Co-Op Homes With Individual Identity

For the last two decades, the Ocean Park community of Santa Monica has, to its credit, supported the development of affordable housing projects, despite the area becoming more gentrified and more expensive.

The hope has been that the new housing would replace at least a few of the many homes and apartments lost to an ill-conceived urban renewal program in the 1960s and, more recently, to a spate of avaricious development.

The neighborhood, which borders Venice, also has been hurt by the Santa Monica rent control system that in serving select tenants not necessarily in need has prompted increasing disinvestment and deterioration of a dwindling stock of rental housing.

Also lost and lamented over the years has been much of the architectural charm of the seaside community, with many of the single-family and courtyard-styled bungalows and other salvageable idiosyncratic structures being bulldozed to make way for tacky, overscaled apartment and condo complexes.

At times the Ocean Park community has stumbled over itself, such as when a faction there lobbied to defeat a proposed affordable housing project to be built in the air rights of a Main Street parking lot.

But mostly, Ocean Park has favored affordable housing schemes, certainly more so than other communities. In particular, it has encouraged the nonprofit Community Corporation of Santa Monica to develop some innovative projects and weave them into the tattered fabric of the neighborhood, a planning approach known as in-filling.

The projects have included an award-winning renovation of a landmark bungalow into several attractive apartments, and the construction of two multifamily complexes in a distinctly designed updated version of the courtyard-centered housing concept.

The corporation’s most recently completed project is a distinctive housing cooperative, consisting of 43 units on five sites, and referred to as “OP 43,” OP standing for Ocean Park.

Conceptually and architecturally, the project is the most imaginative affordable housing development in many years in the Los Angeles region, and a model for other efforts in other communities.

To begin with, the sites selected for the project were vacant, so there was no need for any onerous relocations. In addition, they were purchased in part with money exacted from a developer who needed certain concessions from the city to go ahead with plans for a luxury housing complex elsewhere in the community.

Then, before it was decided what type of affordable housing should go on the sites, whether rental or otherwise, and before anyone began drafting plans, a series of community design workshops were conducted by the architect, the firm of Appleton Mechur & Associates, with the assistance of consultant Paul Zimmerman.

In the workshops, local residents expressed the desire for a cooperative housing scheme that through various financial subsidies and supports would allow low- and moderate-income tenants to become part owners in the project, and therefore be more involved in its and the community’s future.

(Tenants, who were selected by lottery, became owners by purchasing stock in the co-op through a variety of financial means, including loans and grants.

(Carrying charges for the one- to four-bedroom units vary from $334 to $1,000 a month, depending on family size and income. There are strict controls on who is eligible and on resale prices to ensure that the project remains affordable.)

As for the architecture, the community generally agreed that the design should reflect the flavor of the Ocean Park of romantic memory. The result was a variation on the California bungalow style, featuring low-pitched, sloped roofs, accented by exposed rafters, wood siding, trellises, picket fences and subdued colors.

To keep the project’s street profile low, another community request, the architects reduced the building mass by designing village-like complexes of varied detailing, comfortably set back from the sidewalk, with a front facade scaled where possible to a single story.

“What we did, in effect, was marry the bungalow style to the courtyard housing concept, creating common open spaces within each of the five sites and providing each unit with own courtyard entrance,” architect Ralph Mechur explained.

And because each site was different, each building and each unit had to be designed individually. “It was an extra effort, but worth it,” Mechur said.

The cooperative is not another cookie-cutter project, with each of the sites and the buildings on them, and apartments in them, having its own identity.

The residents seem quite appreciative. “I like it that, though we are one co-op, we also are different,” said Peter Knego, an actor living in one of the 15 units at 518 Pier Ave.

“Not only did we get something we could afford, but that also has charm,” added Peter Ludwig, of the six-unit building at 504 Ashland Ave.

The other apartment complexes consist of four units at 642 Marine St., 10 units at 3005 Highland Ave. and eight units at 536 Ashland Ave.

In fulfilling the request that it be well-scaled and sensitive to the community’s architectural heritage, OP 43 ironically stands out as an exceptionally designed complex.

Much of Ocean Park is composed of a mix of boxy, boring, stucco-clad, crudely detailed apartment buildings, persevering bungalows hidden behind overgrown front yards and select protected, pricey gems. Few make any friendly gestures to the street and its neighbors, as does OP 43.

That is why the community was so insistent in its design criteria, said Michael Alvaridez of the Community Corporation.

“OP 43 is a modern return to time past, a reminder of bygone years that makes people feel comfortable,” he explained. “There has been so much change around them that they wanted something stable, something they would like to live in.”

That simple desire could very well serve as a critical standard for in-fill community development everywhere.