IN L.A.’S ECHO PARK, A NEW URBAN DEVELOPMENT TAKES FLIGHT
Blackbirds, a new ‘microneighborhood’ near downtown, is Los Angeles’ latest small-lot urban infill project
The Blackbirds project, which debuted last weekend, is part of a trend — especially among young urbanites — toward smaller dwellings in walkable neighborhoods close to commercial districts and transit systems. It’s also something of a backlash against suburban sprawl and McMansions with lot-line-to-lot-line footprints, a staple in many L.A. neighborhoods.
A short drive from Blackbirds is Echo Park Lake, a popular local attraction. The historic landmark was built as a reservoir in 1870 and is known for its paddle boats and lotus flowers. A lower section of the hilly Echo Park neighborhood is seen to the left of the lake. Downtown L.A., a few miles to the south, can be seen in the distance.
The landscape was designed by noted landscape architect firm Mia Lehrer + Associates. “Our planting selection responds to the microclimate of the Echo Park Avenue ‘valley’ and its surrounding landscape but were also selected for their ability to perform — from providing privacy screens and forage opportunities to bringing delicious garden scents and supporting bees and butterflies,” Mia Lehrer says.
The new mini neighborhood features drought-tolerant and climate-appropriate plantings — not yet grown in at the time of the opening. Vegetation planted on the site includes oaks, pines, honeylocust and citrus trees; shrubs such as bay laurel, thyme and rosemary; and succulents and grasses such as agaves, sesleria and westringia.
The landscape, which is planted by hydrozone to prevent overwatering, is irrigated using a combination of stormwater retention pits, which collect water during the rainy season; a weather-monitoring smart controller; and drip irrigation.
“Echo Park is a great example of a ‘dense’ neighborhood with a strong relationship to nature. It’s urban but wild,” Lehrer says. “It was really important to us to build on this legacy … to embrace this new type of small-lot urban living while supporting urban nature and biodiversity.”
“The large central courtyard is designed to be a nice informal gathering space for the residents but also acts an informal parking lot,” Lehrer says.
LocalConstruct cofounder Casey Lynch says the woonerf (pronounced “vone-erf”) is “an area where you can have a barbecue, throw a ball or simply chat with your neighbor in passing. It fulfills our concept of a living street in that it isn’t entirely focused around the automobile.” It appeared to fit that description at the project’s public opening, seen in the photo above.
Eco-consciousness was a big part of the design plan for this project, located in a formerly gritty area that is rapidly gentrifying — stroller-pushing parents share the sidewalks with tattooed skateboarders.
“Dense urban development is much more efficient than greenfield development, and creating housing near jobs has a huge impact on the environment, traffic and general quality of life,” Lynch says.
Built as a residential urban infill project under the city’s Small Lot Ordinance — with its mandatory compact building footprints and reduced street setbacks — Blackbirds is helping fulfill L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s mandate of adding 100,000 housing units to the city by 2021. Since the ordinance went into effect in 2005, more than 2,000 small-lot homes have been built in the city, especially in trendy areas such as Echo Park and nearby Silver Lake and Eagle Rock.
The ordinance’s design guidelines dictate that new small-lot homes have no shared foundations or common walls. And, as opposed to condominiums, tenants own the land the homes sit on and are responsible for their own maintenance. Local Construct’s Lynch says that at Blackbirds a monthly fee of about $100 will cover landscaping maintenance of common areas.
Lynch says they aimed for “stealth density,” meaning there appear to be fewer homes than actually exist. “By making the community have a lighter, more open feel, we think it will be more palatable than a big, bulky building,” Lynch says. That airiness continues inside the homes, which have high ceilings and open floor plans.
Evidence of discontent still exists, however. Some residents have posted signs objecting to the development. One directly across from the entrance on Vestal Avenue calls for a “moratorium on small lots” and laments the increase in “density, traffic, loss of privacy and views.” Shown at left is an existing home as seen from the deck of one of the Trail model homes.
With new infill construction, which skews toward modern design, there’s often concern about compatibility with existing properties. And since many of the new structures tend to be vertical and multistory, they sometimes tower over neighboring homes.
But Lynch says Blackbirds blends in well with the diverse neighborhood, and the design mimics existing homes: “We feel that the innovation and design in Blackbirds is very representative of the creative and cultural heritage of the neighborhood. Physically, the site plan and massing of the homes are very similar to their surroundings.”
Another complaint among critics of new infill is that L.A.’s small-lot ordinance isn’t living up to the promise of making homes more affordable: For example, the 1,300- to 1,900-square-foot Blackbird residences are priced from the high $700,000s to about $1 million. Even in pricey L.A., that’s on the high side of affordable, especially in Echo Park, where the average home price was about $600,000 in April 2015, according to Zillow.
But infill construction seems to be fulfilling a housing need. As many cities, Los Angeles included, revitalize their downtowns, demand for new housing is high. Cities that lost residents to the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s because of crime and poorly performing schools got them back in the 1990s, and the trend is continuing, according to the nonprofit Urban Land Institute.
The attraction of cultural opportunities and newly vibrant downtown areas has led many to flock to cities, resulting in a boom in the construction of infill projects at former industrial sites and underused commercial properties, especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver and New York.
Such building makes neighborhoods livelier, increases the tax base and preserves rural land threatened by suburbanization, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA report in 2012 said that infill housing development is accounting for an increasingly larger share of new home construction. In San Jose, California, eight out of 10 new homes built between 2005 and 2009 were infill.
Lynch says he hopes Blackbirds sets a precedent for the type of housing L.A. needs. “You can only change so much about L.A.’s nature — we can’t build high-rises in neighborhoods like Echo Park but still need to address density,” he says.
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