In my many pilgrimages to writers’ homes, I’ve felt two responses, often simultaneously. There’s excitement about my proximity to creation. About the whiff of genius that lingers—like lavender, like music—beyond a study’s velvet rope. But then I feel comforted, too. That my literary heroes were, in the sunny patois of supermarket tabloids, “just like us.” Folks who fretted over floorboards and flashing. Who had toilets, toasters, and trash.

Robert Frost’s Stone House in Shaftsbury, Vermont is just that—a stone house—but it’s also where he wrote “The Road Not Taken.” That poem’s lines fill the rooms like winter light. Emily Dickinson’s Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, stunned me into a reverential silence until I saw it for its component parts: beds and windows, beams and bricks.

Another way to think about all this is personification. A writer’s home personifies its owner, giving visitors the sense of “knowing” a person (usually dead) who held the pen. It personifies their writing too. Here’s their typewriter, here’s their table, here’s something tactile on which to ground an artform that can, at its best, hang words in air.

This holds true for writers we admire and those we don’t. When I spiral up the stone steps of Hawk Tower, the poet Robinson Jeffers’ oceanside eyrie in Carmel, California, I feel like I am Jeffers, or at least his houseguest. No such joy accompanied my daily walks around the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana. I rack this up to the badness of Ben-Hur. My dog shared my disdain, peeing frequently on old Lew’s trees.

Lately, when I pass a sign for a writer’s home or peek into J.D. McClatchy’s coffee table book, American Writers at Home, I feel something sour. Like the foxing of a frontispiece. Like crawl space mold. At first, I thought it simple envy. We writers are envious creatures. We envy each other’s sentences. We envy each other’s successes. We even envy our predecessors’ sentences and successes, which surround us in their homes.

This stirring, though, was different, and newer, dating back to 2022, when my wife and I sold our home of six years in Crawfordsville, just across the street from Lew Wallace. It deepened in the year we spent in Portland, Oregon—lucky beneficiaries of my sabbatical—and even after we returned to a new Hoosier zip code. By then the very idea of a writer’s home, a domicile where an author sets up permanent shop, struck me as antiquated. Even privileged. What changed?

Well, we did. From 2022 to 2024, we bounced among three houses, returning to what was, for the majority of our marriage, native ground: the rental market. My perspective on housing shifted. Renting was flexible and maintenance-free. Ownership was permanent and bougie. Mortgage rates rose while the number of active listings plummeted. Prices ballooned, inflation flattened (or shrank) buying power. It felt like a bad time to buy a home.

And yet last fall my wife and I started haunting Zillow and pouncing on early showings. We chatted up our elderly neighbor’s sons—I’m not proud of this—when that neighbor died. (They were selling, but for more than we had.) Throughout it all, I thought about the writers’ homes I’d visited, and if those writers’ lives bore any resemblance to my own. Did I secretly hope, in buying a home, to mimic their lifestyle? Was that possible in 2024?

Not if I wanted to emulate Mark Twain, whose Hartford mansion boasts a billiard parlor and a fireplace with a fluted flue. Ditto Edna St. Vincent Millay, who’d ask the swimmers in her outdoor pool to splash about nude. Even the more modest homes, like Walt Whitman’s row house in Camden, New Jersey, reek of entitlement and stability. Photographs show the elderly poet’s floors there bestrewn with papers—like a hoarder clinging to a golden past.

Of course, this is all unfair—to these writers and to me. The economics of literature has shifted. Its cultural capital too. (Besides, it’s masochistic to compete with someone whose home address is a historic landmark.) As the internet makes writing more democratic, writers’ homes feel elite or off-limits. Don’t touch anything! isn’t just a warning about rarified artifacts; it’s a reminder that this is all out of reach. Today, writers’ homes represent twin goals that remain, for most working writers, distant or divorced: financial security and geographic certainty.

I’ve met few writers who publish their way to a down payment, and if the AI innovators have their way, I’ll meet fewer still. Most writers I know are peripatetic, moving toward the promise of a paycheck, which they often teach to secure. A “room of one’s own” was Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the solitude needed by (and denied to) women writers. But as the local Starbucks and public library, the soccer sideline and the playground can attest, solitude is a luxury that many writers can’t afford. What plaque will hang over these sites of hurried composition? Who’ll tour them, 50 years hence, to pay homage to the novels being written there right now?

If I’m still alive then, two things will be true: my poetry still won’t make money, and my mortgage will be paid off. That’s right, Dear Reader, we did buy a home, though not—at least in my case—because pride of ownership or wealth building held much allure. Nor did the promise of a home office, its shelves sagging with books. No, I bought a house to retain a feeling, however misguided or intangible, that I have some control over my own life. That my loves were perpetually protected. That we’re safe inside our weatherproof ark.

The history of writers’ homes reminds me that this is a delusion, and one we sign for on the dotted line. Ernest Hemingway lost his Havana residence, Finca Vigía, to the Cuban Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson watched his Concord home burn; he was so beset by despair or dementia that he tossed a few belongings back into the flames. The poet Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House (July 10th, 1666),” suffered much the same:

Here stood that trunk, and there that chest,
There lay that store I counted best.
My pleasant things in ashes lie,
And them behold no more shall I.

It doesn’t take a coup or conflagration to remind us that our lives are fragile and that our “pleasant things” are bound, like our bodies, for ash. We can install smoke detectors, map the flood plains, and test for radon. (God knows, I’ve done all three.) But catastrophe will inevitably find—if not our actual houses—then everything they represent: family, contentment, a quiet place in the world.

Owning a home helps us to forget that fact, however briefly, as we arrange new furniture and mow the lawn. I’d almost forgotten it myself, tucked away in my new basement study, until I looked out my only window to see the bees, right at eye level, pollinating the front yard. Then I remembered the siding needs painting. Then I remembered that I’m already halfway underground.

The post What Is a 21st-Century ‘Writer’s Home’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just ask its princes and princesses—those fortunate enough to be able to afford to live and vote there. Most of the time, the nearly 900,000 residents can pretend that they live in the country, even though they’re part of greater Los Angeles. Parks or open space or farmland is almost always within easy walking or biking distance. The Santa Clara River, the least developed of Southern California’s waterways, is being protected. The Kingdom of Ventura’s cities remain separate and distinct developments on the landscape—they haven’t sprawled and melted into each other, like cities do elsewhere in Southern California.

Their secret? “No other county in the United States has more effective protections against urban sprawl,” says the web site of SOAR, aka Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a family of growth-controlling ballot measures.

Those SOAR protections have been fixed in the laws of the county and its cities for two decades. SOAR permits development only within certain urban cores in the county and makes no allowances for population growth. And if a developer wants to change the boundaries or develop open space outside the areas where growth is permitted, that developer can’t buy off the county supervisors or a city council. SOAR requires any development in protected open space be approved by the voters.

Ventura voters like the results so much they are moving to make them all but permanent this November, when they vote on county and city measures that would extend SOAR protections through 2050.

In practice, this has made the Kingdom a mighty fortress. Those sprawling suburban housing developments that fill up the San Fernando Valley to the east and the Santa Clarita Valley to the north? They stop at the county’s edge. It’s almost as if Ventura County has built a wall against growth along its border—and made neighboring Los Angeles pay for it.

All of which makes SOAR worth celebrating. But there is a problem with those walls, and within the Kingdom. And that problem is not the wonderful things that growth restrictions have done. It’s what the princes and princesses of the Kingdom have failed to do.

A group of SOAR volunteers in Ventura County.

Smart growth strategies like SOAR are not merely supposed to preserve open space. At their best, they are designed to promote smart growth—to drive more creative, dense, multi-family, and transit-oriented development in the urban cores where growth is still permitted. But the Kingdom has been far from welcoming to this type of development.

Yes, you can find smart, denser growth in the city of Ventura, particularly around its downtown. But infill development in Ventura County has lagged far behind what’s needed to serve the Kingdom’s growing population and its housing needs. The same citizens of the Kingdom who back SOAR also have opposed multifamily and denser developments (Thousand Oaks even passed a ballot measure limiting density), and resisted investments in public transit to connect their urban cores.

The results are as obvious as the choking traffic on the 101 Freeway and the astronomical housing prices. Ventura County is one of the 10 least affordable places to live in the United States. It’s been very difficult for middle-class people, much less lower-income people, to make their homes there, and that makes it hard for companies to locate there. Many service workers have to commute from outside the county.

“We need to understand that there is an uncertain capacity within our urban boundaries to accommodate job growth,” Bruce Stenslie, president of the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County, said during a public conference earlier this year on SOAR. “Which doesn’t mean that we should tear down the urban boundaries, it means we need to be a little more mature about questions concerning in-fill development and higher density.”

Of course such immaturity about growth—and high housing prices and inequality and traffic—is not limited to Ventura County. What’s frustrating is that after 20 years, the Kingdom doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. The current proposed renewal of SOAR doesn’t include any new flexibility to account for population growth—and it’s not linked to any broader effort to do more infill development in the cores.

This represents at best a missed opportunity—and at worst an example of mass public selfishness.

Matthew Fienup, an economist with Cal Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting (who likes to talk about how much he loves living across the street from orchards), points out that there are myriad ways to require more regular analysis and adjustments of the boundaries, and to put management of the boundaries in the hands of planners, instead of the hands of people with the money to put questions to voters. Fienup suggests that the county would be better off establishing tradable development rights that would protect the same amount of land while bringing some flexibility to the boundaries.

But in its intransigence, Ventura is an example of the California disease—grab your piece of the Kingdom, and then keep out anyone who might come in after you. And few in Ventura seem to care that the county, like other urban coastal places in California, has seen such a decline in its number of children and young families that it might eventually resemble a well-off senior living community.

In California, local growth restrictions are only one small part of how the old block the young. State laws make housing development slow and costly. Prop 13 provisions keep their property taxes low, encouraging people to stay in their homes longer, which reduces the supply of homes on the market.

This local anti-growth bias is now a major statewide issue as California faces a crisis in housing affordability and availability—for anyone but the most affluent. To push back against anti-growth local communities, Gov. Brown is championing legislation that would exempt many urban housing developments from environmental or local government review.

Many localities have responded to this statewide push defiantly, via local ballot measures that block growth and housing, as the Voice of San Diego documented recently. The least responsible cities are going beyond growth boundaries to impose anti-density restrictions. The most reactionary of these ballot initiatives comes from Santa Monica, which was just connected to the L.A. rail system by L.A. county taxpayers. That rail connection should inspire denser, transit-oriented development. But anti-growth Santa Monicans want to derail all this by requiring a vote of the people on most developments taller than two stories.

The defense of those backing anti-growth measures is disingenuous: If you don’t like restrictions, you can go to the ballot. But that argument is an invitation for development to be determined by a showdown between NIMBY demagoguery and self-interested political money, as opposed to any rational long-range planning.

One lesson from Ventura County is that growth boundaries like SOAR shouldn’t be pursued in isolation. They need to be tied to rock-solid requirements for creating more housing, both for low-income and middle-income people. To put it another way, it’s great if your community wants to protect open space from development, but then you don’t get to block denser development, housing, and transit in your already developed spaces.

If Ventura County wants to wall off growth in its open areas until the end of time, fine. But it must be compelled to open gates in its walls big enough to bring much more progressive development into the Kingdom.

The post The Walls Are Too High in the Kingdom of Ventura appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

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.

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.

The post The Surprisingly Modest Start to McMansion Sprawl appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.