting way in Treehouse, because in a lot of the co-living projects that emerged, you couldn't help feeling that however much they sold the idea of community the underlying theme was still a real estate idea – maximizing the return on the square footage.

With Treehouse, you have these two developers Prophet Walker and Joe Green, who are definitely businessmen. However, they seem to genuinely feel that their generation – Millennials – had grown up in a world that was becoming increasingly fragmented. Ironically, the fragmentation was intensified through social media. It should be the other way around. But they were the children of suburbanization and they felt that in America the more you earn, the more loneliness you buy, or the more isolation you buy. And they chose to try and combine all of these ideas in this first of their co-living projects.

HP: What were the principles? And how does that kind of structure work in terms of the community? And how do you make it work?

FA: You have to abide by principles, you have to prove that you are ready to commit to this small community lifestyle, and you have to demonstrate past examples of having been involved with some level of community or sociability. And then once you're in, you turn around and help choose the next people. And they're not alone in doing this. Other communities are doing it too. And some people have found it has worked for them, and others have found that it's really hard and they leave. Is this something you can put up with for a brief amount of time before you find it suffocating? Or is it genuinely kind of wonderful? And can it apply really only to twentysomethings who are essentially just continuing their dorm life until they find a partner or whatever, and move into, guess what, the single family home? It's definitely being tested.

Yeah, I think it's very experimental right now, in terms of what does it really mean? And to what extent will it work and which populations can actually cohabitate. And how do they do it?

It's also a factor of LA being an incredibly expensive place to live. Of course, one has to wonder, all the people who are making this choice to live in a 150 square foot bedroom, and then share the kitchen, the roof, terrace, etc. – would they make that choice if they had other options? We don't know.

HP: So let's move on to the ADU. I think we're coming towards the latter portions of the book. The emergence of the ADU is also super significant in Los Angeles and will undoubtedly change the landscape of the city. But the view presents certain conflicts and anxieties between this kind of social contribution, that spirit of wanting to densify the city and to have it serve certain populations, and the overwhelming power of market forces related to capitalism, right? I'm wondering how you framed it in the book.

FA: I framed it as potentially offering up some level of solution to growing the availability of attainable housing and also potentially offering an opportunity for what was a traditional form of socially-oriented living, the intergenerational household – where the granny flat is genuinely for granny. I offered up those potentialities and I talked about the work done over at cityLAB  that contributed to the legalizing of the ADU and then we get the JADU and then SB 9 and 10, all of which suggest a greater attainability of living for a renter as well as a greater amount of socially-oriented living. The reality is more complicated.

One, not everybody who builds an ADU wants to rent it out to some stranger. In fact, they don't even necessarily put granny in there, they put the yoga mat in there, or it's an airbnb. So there isn't really control over the way these units are used. Also, we learn that they're all custom, so they can wind up being really expensive to construct. So they don't fully deliver on their potential for attainable housing. Having said that, I did speak to a UCLA professor named Frederick Zimmerman and he said that despite those limitations, “newly constructed and thoughtfully designed ADUs may not prove to be an affordable solution for low income Angelenos. But they're an important part of the ways in which housing supply can rise to meet housing demand and therefore keep prices lower than they otherwise would be in the overall market.”

One of the architects who's forged a practice in this area is Melissa Shin, and her sister Amanda, with Shin Shin. Melissa was really interested in what the ADU represents. She said it is a “typology that's questioning the way that we live together and share space. It's a strange idea actually to most people that you would share your private property with a stranger.” So for her the challenge has been figuring out how to enable people to co-exist in a way that's not mutually invasive. She says ADUs have largely “filled a niche in housing for young professionals who can't quite afford to buy a home but want to rent something nice with the yard and the charm of a single family residence.”

HP: She sees a particular demographic as entering that space. Moving on, coming full circle into the afterword, you again make a strong kind of conclusive case for housing as a social antidote to the hyper individualism, as you put it, that is a byproduct of advanced capitalism. Is there anything you want to add to what we talked about so far as a kind of conclusion to underscore that thesis? Or do you feel like we've kind of said it all?

FA: What I will add is that the book was trying to do two things. On the one hand, it was trying genuinely to just celebrate LA's legacy of multifamily housing – to reclaim that legacy and say, look, living in multifamily in LA can be an alluring experience, just in the way the single family home has been presented. My book was going to be the carrot; it's going to say, let’s not see multifamily housing as this thing that we'd rather not have to deal with but instead let’s say, you could actually have a better life in an apartment of the type in this book than rattling around in your lonely single family home. That’s the conceit of the book.

But at the same time, I couldn't do that without acknowledging the politics, the racial history, the economics of housing, but I didn't want to go too far down that road, because I didn't want the book to be an earnest, worthy, downer about multifamily housing. Therefore, what I didn't spend too much time on was capitalism. But actually, of course, that's at the heart of all of this.

And the last thing I will say and this is for our next interview, Hadrian, is there is this whole other piece of this story, which is the relationship of multifamily housing in LA to the street.

HP: That sounds like your next book. 

FA: I've touched upon it. With all this development on the arterials there is a big thing amongst architects about engaging with the street. The thing that I have learned through all the multiple interviews with residents of multifamily living is that what makes many of the best loved places special and delightful is a sense of self-containment and a sense of secrecy. It's a very LA thing to go into your internal world. I think one has to really heed that and not get too excited about building on Jefferson and Lincoln and all the arterials and exposing the poor residents to all of that traffic and horrible pollution. No, I think if that's going to succeed, you've still got to create  the secret world. 

HP: I think that's a really great place to conclude the interview. Frances Anderton, thanks so much and congratulations on your book - quite an accomplishment.


_{Photo Credits:
Arroyo, designed by Koning Eizenburg for Community Corp, 2018, courtesy of Koning Eizenburg
Bungalow Court, Pasadena, 1911, photo by Eric Staudenmaier
Laurelwood designed by Rudolph Schindler, 1949, photo by Julius Shulman
Village Green Landscape, Photo by Art Gray
Park La Brea, Photo by Frances Anderton}