Couple of weeks ago, in this space, I commented on the superb SoCal housing-supply forensic work done by Josh Albrektson, MD of South Pasadena — radiologist by night, City Hall annoyer by day.
The dashing doc was profiled in the excellent piece by staffer Jeff Collins about how many of our no doubt mostly beloved, mostly truth-telling city halls across the hundreds of municipalities among which we live fudge just a little teeny bit when it comes to telling Sacramento about their plans to build mandated new housing.
South Pas, for instance, pop. 26,000, has been instructed to build 2,067 new housing units in a 150-year-old California city with zero empty lots.
So naturally they fibbed the answer to the question, “Where and when?” Human nature. “Uh, sure, we’ll build them affordable multi-family units let’s see — yes, right in the parking lot of that upscale Pavilions down the street, the one currently undergoing an expensive renovation. That’s just the spot. Hundred thirty-three new homes, you say? Yessir, let me just make a note of that. Gotcha.”
Never gonna happen, I blithely said.
I did get a very nice note from Dr. Albrektson, and we’ve tried to get together in his town so he can show me all the sites where housing will go in, in some kind of state Capitol fever dream, at least. I really want to make it happen, because Albrektson gets around on one of those zippy electric scooters, and I have plans to pick up one of those Lime scooters you see lying on the sidewalk as if crashed there, give it all my credit card information and then power it up to bomb like hell through the bideaway-cottage streets of South Pas.
Just hasn’t happened, yet.
In the meantime, I’ve had a change of heart. Responding to some reader entreaties and some corrective info from an actual city planner, I’ve gone all in on putting new housing in supermarket parking lots.
And new housing as well in nicely designed low-rise apartment buildings rising above each of the thousands of godawfully ugly strip malls from the Inland Empire to shining Doheny, from hipster Altadena to the sands of far Malibu.
Those mini shopping centers we’ve allowed to define the look of our Southern California cities, so that when out-of-town relatives and friends come here, and they look out your car window as you drive them from the airport, they invariably say: “Geez, they never tell you it’s so unsightly. When’d you say we get to the beach?”
So let’s have an old-fashioned architectural design competition and put apartments above every strip mall in sight.
That idea came from reader Malie Tsurunaga, who’d heard it somewhere, and who writes of visits to Switzerland, where she has seen, “at the local co-op, a large, modern grocery store … on one level with two levels of very nice housing as the second and third floors. The roof of the grocery is flat and all the apartments or condos have large front terraces. I can see that as an attractive housing option for … even the newly remodeled Pavilions in South Pas. A lively dining and shopping area near green space and convenient to bus lines. Why can’t that be done to our grocery stores? I’m sure it is related to our antiquated and convoluted special interest zoning laws.”
Why not, indeed.
Oh, and I was horribly wrong about current South Pas being almost entirely devoid of multi-family. I had forgotten about the hundreds of apartments hidden behind trees up on what used to be called “Pill Hill,” because the Huntington Hospital nurses lived there. Perhaps they still do. Planner David Watkins, who I’ve known since I was a cub reporter, tells me multi-family is over half the South Pas housing stock.
And it needs more, and we now know just where to put it.
In the parking lot. Plus, living over the store.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
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