I’m a real estate agent in South L.A. The scarcity of inventory has created a seller’s market and left a lot of buyers wondering how they can get their offers accepted among the frenzy. In this market, buyers have to move fast and bid above the asking price to win the bidding war. I can’t remember the last time a client bid below asking price and got an acceptance. Such is life in today’s South L.A. housing market.

If you live in South L.A., as I do, it’s obvious why so many people are trying to buy here. The inventory is low for a reason—not too many people want to leave, and where else could they go that is equally fabulous and affordable? This is especially true for the seniors who’ve been living in the community for many years. On the other end of the spectrum, there are many buyers coming over this way who have been priced out of the West Side, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. South L.A. is an ideal alternative for them because it’s close to Culver City, LAX, downtown, USC, and the 10, 110, 405, and 105 freeways.

Many of the neighborhoods where I do business—like Windsor Hills, Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Park Hills Heights—are located on a hill, so you get magnificent views. The houses are gorgeous, spacious, and stylish—buyers are really getting a bang for their buck. And there is so much soul on our blocks. There are generations of folks who have upheld the community with tender loving care and the utmost pride. There are still block clubs and block parties—there is a distinct community here. I should know, I’ve lived in Leimert Park for many years and now Windsor Hills.

I love the ease and convenience of living here, the vitality of Leimert Park Village during a festival, and the beauty of Kenneth Hahn State Park, the prettiest place in the city, with its 360-degree view of the city I love the most. I used to think, “Why aren’t more people coming to buy these beautiful homes in the Crenshaw District and across South L.A.?” It used to feel like I was in on a big secret—not any more. Open houses are packed every weekend and there are multiple offers on everything!

The high housing prices just about everywhere, and the improved safety and growth in South L.A., have brought many Angelenos to the area. The downside to the new interest is that I see many people who grew up in South L.A. and want to buy here, but can’t afford it. One of my missions is to help people like that figure things out—too many people don’t even try to pursue the idea of purchasing a home because of prices and competition. A lot of prospective homeowners are still under the impression you need a 20 percent down payment and a perfect credit score. You don’t— 3.5 percent down, a 620 score, a winning mindset, and a well-connected agent will get you there. You just have to be brave, and willing to stick it out.

It’s so nerve-wracking for these new buyers. I’ve made a habit of investing an hour (or two) to explain the market and answer questions on what to expect in the escrow process. I have a “to do” list with 12 key items covering basics from preparing an offer, what escrow is, looking out for important deadlines, how to make an offer, how to protect your earnest money deposit, and what the home inspection is going to be like. My sessions tend to have a special emphasis on how to cope with the emotional aspect of the transaction, something I can empathize with after having bought and sold my own home. I even do a few check-in calls throughout the process to see how they’re feeling about it all. A great deal of psychology is involved here. Positive encouragement is a must.

Of course, in this area once you’ve got the keys, you’re getting some headaches too. The big question in South L.A. is: When are the public services going to catch up with the needs and lifestyles of community? I live here too and have small kids, and so I, like my clients, need to see South L.A. fulfill more of its potential. The need for more affordable housing is obvious, we need more parks (especially parks tucked away from major traffic), and we’re desperate for better roads and more sidewalks. There are people who live in Baldwin Hills who would like to walk down La Brea to the grocery store, without dealing with 40-mile-per-hour traffic. But there’s no sidewalk on that stretch of street.

Another grave issue is that the schools have been a huge disappointment. We have some pretty good preschools, but elementary and junior high schools could be better. Crenshaw and Dorsey High Schools are OK, and View Park Prep is strong but many parents believe it should be better organized.

While there are some retail and grocery options, South L.A. still has a long way to go. The produce selection at many of our major grocery chain outlets here would be totally unacceptable in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. I’d love to be able to do all my shopping and spend all my dollars in the community, but it’s tough. So I do what I can, including attending neighborhood council and stakeholders meetings. I’ve even made cash donations for special improvement projects in Leimert Park. I have also made a commitment to order books by calling Eso Won Books (in Leimert Park Village) instead of clicking Amazon, and I can usually pick them up the next day.

I am a big believer that there are no new problems in the universe—all these issues have remedies! The keys to progress will be collective effort and pooled resources. I think a lot about the late Lark Galloway-Gilliam, who lived in Leimert Park—she would always say that we all need to “slow down, be present, and listen (to each other).” I would love to see neighbors old and new talk to each other more, even if it’s about ethnicity or race. It’s hard to get your neighborhood together if you don’t really know each other. Nothing can be resolved without true and honest dialogue from the community. Hopefully after conversing, folks will see that the most significant commonality is the desire to build a better community for the sake of our children. Raw dialogue can be uncomfortable but it is often where brilliant ideas and strategies for change can emerge.

The post The Secret Is Out, South L.A. Is One of the City’s Hottest Housing Markets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By 2010 this ethnic change in South L.A. had continued such that people of Mexican ethnicity outnumbered blacks everywhere east of Interstate 110, from Watts north to Interstate 10.

The two of us have long studied the ethnic quilt of Southern California, and recently updated our 1997 book on the subject. For us, the story of South L.A. is part of a larger, shifting story of segregation and desegregation. This second change—of blacks shifting and being replaced by Latinos— is not special to South L.A.; it has occurred in other once-segregated ghettos in Altadena-Pasadena, Monrovia, Pacoima, Long Beach, and San Bernardino.

Housing and home ownership are at the center of this story.

From roughly 1920 through the 1960s, white society generally did not permit blacks to own or rent housing outside certain areas. Restrictions on the future sale of a home to only whites were widely found on property deeds, and mortgage lenders usually restricted tightly the area within which they would provide a loan to a black family (a practice known as redlining).

Between discrimination in the job market and
low levels of educational attainment, even blacks who owned houses in these areas often did not have the money to maintain the housing very well. These difficulties in homeownership and maintenance resulted in increasingly poor and crowded housing in the ghettos. South Central (now South LA.), named because it focused along Central Avenue, was the largest such ghetto in the region.

When segregation began weakening during the 1960s, some middle-class blacks left behind the oldest and poorest housing east of I-110. They moved westward into other South L.A. neighborhoods or to Inglewood or southward into small cities like Compton, Gardena, and Carson.

While the public often associates the 1980s and 1990s in South L.A. with crime, the 1992 riots, and related challenges, there was another reality: housing prices were rising along with home ownership. In the 1990s, in fact, professor James Craine of Cal State Northridge has shown that housing prices in the South L.A. area increased faster than those in Los Angeles County as a whole. By the 2000 census, 40 percent of black households in South L.A. were owner-occupied, according to USC Professor Dowell Myers.

Behind those rapidly rising prices was strong demand on the part of Latinos, especially young Mexican and Mexican-American families. That demand, and the price trend, have mostly continued, with the exception of the Great Recession, which began in 2008.

One result: many black families in South L.A. have built substantial equity in their homes from earlier decades, giving them much more choice about where to live. And people have taken advantage of that choice, with former residents of South L.A. dispersing across other areas of Southern California.

Blacks in the San Fernando Valley, for example, have become widely distributed, though primarily in neighborhoods where housing costs are relatively low or average. In more distant places like Lancaster, Palmdale, Victorville, and Moreno Valley, some blacks were able to purchase inexpensive new homes, priced low because those locations meant long commutes to jobs.

Population numbers can disguise this dispersal. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of blacks in the five-county area increased by 1 percent. That small change hides the fact that blacks in Los Angeles County decreased by 6 percent during this period. But the number of blacks in Orange County grew by 43 percent during the same period, with even faster growth in other outlying counties.

Within the cities of L.A. County, a similar dispersal pattern emerges. Blacks now comprise just 9.6 percent of Los Angeles City’s population while blacks represent a quarter of the residents of Gardena and Carson. But the place with the highest percentage of blacks in the five counties of Southern California is a prosperous and unincorporated neighborhood bordering South L.A., View Park-Windsor Hills, where 85 percent of the population is black.

View Park is a reminder that the broader dispersal of blacks across the region is not the whole story. There is still a large area of South L.A. in which blacks comprise at least 45 percent of the total population. This includes View Park-Windsor Hills and the mostly middle-class black populations of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood.

Many blacks who could afford to move far from South L.A. prefer to stay more closely connected with community there, and some who have lived in neighborhoods with very few blacks have moved back to South L.A. for reasons of cultural comfort—to be closer to the institutions, services, and retailers that serve that large black population. Middle-class blacks have developed a strong social, cultural, and commercial focus in Leimert Park.

Despite the recent dispersal, Los Angeles remains quite segregated between blacks and whites. The level of residential segregation can be measured by what demographers call “the index of dissimilarity,” the most widely used statistic for this purpose. John Logan and colleagues at Brown University have calculated that L.A. is the 14th most highly segregated of the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest black populations.

But such a ranking represents an improvement. Our calculations for 1960 show Los Angeles as the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country; in that year, only Chicago was more segregated.

We have found the segregation that still lingers is no higher between whites and blacks than between whites and Mexicans, or Chinese, or Salvadorans, to name a few of the many new immigrant groups creating their own communities among friends and family who have also made the journey to Los Angeles County.

Those communities may too disperse in time. L.A.’s desegregation since 1960 was most directly the result of blacks moving slowly but steadily out of their segregated ghettos into what had been mostly white suburban neighborhoods. Our mapping shows that the major sources of the diminished numbers of blacks in L.A. County are still those leaving old black concentrations that had been built up in the days of segregated housing.

So South L.A., as now constituted, represents a legacy of both segregation and desegregation. Or to put it another way: South L.A. and its people, through their movement, have reshaped not only their region but also communities throughout Southern California.

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New speculative builders, or “merchant builders” (as they called themselves), responded to answer this desire. In the first two decades after the end of the war, tens of thousands of such builders erected more than 13 million new single-family houses in new suburban subdivisions. These dwellings looked radically different from most buildings of the past: They were low-rise ranch or split-level houses, rather than the two- or two-and-a-half-story blocky-looking structures that had previously dominated suburban landscapes (houses with formal plans, sited on relatively narrow lots).

Old-style suburban house from Authentic Small Houses of the Twenties (1929)

 
Until recently historians have not known much about these builders. The Levitts, who created three very large developments in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, are well-known—but they weren’t typical. The Levitts built new communities with thousands of dwellings at top speed. The average merchant builder worked more slowly, in much smaller subdivisions, and in varied locations. Merchant builders often shared the backgrounds and attitudes of their buyers.

The Campanelli Brothers in 1948

 
The Campanelli Brothers of Braintree, Massachusetts, were one of these typical merchant builders. When Michael, Joseph, Nicholas, and Alfred Campanelli created a construction company in the late 1940s, they were young and inexperienced. Their parents, Francesco Campanelli and Lisa Marie Colondono Campanelli, arrived in the U.S. in 1915 from a tiny and ancient mountain village in the Italian Apennines; they settled in an immigrant neighborhood in the small city of Brockton. The boys were used to hard work, quitting school after their father died to help support the family by working at the Quincy shipyards near Weymouth. Joseph also worked on some house construction sites before World War II. The three younger brothers served short stints in the Navy during the war.

After they came home, the brothers used an army surplus truck to move gravel to big construction sites, including Logan Airport. Soon they began pouring concrete footings for new buildings. As their assets increased, they built two new houses in Brockton, one for their mother and one for their sister Ann, whose husband, Salvatore De Marco, now joined the brothers’ team. They branched out to small developments near Braintree, Massachusetts, and Warwick, Rhode Island. Success there led them to develop more ambitious subdivisions in Natick, Framingham, Peabody, and other areas near Boston. In the process, they assembled a sizable group of foremen and loyal subcontractors, many drawn from their old neighborhood and earlier shipbuilding work. Their firm rapidly grew into the leading home building enterprise in the Boston area, and later built extensively in Florida and Illinois as well.

The typical Campanelli house was attractive because, as one buyer explained it, it was “a new kind of house” for “a new time.” It discarded the old-fashioned, larger, more monumental look. It had a low-pitched roof, like contemporary ranch houses in California, but still kept shutters or an occasional bow window for a faintly “colonial” flavor. Campanelli houses usually had two or three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a garage. The three-bedroom version was about 1,000 square feet of living space. In the mid-’50s, the firm extended the kitchens to form a “living kitchen” or a kind of a “family room.”

Plan for a typical Campanelli Brothers house

 
These plans were compact and “open,” with far less division between rooms than had usually been the case in American houses for all classes before World War II. The focus was on informal family activities—reading, watching TV, eating—and on an easy connection between indoors and out. In the rear stood a patio with the family barbecue and a large open yard, inviting for children’s play.

Ad for a Campanelli Brothers house, 1956

 
In the front, a large “picture window” offered passersby and visitors a preview of the interior. The fenceless and hedge-less front yard ensured visual continuity with neighbors’ houses and the street. Wide roads, with sidewalks, were laid out in curvilinear patterns by the firm’s engineer. The houses were equipped with sophisticated appliances—like the GE wall-mounted refrigerator that the Campanellis often used. Each house had a fireplace.

Ad for a wall-mounted refrigerator, 1956

 
How did builders arrive at these designs? The Campanellis always insisted that the designs were theirs. Yet they often said, in conversation and newspaper ads, that “the best architects a builder has are today’s home buyers and prospective buyers.” The Campanellis watched sales closely: The firm would begin a subdivision with a few model houses in various styles, and then continue building the model that sold best. What sold, and sold “like hotcakes,” were the new ranch houses.

The typical buyer was in a hurry: Near Boston and in most other American metropolitan areas, new homebuilding had stalled as the country struggled with the Depression and World War II. This meant an acute housing shortage. The typical buyer was eager to get started on a new life with the new family, new job, and access to a Federal Housing Administration—or Veterans Administration—financed mortgage. He and his wife wanted a house that broadcast the idea of “modernity.” They saw the Campanelli ranches as embodying the new lifestyle that they sought.

This ranch house was the type that was shipped to Moscow in 1959 to demonstrate what was available to the “average American.” (It was in the kitchen of a model ranch house that Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had their famous “kitchen debate” over the relative merits of Soviet communism and American capitalism.) Houses like this embodied the postwar aspiration of home ownership by the nuclear family, access to new places via the automobile, and a new, freer and more informal lifestyle.

In the first 15 to 20 years after the war, the buyers of new houses often came from white working-class backgrounds of varying ethnicities. Because of discriminatory FHA restrictions on mortgages, people of color initially had little access to the new suburbs. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, African-Americans, Asian- Americans and Hispanic-Americans began to transform the population of the early suburbs. Meanwhile, however, rising land prices and rising interest rates began to close the frontiers of new suburbs to working-class populations. New kinds of builders, often large-scale corporations, built on the interstices between the postwar subdivisions—larger and larger houses, with more rooms for more specific purposes, aimed at ever-more-affluent buyers. The family home came to be seen as an investment that would be “traded up.” The postwar suburbs have merged into overall sprawl.

One result of these changes has been the widely disliked, oversized “McMansions” of today; another is the growing tendency of young couples to seek alternative housing: either in smaller and more mobile dwellings within “the tiny house movement” or in non-traditional center-city spaces such as lofts. The McMansions usually imitate monumental house styles of the 19th century, though they retain two features of the houses of the postwar era: the multifunctional living room (now called “the great room”) and the large “living kitchen” invented by the Campanellis and other merchant builders. And they are uncomfortably crowded onto small lots that are descended from the postwar era.

The long-term picture of American suburban housing since 1945 is one of sprawl, stylistic disunity, and diverging social composition. But for a while, merchant builders and postwar buyers created a new and attractive kind of American modernism for American domestic architecture.

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