Editor’s Notebook -- S.J. Cahn
Ah, the tear-down. The quintessential piece of Southern California
real estate, the little ramshackled, falling-apart home that’s worth a
couple million dollars.
Well, the home’s not really worth anything. But the land -- oh, the
land -- is worth a little something, especially once a three-story, giant
box of a home is plopped down where that “tear-down” once so cutely
stood.
It’s a phenomena that’s come to be called “mansionization,” and it’s
striking beach communities all across Southern California. It’s happening
on the Balboa Peninsula, you see it on the Eastside, people are squeezed
by it in Corona del Mar.
And folks are getting mad, mad, mad about it. In Newport Beach (and
even more so just south in Laguna), residents are up in arms enough to
want the City Council to put restrictions on just how big, how
space-consuming, new homes can be.
What I’m trying to figure out is just why, all of a sudden, everyone
is talking about it. Has it intensified that much? It certainly seems
like it is far from a new trend.
I remember the first mansion on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, where I
grew up: late ‘70s, just a year or two after I’d become an avid beach
rat, along with all my friends and our somewhat reluctant mothers.
Suddenly, the metal framework was there, looming like the prow of a
battleship over the beach.
It stayed that way for months and months -- work wasn’t done at the
quick pace you find today. So we had a while to get used to what was
clearly going to be a windowed monstrosity.
We never really did. And today, that first mansion is just one of many
that line the beach, much as they do on the peninsula. It’s nothing
special. In fact, you can almost imagine someone taking a look at it and
thinking, “Well, if we tore it down...”
(If you’re ever walking the Strand, it’s the house on the north corner
of 19th Street. Huge, tinted windows. And after many color schemes, it’s
just plain gray.)
Having lived through this phenomena, it’s easy to understand why
“mansionization” has people frothing. In Manhattan, as on the peninsula
and up and down streets in Corona del Mar, the very nature of the
community has changed. Now it’s the small, original beach cottages that
are few and far between, that stand out in their puniness.
Instead of front yards (yet alone back yards), people have sealed
themselves inside the most square feet of home they can. As a result, you
see a lot of kids’ play rooms, since there isn’t a yard for them to play
in.
What’s been lost, I think, is not only the feel of the old beach
communities -- that relaxed, slowed-down evening barbecue sense -- but
the very community, itself. Neighbors waving to neighbors. Kids playing
on the beach in huge, swarming groups. Pauses in walks to talk to someone
you know, just a little bit.
Now people live in impregnable fortresses, lined up one against the
next. It’s a harsh, sterile world.
It’s not the world I grew up in.
I’m exceedingly glad that I’m not one of our city leaders who will be
wrestling with this issue in the coming weeks, months -- years, I
suspect. People who can afford to, have a right to build the home of
their dreams.
But what do you do when that dream crashes irrevocably against the
wishes of neighbors?
I’ll be interested to see what our leaders decide.
What I dread seeing is how this trend will -- hmm, I think I can write
this literally -- hit home. At some point, the house I grew up in and
where my parents still live, the house that was once among the biggest on
20th Street but has for a decade been a tear-down, will make way for a
mansion.
I don’t see any other end to it.
* S.J. Cahn is the managing editor. He can be reached at (949)
574-4233 or by e-mail at o7 steven.cahn@latimes.comf7 .
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