In the last five years, California has prudently upzoned big parts of its cities, particularly by unlocking multi-family housing in single-family zones with major transit stops. This kind of \u201ctransit-oriented development\u201d is uniquely virtuous in allowing us to tackle homelessness, rent burden and climate change simultaneously.<\/p>\n
But while the state has told cities \u201cyou need to allow more of this housing,\u201d it hasn\u2019t given them a clear playbook for what that new growth should look and feel like.<\/p>\n
The people of L.A. have our own views on what a beautiful building looks like. We drive our friends and visitors around Hancock Park and Beverly Hills to openly gawk \u2014 or walk them around the grand, revivalist Bradbury Building with its gorgeous facade.<\/p>\n
When it comes to housing, Los Angeles\u2019 old-and-owned housing retains its charm. But development defaults for new, multifamily rental housing are generally depressing. In an age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, an astonishing share of what L.A. builds today looks and feels utterly soulless. Think big white boxes with stepbacks, pop-outs, jagged rooflines and plane changes, all designed to make new development look small.<\/p>\n
These buildings may perform admirably by commercial standards, but they don\u2019t register positively in the human heart or the civic consciousness. Yes, it\u2019s housing, serving its residents. But it\u2019s not serving the street.<\/p>\n
The people shaping our urban form have other priorities beyond aesthetics. Developers rightly complain that excessive building costs leave them little financial or mental bandwidth for appearances. Our city\u2019s design standards<\/a> focus on function \u2014 with form following \u2014 rather than beauty, with guidelines emphasizing pedestrian, environmental and community benefits and encouraging conformity. And something about the proliferation of the mid-rise \u201c5 over 1,\u201d an L.A. invention<\/a> that combines 5 stories of residential use with a single story of retail, seems to have standardized the looks of mid-rise multifamily development around a baseline of mediocrity.<\/p>\n We are living in the consequences of this banality. Historic buildings are treated with increasing cultural and policy reverence while Americans gaze longingly at the stone and tile veneers of places like Portugal and Iran. Political opposition grows against new housing, especially when it smacks of the \u201cgentrification building<\/a>,\u201d a powerful but apocryphal meme that actually captures the drab look of both new luxury housing and new affordable housing.<\/p>\n The fervent opposition to ugly suggests that beauty is not icing on the cake. When every new building feels hostile to the street, the public says: keep your growth, your climate goals, your housing affordability. As we prepare to build much new housing under state law<\/a>, Los Angeles has a mandate: ensure that what\u2019s new is beautiful.<\/p>\n Civics culture is, to some degree, literally built. The \u201cbroken windows<\/a>\u201d theory of urbanism \u2014 while disputed in its implications for law enforcement \u2014 should at least teach us that the look of a place influences how we engage with it. Beauty is part of how a city shows respect. If a street is beautiful, most of us will feel some subconscious instinct to respect it back.<\/p>\n