Friday, February 16, 2007

O.C. is going vertical

With suburban build-out imminent, at least 30 residential towers are rising. It means less of a homogenized landscape and more a set of places with unique characteristics, one expert says.
By David Haldane and Yvonne Villarreal, Times Staff Writers
February 16, 2007

A Marquee view

Tom Testa comes home each night to his 12th-floor condo and props his feet onto the sill of a picture window that wraps around his entire home.

The breathtaking view he takes in while sipping chardonnay with his fiancée isn’t Los Angeles or San Francisco; it’s Irvine, part of what used to be Orange County’s flat suburban landscape.


“Everything is within reach,” Testa, 51, said. “It brings a New York way of life to Orange County.”

Last spring he became a pioneer of sorts as the first resident of Marquee Park Place, twin 18-story residential high-rise buildings with views of the Irvine Spectrum, San Joaquin Wildlife Preserve and, on clear days, Catalina Island.

The towers, which had their official opening Thursday, are the first of at least 30 high-rise condo and apartment towers planned or under development in Orange County. The rapidly changing skyline signals the transformation of a suburban landscape.

Scott Bollen, a professor of urban planning at UC Irvine, said the residential towers would “offer citified living in a unique para-urban environment. It means that Orange County is mature enough and sophisticated enough to live in like a city, but at the same time, it’s not Los Angeles.”

The merging of urban living with suburban communities, Bollen predicts, will change how people live and work in Orange County.

“New centers and clusters of activity will give more identity to different places countywide,” he said. “The county will become less and less of a homogenized landscape and more a set of places with unique characteristics.”

Bollen said Orange County joins a few other communities across the country — including the suburbs of Washington, D.C. — that can support high-rise living in a nontraditional setting.

So far, Orange County’s high-rise residential housing is concentrated in four cities. Costa Mesa recently approved eight towers, all roughly 20 stories, near the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Anaheim has approved or is reviewing five projects that include towers of up to 30 stories. Santa Ana has eight high-rises approved or under review, including a 29-story loft project. And Irvine has 11 towers already built or under construction near John Wayne Airport.

Several major factors are driving the move toward residential high-rises. Undeveloped land has become scarce countywide, and that which exists is expensive.

Some experts say Orange County’s stock of available open land at the outskirts of developed areas will be gone within the next decade.

“That’s the land used for horizontal communities that are easy to build and for which the county has become famous,” Bollen said.

Now developers are satisfying the need by building skyward on smaller parcels surrounded by existing development.

Another reason for the vertical push: people looking for ways to cut or eliminate their drive to work as freeways clog up for longer parts of each day.

“People are getting fed up with long commutes,” said Sheri Vander Dussen, planning director for Anaheim. “They don’t want to spend hours and hours away from home.”

The commute isn’t the only way high-rise residents are able to simplify their lives.

Security is provided, there are no yards to tend, and there are special amenities not normally associated with traditional condo and apartment environments.

“They prefer a screening room for movies,” Vander Dussen said, “or a common area for visiting with their friends; a space you can reserve for a family party with a large room and big kitchen so you don’t feel like you’re in a social hall.

“Many of these places will be upscale, with valet parking and concierge service; they can basically handle your life for you,” she added.

For this new residential niche to work ideally, planners face major challenges, particularly in ensuring that residents live close to public transportation, retail and entertainment spots.

“There’s a whole lot of planning that has to happen,” said Marlon Boarnet, a UCI professor of planning policy and design, “and if the planning is done, it could work out well. We are literally going into places that had no residences; it’s an exciting moment when planning could make a big difference in the vitality of the region.”

None of which seemed to be on Testa’s mind Thursday as he boasted about the view. “Why wouldn’t you want to live here?”

david.haldane@latimes.com

yvonne.villarreal@latimes.com

Posted by M at 14:59:51 | Permalink | No Comments »

In Setback for New Orleans, Fed-Up Residents Give Up

Lee Celano for The New York Times

Dylan Langlois, center, and Kasandra Larsen said goodbye to a friend as they prepared to move out of New Orleans.

By SHAILA DEWAN; Published: February 16, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 15 — After nearly a decade in the city of their dreams, Kasandra Larsen and her fiancé, Dylan Langlois, climbed into a rented moving truck on Marais Street last Sunday, pointed it toward New Hampshire, and said goodbye.

Lee Celano for The New York Times
GOING Kasandra Larsen and Dylan Langlois on their last day in New Orleans. “I think a lot of us are feeling under siege,” Mr. Langlois said.
Lee Celano for The New York Times
COMING Byron Lewis, center, and Michelle Quinn moved into a rental house in New Orleans last week after living with relatives for months.

Not because of some great betrayal — they had, after all, come back after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina — but a series of escalating indignities: the attempted carjacking of a pregnant friend; the announced move to Nashville by Ms. Larsen’s employer; the human feces deposited on their roof by, they suspect, the contractors next door; the two burglaries in the space of a week; and, not least, the overnight wait for the police to respond.

A year ago, Ms. Larsen, 36, and Mr. Langlois, 37, were hopeful New Orleanians eager to rebuild and improve the city they adored. But now they have joined hundreds of the city’s best and brightest who, as if finally acknowledging a lover’s destructive impulses, have made the wrenching decision to leave at a time when the population is supposed to be rebounding.

Their reasons include high crime, high rents, soaring insurance premiums and what many call a lack of leadership, competence, money and progress. In other words: yes, it is still bad down here. But more damning is what many of them describe as a dissipating sense of possibility, a dwindling chance at redemption for a great city that, even before the storm, cried out for great improvement.

“The window of opportunity is closing,” Ms. Larsen said, “before more people like us give up and say it’s too little, too late.”

Mr. Langlois, who has repeatedly called the health and sanitation departments, the police and City Hall, said he despaired of receiving any response. In November, the couple bought their first house, and in December, they bought their first handgun.

“My friends here are just the greatest, hard-working, tax-paying people,” Mr. Langlois said, “and I think a lot of us are feeling under siege.”

The couple are unlikely to make any money on the sale of their house.

For every household that, like this one, has given up, there is another on the verge. Tyrone Wilson, a successful real estate agent and consultant, said he and his wife, Trina, a lawyer, had given post-storm life a fair chance. But, Mr. Wilson said, at the end of the school year they are likely to take their three children back to Dallas, where they took refuge after the storm.

“We came back, we tried,” he said. “It’s really draining, and at a certain point you sit down and you say, ‘We don’t have to go through this.’ ”

As a city in flux, New Orleans remains statistically murky, but demographers generally agree that the population replenishment after the storm, as measured by things like the amount of mail sent and employment in main economic sectors, has leveled off. While many poorer residents have moved back to the city, the “brain drain” of professionals that the city was experiencing before the storm appears to have accelerated.

Some say the overall effect is negligible. Greg Rigamer, a demographer who has done work for the city, said that the lack of housing had constrained the recovery, but that many residents remained fully committed to the city.

“The pattern in is certainly stronger than the pattern out,” Mr. Rigamer said.

But in December, the number of houses on the market peaked at a high not seen since the late 1980s, while the number of sales has trended downward since last June, according to data tracked by the Brookings Institution in Washington. Statistics kept by commercial moving companies show a net loss to New Orleans. Employers say they have raised salaries for skilled workers.

One oft-cited survey by the University of New Orleans found that a third of residents, especially those with graduate degrees, were thinking of leaving within two years.

Susan E. Howell, who conducted the survey, cautioned that the sample was small and that the poor were underrepresented. There are indications that low-income New Orleanians — those who will need the most help from a cash-strapped city —are making their way back, despite a lack of affordable housing, piling into relatives’ homes and trailers.

U-Haul, the rental company that is more affordable than commercial movers, has had more inbound trucks than outbound, according to the company’s records, and the number of public school children and new applications for food stamps in Orleans Parish are rising. In Houston, a task force that helps Hurricane Katrina residents resettle has paid more than $1 million in moving expenses for 350 families returning to New Orleans.

“This is a serious problem for the city, because one of the things we had pre-Katrina was the lack of an educated population,” Dr. Howell said. “We had too many people at the low end and not enough at the high end, and Katrina sort of fast-forwarded that trend.”

Because many poorer people have taken longer to return, they have not dealt with as many months of frustration as families with higher income and more mobility, so their staying power has yet to be determined.

Reganer Stewart, 30, a hotel maid, said she had been living with her cousin and her cousin’s mother and four children since November. In January, Ms. Stewart’s 12-year-old daughter, Brandi, joined them, but was put on a waiting list for school and could not enroll until earlier this month.

Houston, which Ms. Stewart had not liked when she evacuated there, was growing more attractive as her search for an apartment here grew longer. “Most likely, we going to leave,” she said.

In battered but proud New Orleans, abandonment is a highly emotional subject, in part because many have made sacrifices to stay and rebuild. To some, leaving now is tantamount to treason. When a report appeared a year ago that Emeril Lagasse, the famed chef, had said the city would “never come back,” reservations at his restaurants were canceled and strangers berated him. He insisted he had been misquoted.

And in response to an article in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about a woman who had decided to move on, Poppy Z. Brite, a New Orleans novelist, wrote: “This isn’t an easy place to be right now, and the decision to stay or go is deeply personal. But why must some people use the media to take a parting shot at the city?”

On another occasion, Ms. Brite said, “If a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don’t desert it just because it can kill you. There are some things more valuable than life.”

Such fierce sentiments help explain why a dozen people who were planning to move or had already done so declined to speak on the record for this article or allow their name to be used. One man, a chef, said he wanted to remain anonymous because he was likely to return someday. A university professor said she did not want to compromise her employer’s ability to recruit.

“If I was going to be really politically savvy,” she said, “I would say that I was going to do a job search about this time anyway.”

The decision to leave is especially difficult for natives, said Elliott Stonecipher, a demographic analyst in Shreveport, La., even if they are going no farther than the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

“They just won’t talk about it; they do not want to talk about it,” Mr. Stonecipher said, adding that the reluctance shows just how unusual the city is. “It’s remarkable that they just don’t want anybody to know that they gave in.”

Others have unimpeachable reasons: Paul Gailiunas, a doctor whose wife, Helen Hill, was murdered in their home last month, left immediately for South Carolina.

As for Ms. Larsen and Mr. Langlois, they have taken in all the fury at those who are leaving, in newspapers, neighborhood forums on the Internet and even in the bars and cafes of their neighborhood, the Ninth Ward. But while many of their own friends had expressed disappointment, none had blamed them.

“Not only do they understand why we’re leaving,” Ms. Larsen said, “but they say, ‘You know what, I’m thinking about getting out of here, too.’ It’s like they’re waiting for that one more bad thing to happen.”

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting.

Posted by M at 14:30:28 | Permalink | No Comments »

Walter Sondheim Jr., 98, Leader in Baltimore Renewal, Dies

GARY GATELY; Published: February 16, 2007

Walter Sondheim Jr., a longtime Baltimore civic leader who played crucial roles in desegregating the city’s schools and redeveloping its downtown, died yesterday in Baltimore. He was 98.

Tracey Brown
Walter Sondheim Jr.

The cause was pneumonia, said Dan Collins, a spokesman for Mercy Medical Center.

Mr. Sondheim’s influence, both in highly visible roles and behind the scenes, had been a powerful force in the city for more than half a century.

 

In 1954, as president of the Baltimore school board, he pushed for the speedy desegregation of city schools after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, even as other cities employed delaying tactics.

He was best known nationally for his pivotal role in the revival of downtown Baltimore, which transformed a moribund port city into a model of urban renaissance through projects like Charles Center and the redevelopment of the Inner Harbor.

Until last week, colleagues said, he continued to show up at his office as senior adviser at the Greater Baltimore Committee, the business advocacy group he helped found in 1955. The office overlooks the once rat-infested harbor basin where Harborplace, the National Aquarium and the Maryland Science Center now line the brick promenades.

In that office, and in those of several other jobs, Mr. Sondheim served as sage and consensus builder, specializing in assembling public-private partnerships for redevelopment.

Among his many posts were those of chairman of the Baltimore Housing Authority, director of the Baltimore Urban League and chairman of Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, the nonprofit organization that oversaw the Inner Harbor’s development.

Born in Baltimore in 1908, Mr. Sondheim graduated from Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., in 1929. He worked four decades at Hochschild, Kohn & Company, a Baltimore department store that branched into the suburbs, before retiring as a senior vice president in 1970.

The retirement proved short-lived, and Mr. Sondheim soon threw himself into efforts to renew housing and the port. First as a member, then as president, of the State Board of Education in the 1990s, Mr. Sondheim pressed for more accountability for failing schools throughout the state.

In 1934, Mr. Sondheim married Janet E. Blum, who died in 1992. He is survived by two children, John W. Sondheim and Ellen S. Dankert, both of Baltimore; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Posted by M at 14:22:46 | Permalink | No Comments »

A School District With Low Taxes and No Schools

Jeff Topping for The New York Times

Patrick Flynn led a successful drive to avoid paying higher property taxes by creating a school district that would have no schools or students.

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER; Published: February 16, 2007

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 13 — Just to be clear, Patrick Flynn says he loves public education. He just does not like the idea of paying for it.

Jeff Topping for The New York Times
Casey Perkins and her daughter Marietta, who live in Troon. Marietta attends school in Scottsdale.

So when it came time last November for the expanding, unincorporated desert community of Troon to choose between joining a nearby school district, and paying higher property taxes to help finance it, or starting its own, Mr. Flynn led the movement that created the Christopher Verde School District.

Not that the Christopher Verde district will have any schools, teachers or, apparently, students.

The children of Troon will continue to attend nearby schools. And thanks to a loophole in Arizona law, the grown-ups of Troon will continue to avoid paying property taxes in those districts, which makes officials in the districts less than mirthful.

“The whole purpose of this was to avoid taxes on their million-dollar homes,” said State Senator Linda Gray, a Republican who has sponsored a bill to prevent the formation of a school district without schools. (Ms. Gray conceded that there was at least one Flynn supporter who had “a half-million-dollar home.”)

Beginning in the next school year, Troon students will now pay tuition to the school district they attend, and that money will come from part of the property taxes collected by the new Christopher Verde district.

Even if Ms. Gray’s bill, which the Senate passed last month, becomes law, the taxpayers of Troon will not be affected. The legislation would not be retroactive.

“I am happy,” said Mr. Flynn, the president of a homeowners group in the area, which, he emphasized, had nothing to do with his opposition to higher property taxes.

The quandary over what to do with the roughly 450 public school children in Troon and adjacent Rio Verde essentially pits older homeowners in a place best known for its excellent golfing against young families who are part of this rapidly expanding area in North Scottsdale.

“By forming our own school district, the children will be educated by the schools they choose, and the residents will keep their tax rate the same,” said Mr. Flynn, a retired salesman whose children are grown.

Casey Perkins, a parent with a young child, disagreed. “I am willing to pay for my own child,” Ms. Perkins said. “I am paying Social Security, and I am never going to see it. But both are part of living in our society.”

It is a face-off increasingly common across Arizona.

“The population and housing explosion of the past decade or so here has been driven by younger families, rather than by the traditional model of sun-seeking retirees from the Midwest or Canada,” said Stephen K. Doig, a census expert at Arizona State University.

“Arizona is seeing more of the traditional battle of the generations,” Mr. Doig said, “between some retirees who want taxes — including school taxes — kept low, and most parents who want better support for the schools their kids attend.”

Under the state’s open-enrollment law, children may attend any public school, provided it has space. Children living in unincorporated areas with no schools of their own have traditionally been assigned to schools by neighboring districts.

Those children often had to attend schools 20 miles from their homes because the districts tended to give priority to families living — and paying taxes — in the district. When Ms. Perkins went to enroll her daughter in kindergarten in Scottsdale and realized that her child would be bused miles from home, Ms. Perkins said she was told by a district administrator, “Let’s face the facts, you are not paying your fair share.”

The Legislature enacted a law in 2005 to remedy the matter, obligating unincorporated areas with more than 150 students either to be absorbed by an adjoining school district or to create their own.

So when the question was put on the ballot here in November, voters narrowly favored creating a district instead of joining the closest existing district, Cave Creek Unified, where a majority of the Troon and Rio Verde children attend classes.

The outcome essentially prevented a doubling of property taxes (to $1,190 from $590 on houses assessed at $500,000) — at least during the first year — and the secondary taxes assessed to build and maintain schools, since, well, there would not be any in Christopher Verde, as was made clear during the campaign.

Homeowners in the new district will pay about $1.80 per $100 of valuation on their homes, compared with the $1.70 they paid to the county before the vote to create the district. Homeowners in the Cave Creek district pay a little more than $2.50 per $100 in base taxes, and just over $1 more per $100 in secondary taxes.

Cave Creek schools have more than 250 children from the unincorporated areas of Troon and Rio Verde, a growing percentage of the district’s population of roughly 6,000 children, said Kent Frison, an associate superintendent for the district.

“From that perspective, the taxpayers of the school district, they feel it is inequitable,” Mr. Frison said.

There will be some redress. Because Christopher Verde is now a formal school district, children there will be required to pay tuition when they attend schools in other districts. The Christopher Verde School Board will negotiate the tuition rates and try to have a voice in the administration of the nearby districts.

Mr. Flynn has not applied for a seat on the new board. “I think I can do a better job on the outside just keeping my eyes on them,” he said.

Ms. Perkins is also moving on. “It really ripped our community,” she said of the battle over creating the district.

“We have to deal with the cards we are dealt,” Ms. Perkins said. “We have to make sure our children are taken care of, too.”

Posted by M at 13:57:54 | Permalink | No Comments »

Snowstorm leaves salty aftertaste

By Emma Graves Fitzsimmons; Tribune staff reporter
 Published February 16, 2007

The crunch of each step. The white smudge on the Persian rug. That pallor that has overtaken once-colorful automobiles.

The blizzard may be gone, but the salt lingers.

Snow and low temperatures have had the region’s streets on a high-sodium diet for most of February, and the salt is now everywhere, coating everything.

Pant legs and coats appear to have been attacked with chalk.

White marks on shoes look like the lines on topographical maps.

Dogs’ feet are chapped, sore.

Millions of dollars of salt has been spread recently. Thousands of tons of it. And rest assured, more is coming.

“You might get it on your shoes or your pant cuff, and you might brush up against it when you’re leaving your car, but that’s a small price to pay for saving your life,” said Matt Smith, spokesman for the city’s Department of Streets and Sanitation.

This week’s storms prompted city trucks to dump salt along the same routes as many as 80 times on Tuesday, officials said.

The state alone spent $2.69 million on 67,232 tons of road salt to clear roads statewide from Monday to Thursday, officials said.

The city starts each winter with 390,000 tons of salt, with each “snow fighting truck” carrying about 10 tons, but it didn’t have statistics on salt use during this storm.

Putting salt on the streets during a snowstorm allows ice to melt at below-freezing temperatures. It is effective and cheap–just $35 per ton.

For the coldest weather, trucks use a more powerful liquid, calcium chloride–at a pricey $400 a ton, said Mike Claffey, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation.

The snowstorms this week required more salt than usual, said David Schulz, the director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute at Northwestern University. The snow just wouldn’t melt because it was so cold, prompting repeat salt treatments.

“Usually, salt goes out there and does its job– it melts, and it’s gone,” Schulz said. “In this case, there was snow followed immediately by cold, and then it snowed while it was cold. The salt is just sitting there.”

Until someone–or something–steps in it.

“It’s very frustrating when I see those big glops of salt–it’s so pet unfriendly,” said Marc Matlin, owner of Chicago Dog Walkers. “People think they’re doing a good deed, but if I see salt, we’ll walk on the parkway in the snow, or we’ll carry the dog through it.”

But the salt can’t be avoided. It is being tracked into offices, into stores, into homes–and on to fancy carpets. Lazar Malko, the manager of Caspian Oriental Rugs, said a customer came in the store Monday with a salt-stained Tabriz Persian rug worth thousands of dollars.

“They were upset because that is an expensive rug,” he said. “They’re always blaming kids and pets.”

Permanent stains can occur if a mix of ice and salt soaks into the rug and causes the colors to run, he said. Rug cleaning at the North Side store starts at $100 and can cost more, but in most cases, the rug can be saved, he said.

Cars can suffer too. The manager of Gold Coast Hand Car Wash has had cars lining up to have the salt washed away. Around rush hour, the store has seen as many as 40 cars an hour, said Michael Patitucci.

“A lot of the people have expensive cars and want to keep it from destroying the paint job and ruining the car,” he said. “During this time, people come more often–sometimes twice a week.”

The city recognizes how much salt the storm left behind, but maintained that it is the best option.

“Too much salt in your diet can be bad for you, but it’s something we do need to have for public safety,” Smith said. “This storm illustrated better than anything that you have to keep people on the streets safe. With the winters we have in Chicago, it also has to be cost effective.”

The city tries to limit damage of the salt exposure and is searching for alternatives that are more environmentally friendly, Smith said.

For instance, the city has tried spraying a beet juice compound in advance of icy weather to limit ice on the roads, Smith said.

The city also reduces the speed limit on Lake Shore Drive from 45 miles per hour to 40 from November through March every year to minimize the damage of salt spray on trees and shrubbery in median planters along the route, said Brian Steele, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

The city also chooses plants from a list that can withstand salt exposure so that even the response to the worst storms doesn’t kill the plants, Steele said.

The city’s salt spreading trucks were in action Thursday, concentrating on clearing side streets after as much as 12 inches of snow fell on the Chicago area during the storm.

Schulz, who served as the city’s deputy public works commissioner and budget director 20 years ago, said some environmental groups worry about the salt’s effect on nature.

“They’re very concerned about the use of salt because of potential problems with the runoff water,” he said. “It is a concern, and I think it’s a reminder that we have made a choice as a society to be able to use our roads in all but the worst conditions. There is a price to be paid for that.”

For Matlin, that price is loud yelps from the dogs his 50 walkers take out for exercise in rain, shine or snow–and the sad sight of watching a pup limp around on three legs after getting the salt rocks stuck between its paw pads.

“I use a dog friendly salt on my front walk,” he said of special ice melting pellets without salt that are sold at pet stores. “My neighbor was out shoveling, and I told him I would appreciate if he salted in moderation. He said he wouldn’t do it at all.”

———-

efitzsimmons@tribune.com

Posted by M at 09:32:00 | Permalink | No Comments »

Sonoma on the verge

As wineries, restaurants court well-heeled visitors, will Sonoma become the next Napa?

Tina Caputo, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, February 16, 2007

A tasting room staffer pours samples for customers at the... Masseuse Marjorie Sisneros gives a chocolate massage at t... Sonoma County visitors Katie Delavati (left) and Nate Glo... The serene Gundlach Bundschu vineyard harks back to the d...
Sixth-generation vintner Jeff Bundschu doesn’t remember a time the town of Sonoma wasn’t a tourist attraction. Raised on his family’s Gundlach Bundschu winery estate in Sonoma, 38-year-old Bundschu has spent his whole life observing an ever-changing stream of visitors to his hometown.

“Early on, Sonoma drew people with its culture and history — its quaint and historic square, Jack London’s home,” Bundschu says. “Foodwise, our two cheesemakers and the French bakery were the extent of the culinary scene. Restaurants were all geared toward locals, and the winery tasting rooms were fringe benefits.”

As the public’s interest shifted toward wine in the ’80s and ’90s, wineries became Sonoma County’s main attraction. But even then, Bundschu says, visitors were content to hop indiscriminately from one tasting room to the next.

A decade later, it’s a different scene. Sonoma County towns like Healdsburg and Sonoma are gradually shifting from down-home to upmarket, and visitors are seeking out increasingly high-end wineries, restaurants and hotels with full-service spas.

But as Sonoma County continues its upscale trajectory, residents and vintners fear it’s in danger of losing its identity. Is Sonoma County, with its rural charm and eccentric personalities, destined to become the new Napa?

 

Napa Valley has long looked down on its less sophisticated country cousin, and until recently, Sonoma seemed to accept and even embrace its reputation as a funky destination. But according to regional associations like Sonoma County Vintners (SCV) and the Sonoma County Tourism Bureau (SCTB), who cater to the nearly 2 million tourists that visit the county each year, Sonoma is now making a conscious effort to promote itself as a luxury destination on par with Napa — and the shift in direction seems to be paying off.

Visits to Sonoma wineries increased by almost 20 percent in 2005, according to the wine industry’s annual VinQuest survey, and that number is expected to climb even higher when 2006 figures are released.

“Napa’s really done an excellent job of going after the high-end, luxury traveler,” says tourism bureau director Ken Fischang. “We have that high-end traveler experience, but then we also have everything else in between. Napa is exclusive; Sonoma is all-inclusive.”

While many Napa wineries, such as Rubicon Estate, are trying to weed out entry-level tour bus crowds by charging $25 and up for tastings, Sonoma vintners are expanding their offerings to include high-end reserve tastings and elaborate food pairings.

“I think that people in Sonoma have realized that they were leaving a lot on the table by only cultivating this down-home farmer image,” says Sonoma County Vintners spokesman Phil Bilodeau.

J Vineyards & Winery started the trend in 1999 with the opening of its Healdsburg visitor center. Tasting bar patrons now pay $20 for a flight of J wines, each paired with a sophisticated snack. In 2004, J Vineyards took the concept a step further with the Bubble Room, a swanky tasting salon that pairs higher-end wine flights with refined eats like seared foie gras, mushroom terrine and truffled whitefish caviar.

A year after the launch of the Bubble Room, Mayo Family Winery opened the Reserve Room in Kenwood, a tasting room entirely devoted to sit-down wine-and-food pairings. For $25, visitors are treated to appetizers made by the winery’s in-house chef, such as bee pollen-crusted scallop “lollipops” or molasses-glazed duck breast kebabs, paired with single-vineyard wines. This concept proved to be so successful that the winery has opened a second Reserve Room in Healdsburg.

“People are more interested in the entire Wine Country experience now,” says winery owner Jeff Mayo. “It’s not just about accumulating wine and getting whatever has a 99-point rating.”

Mayo points out that Napa Valley spillover is partly responsible for the change in Sonoma’s visitors. “What really happened is that the congestion and pricing and attitude of Highway 29 forced people to look at other alternatives,” he says. “It’s kind of like when the glass it too full, it spills out over the top, and the only place for it to spill nearby is Sonoma.”

As wineries polish up their public faces, luxury hotels are also bringing big-city sophistication to small-town Sonoma. And restaurants like Cyrus and Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen have put Sonoma County on the fine-dining map.

The opening of Hotel Healdsburg in 2001, with its sleek, modern furnishings, fine dining restaurant and luxurious spa, appeared as perhaps the most clear signal of Sonoma’s changing standards. At $260 to $790 per night, the 55-room boutique hotel was a major step up from the typical bed-and-breakfast experience. The involvement of celebrity chef Charlie Palmer as part owner of the hotel and owner of its on-site restaurant, Dry Creek Kitchen, brought an air of high-end legitimacy to the town of Healdsburg.

Hotel Healdsburg’s success paved the way for other chic hotels, like the 16-room Les Mars Hotel. Opened in 2005, it emulates the elegance and service of fine European hotels. Appointed with 17th- and 18th-century antiques, rooms at Les Mars run $425 to $1,025 per night.

Les Mars even offers customized wine tours led by well-known wine educator Karen MacNeil. The starting price for a one-day excursion is $7,500.

Les Mars is also home to Cyrus, Sonoma County’s answer to the French Laundry. With its fine china, silver flatware and formal, Old World service, Cyrus received four stars from The Chronicle and two stars from Michelin. Despite some initial doubts that this ultra-upscale concept would fly in down-home Sonoma, hopeful diners have been fighting for reservations since the restaurant’s 2005 opening.

Cyrus maitre d’ and co-owner Nick Peyton, who helped set standards at restaurants like Masa’s and Gary Danko, originally planned to open Cyrus with chef Douglas Keane in San Francisco. But when rents proved too expensive, he turned his attention northward to Healdsburg.

“When the idea came up that Doug and I should look at this property, we talked about it and said, ‘If there can be French Laundry, Auberge du Soleil, Terra, La Toque — all these world-class restaurants over in the Napa Valley — then surely Sonoma could have one special-occasion, formal dining restaurant.’ “

After talking to local restaurateurs, Peyton and Keane decided that Healdsburg could not only support such a restaurant, it desperately needed it. “I feel like we provided a piece that was missing in the whole jigsaw puzzle.”

While attracting more well-heeled visitors will certainly benefit the businesses of Sonoma County’s vintners, hoteliers and restaurateurs, what effect will it have on the town’s rural charm and residents’ quality of life?

Protecting open spaces

Tourist traffic on Napa Valley’s winery-packed Highway 29 has turned into a real problem, and some fear that Sonoma is headed in the same direction.

“Bit by bit, things like wineries, event facilities, hotels and resorts are chipping away at the very qualities that make Sonoma County a great place to visit — its rural charm, natural beauty and wide open spaces,” says Daisy Pistey-Lyhne of the Sonoma-Marin Greenbelt Alliance.

“Maintaining the economic vitality of our farmlands is important, but if we don’t strengthen our protections for rural land, we could lose the farmland and the scenery that define Sonoma — and that would be bad for visitors, residents, farmers and businesses alike.”

Jennifer Barrett, deputy director of Sonoma County’s Permit & Resource Management Department, says that citizens are concerned about traffic and congestion.

“The saturation of wineries and events has been ranked as an issue in some areas, like Sonoma Valley and Dry Creek Valley, where road capacities are maxed out,” she says. “We’ve had to limit winery events in some areas, and we can’t always approve tasting rooms in remote locations.”

In some cases, wineries are issued “appointment only” permits, or encouraged to open their tasting rooms in town centers. Local citizens’ organizations, like the Dry Creek Valley Association, carefully monitor winery use permits and expansions to ensure that traffic and environmental concerns are met, and that the balance between development and agriculture is maintained.

Lou Preston, owner of Preston Vineyards in Dry Creek Valley, serves on the association’s board. As a vintner and 35-year resident, he is worried about more than traffic and congestion. He fears that the increasing number of wineries and tourist-driven businesses in the Dry Creek/Healdsburg area will result in homogenization. “The consumers demand these ancillary — or not so ancillary — services of fine dining, hotels and all that,” Preston says. “In a way there’s nothing wrong with that, but it kind of takes away the personality of the area.”

Even so, Preston believes it’s possible for showcase wineries to coexist with small, low-key operations like Preston. “I think you need the more visible wineries to capture the imagination of the broader public.”

The positive side to Sonoma’s development, Preston says, is that it’s bringing more cultural diversity to the region. “There is culture here now — we used to be kind of a cow town, and rather introverted. I think the danger is that the decision makers — I’m talking especially about Healdsburg — like the City Council and Chamber of Commerce, are listening to money. The people who have been here for a long time aren’t calling the shots anymore, yet they are the personality of the area.”

Despite Healdsburg’s rapid boom, Chris Hanna, president of Healdsburg-based Hanna Winery & Vineyards and president of Sonoma County Vintners, says the city will maintain its diversity and small-town charm. Hanna operates two popular tasting rooms — one in Healdsburg and one in Santa Rosa — that attract approximately 2,300 visitors each month.

“I think the merchants here and hoteliers really value the locals and the small-town atmosphere,” she says. “That’s why we all live here, and we all work toward that end.”

Balancing act

Rather than pushing out the small, folksy wineries that characterize Sonoma, Hanna says, new tourist-driven wineries will make it easier for them to survive. “If we want family wineries to be viable, we’ve got to provide wine tourists to support those businesses. The reality is that many of those wineries are small, and they rely on direct sales. I think there’s room in Sonoma County for both types of experience.”

Jeff Bundschu also believes that Sonoma’s quirky character will live on. “I don’t believe that upscale and eccentricity are mutually exclusive attributes,” he says. “The funk hasn’t disappeared, it has just moved right along with the times. As Sonoma has evolved, the ‘down-home oddball’ has become the ‘rich eccentric,’ with the only real difference being the size of their respective checkbooks.

“For example, no longer do we have the guy downtown who rented his un-refurbished chicken sheds out as art studios, but we do have the guy who is putting a full-scale railroad around his 10-acre rural property.”

Vintner Jeff Mayo adds that Sonoma County’s landscape will prevent it from turning into a congested wine Disneyland. “We’ve got something going that Napa doesn’t, and it’s that our areas are so much more spread out,” he says.

“You’re not so bottlenecked in one location, with so much traffic on only two roads. You can go to Highway 12 in Sonoma Valley, you can go to Dry Creek, you can go to Westside Road, you can go to Occidental Road, you can go out to Graton — we really have a way of dispersing people in more varied locations.”

Still, Mayo predicts that Napa and Sonoma will someday be thought of as a single wine region. “They’re becoming more alike,” he says.

“People used to only say ‘Napa’ or ‘Sonoma,’ but now I hear people saying ‘Napa-Sonoma.’ “

A taste of luxury in Sonoma County

Wineries

The Blending Cellar

Free wine blending session included with six-bottle (per person) purchase of the final blend at $40 per bottle. Mayo Winery, 13101 Arnold Drive, Glen Ellen; (707) 849-4041 or blendingcellar.com.

Chalk Hill Winery

Culinary tour ($40) includes a tour of the winery’s organic garden, vineyards and a sit-down tasting of wines paired with several small plates. 10300 Chalk Hill Rd., Healdsburg; (800) 838-4306 or chalkhill.com.

Hanna Winery & Vineyards

Artisan cheese pairing ($12) includes sit-down tasting of Hanna wines. 9280 Highway 128, Healdsburg; (707) 431-4310 or hannawinery.com.

J Vineyards & Winery

Bubble Room tasting ($45) includes a choice of wine flights with appetizers. 11447 Old Redwood Hwy., Healdsburg; (707) 431-5430 or jwine.com.

Mayo Family Winery Reserve Rooms

Tasting ($25) includes seven wines paired with seven gourmet appetizers. Sonoma Valley Reserve Room, 9200 Sonoma Hwy., Kenwood; (707) 833-5504. Healdsburg Reserve Room, 40 Center St., Healdsburg; (707) 433-9400.

St. Francis Winery & Vineyards

Wine and food pairing ($20) includes four reserve wines and four appetizers. 100 Pythian Rd., Santa Rosa; (888) 675-9463 or stfranciswinery.com.

Seghesio Family Vineyard

Sit-down tastings ($25) featuring chef-prepared family recipes and four limited or library wines held Friday-Sunday in the winery’s upstairs cellar. 14730 Grove St., Healdsburg; (707) 433-3579 or seghesio.com.

– T.C.

Tina Caputo is the managing editor for Wines & Vines magazine. E-mail her at wine@sfchronicle.com .

Posted by M at 09:30:00 | Permalink | No Comments »

L.A. housing project stuck in a cycle of violence and distrust

Residents feel caught between the local gang and the police officers that battle it.
By Paul Pringle, Times Staff Writer
February 16, 2007

Mourning in Ramona GardensProfile of a project

School was out, and the municipal gym jumped with the wholesome noise of girls and boys slapping basketballs onto the hardwood. Then came the clatter of a helicopter overhead.

“LAPD — you see?” said Jose Saucedo, in a voice too weary for his 18 years. He stood at the gym door, eyeing the police chopper as if it were a storm cloud.

“What’s the reason for the helicopter? Why?”

The simple answer is that the gym sits in Ramona Gardens, an Eastside housing project that has seen countless confrontations between the police and its home-grown street gang, Big Hazard. The cycles of seething standoffs and bursts of violence stretch back generations and have defeated every effort to bring lasting security to the neighborhood.


Caught in the middle are Saucedo and his fellow ballplayers, along with about 2,000 other folks determined to lead normal lives in the sprawl of barracks-like, World War II-era masonry buildings.

Some say they feel under siege more from the police than the gang, because of what they contend are heavy-handed tactics, a characterization that the Los Angeles Police Department disputes.

“Growing up here is as close as you’re going to get to living in a police state,” said Jose Navarro, 29, a USC doctoral student from Ramona Gardens.

Earlier this month, the routines of residents were disrupted again after a reputed Big Hazard member died in LAPD custody. The death of Mauricio Cornejo, 31, who was arrested in the project, ignited yet another round of police-brutality accusations and countercharges of gang intimidation.

Two people said they saw officers beat or kick Cornejo in the head. The LAPD denies it and cites a preliminary coroner’s examination that found no signs of serious head injuries. The police also say they are often targeted by Big Hazard. The gang has at least 260 members, including those in prison or living outside Ramona Gardens, and has connections to the Mexican Mafia, according to the LAPD.

Twice since January 2006, the police say, gunmen have fired at patrol cars in Ramona Gardens, with bullets narrowly missing officers.

“Every time we walk away from our car, it’s going to be vandalized,” said LAPD Capt. William Fierro. “I just don’t know how to get the roots of that gang out of there.”

None of this surprises housing experts. They say that Ramona Gardens, squeezed by railroad tracks and the San Bernardino Freeway, has become a field laboratory for housing policies gone wrong and that any solution would require razing the buildings and starting from scratch. The city’s oldest project, Ramona Gardens opened in 1941.

“It has outlived its useful life,” said Rudy Montiel, executive director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, which runs the project. Rents for the 497 residences are based on income and can be as little as $50 a month.

Montiel said Ramona Gardens typifies a failed model, because it piles poor families on top of each other and is separated from the surrounding community — hothouse conditions for predatory crime. He said the old Aliso Village project nearby was in similar distress until it was replaced with a combination of low- and middle-income housing. That could ultimately be Ramona Gardens’ fate, he said, although there is no specific plan for such an undertaking.

“This is an area that has been neglected for years,” said City Councilman Jose Huizar, whose district includes Ramona Gardens. He pledged to begin meeting regularly with residents.

A litany of ills

The project has witnessed shootings, a thriving drug trade, shakedown schemes that victimized delivery and bus drivers, apartment squatting by gang members and street skirmishes that rained rocks and bottles on police, according to the LAPD.

Last week, as tensions mounted over Cornejo’s death, the threat of more mayhem charged the air. About 100 riot-equipped officers rolled into Ramona Gardens to disperse a group of 40 to 50 Big Hazard members — some of whom were drinking beer and smoking marijuana — and residents holding a curbside carwash to pay for Cornejo’s funeral.

Because the gang members melted away without incident, LAPD officials declared the operation a success. But it left mixed emotions among residents. As police prepared to pull back, Fabian Puente, 21, who was born in Ramona Gardens, walked onto Lancaster Avenue to applaud them. “These officers are just doing their jobs,” he said. “We are living in our houses like prisoners.”

Many other residents declined to answer a reporter’s questions or even give their names, seeming to show that they were afraid of the gang, the police or both.

The most vocal complained that the police stopped them for nothing and issued jaywalking tickets to teenagers heading home from school. Several accusations were directed at an officer assigned to monitor Big Hazard.

Miguel Jurado, 18, who grew up in Ramona Gardens, said the officer recently ticketed him for riding his bicycle without lights.

“He told me I looked like a gang member,” said Jurado, a carpentry student who added that he doesn’t belong to a gang and has never been arrested.

Fierro said the police do not detain residents without probable cause, and he defended the lead gang officer. He also dismissed a common belief in the project that rookie officers are deployed in Ramona Gardens as part of their training.

But Fierro acknowledged that there might be truth to an assertion that officers do not have enough contact with residents to quickly judge who is and isn’t a troublemaker. “That bothers me, and I want to see if we can change that image that we have,” he said.

Fierro and other police officials said they had been making strides in that direction — last year, an LAPD team played residents in a basketball game — until Cornejo’s death.

On Feb. 3, LAPD spokesmen say, officers tried to apprehend Cornejo, but he led them on a foot chase and tossed away a .45-caliber pistol.

They say Cornejo, a wanted parolee, then fought with officers and was struck with a baton on an arm and leg. After he was handcuffed, Cornejo continued to kick at the officers, according to Lt. Paul Vernon. At the LAPD’s Hollenbeck station, Cornejo developed breathing problems, and the police called paramedics, Vernon said. Cornejo was pronounced dead shortly afterward.

Two women have said they saw the police strike Cornejo in the head and body after he was handcuffed, and a third woman said she saw officers drag him through a station hallway and kick him. The police say that is untrue.

Complete autopsy results are pending.

History repeats itself

The recriminations over Cornejo’s death are history repeating itself at Ramona Gardens. Eleven years ago, a crowd pelted officers with rocks and bottles after the police shot a suspected gang member to death. In 1991, a similar eruption occurred when a sheriff’s deputy fatally shot an unarmed gang member, who authorities said had assaulted a second deputy with a flashlight.

Each time, residents said the police and sheriff’s officials had ignored harassment complaints and were out of touch with the community.

The residents do not downplay the presence of Big Hazard. But many say the gang members, for better or worse, have family ties with those on the right side of the law.

The police insist that Big Hazard bullies residents into silence, while dealing drugs and committing robberies.

“Ninety percent of the people in there are good, hard-working people,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Cayler Carter. He said the department has resolved to “take that community away from the gang and give it back to the people.”

Carter and Fierro said the 2006 shootings at two patrol vehicles were on their minds when they marshaled a military-strength convoy to break up the carwash last week.

Current and former gang members say the police exaggerate the danger. Gabriel, 42, who asked that his last name be withheld, said he joined Big Hazard at age 12, has served multiple prison terms and has been employed under the table since his 2004 parole.

He said Big Hazard does not prey on residents. “It could be better, but it’s a nice community,” he said the day after the police operation.

Gabriel said that he expected the police to constantly eye him, if only because he is thoroughly branded with gang tattoos, but that the LAPD hassles too many innocents.

“These kids see it,” he said, gesturing to the youngsters at the gym.

He said he followed his father into the gang, but the family had its triumphs: A brother is a civilian worker for the Sheriff’s Department, and a sister is an apartment manager. “You can emancipate from this,” Gabriel said, “but it takes a lot of discipline.”

Discipline pays off

Navarro, the USC doctoral student, had the discipline. At the carwash, he wore a pullover from his alma mater, UC Berkeley, and told of being reared at Ramona Gardens by his aunt, Maggie Aguilar, who helped keep him out of the gang.

“I’d have kicked his butt,” said Aguilar, whose daughter, Kristy Alvarez, is Lincoln High School’s reigning homecoming queen.

Navarro, who was a friend of Cornejo, said the police use the gang label to “dehumanize” young people in the neighborhood. “There’s little difference between me and the so-called gang members,” he said.

He was standing on Lancaster Avenue as the third day of the carwash wound down. As it grew dark, Navarro chatted with another childhood friend, Gerard Hernandez, 27, remembering happier times. Hernandez once visited him at Berkeley, Navarro said.

On this night, he said, Hernandez joked about someday attending Harvard.

Half an hour later, Hernandez was shot near the gym and staggered out to the street. He died at the hospital.

Fierro said that Hernandez belonged to Big Hazard and that the killing was gang-related.

paul.pringle@latimes.com

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Profile of a project

Background

Opened in 1941, dedicated by California Gov. Culbert Olson.

About 2,000 people live in 497 apartments, which are spread over 32 acres.

—

A history of tensions

August 1991: The shooting of an unarmed gang member by a sheriff’s deputy triggers a tense standoff with residents.

August 1992: Two firebombings target black families at Ramona Gardens, which is otherwise almost entirely Latino.

February 1996: An angry crowd confronts the police after a gun battle that left a suspected gang member dead and an officer wounded.

–

Sources: ESRI, TeleAtlas, InfoUSA. Graphics reporting by Paul Pringle

Posted by M at 09:27:29 | Permalink | No Comments »

A plan to invest big bucks in a big dream for downtown L.A.

from the February 16, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0216/p02s02-usgn.html

The Los Angeles City Council and the County Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved what would be the largest single development in city history.

By Daniel B. Wood | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
LOS ANGELES

Downtown Los Angeles appears headed for a skyline makeover.

A $2 billion plan to build a mini- complex of office and residential towers at the city’s center – approved Tuesday in a rare act of collaboration by the Los Angeles City Council and the County Board of Supervisors – would be the largest single development in city history.

But whether the plan will bring to sprawling L.A. a “destination” equivalent of a Times Square or a Champs Elysées – as many residents and urban planners hope – depends upon whom you ask.

 

At least five new high-rise buildings – two of them dedicated to 1,000 units of housing for people all income levels – are at the center of the so-called L.A. Grand Avenue Project. It aims to create dense housing in areas next to rail lines, the new concert hall, the downtown Music Center, and shopping areas. The approved plan also calls for a 16-acre park.

“L.A. is trying to restore the texture of the downtown it once had but sterilized when it went on a skyscraper building boom from the 1950s to the 1980s,” says John Norquist, president of Congress for the New Urbanism in Chicago, which promotes land-use alternatives to sprawl.

The plan’s strength is its mix of residences, offices, and shops, he says. But such a large development, if poorly handled, could misfire. “I’d feel better if there were a spread of smaller, diverse projects, so that if one goes wrong, other creative alternatives could offset it,” says Mr. Norquist.

Supporters see the plan as a turning point after years of struggle over how to give Los Angeles a cultural hub. They credit local backers, led by billionaire Eli Broad, with a bold attempt to put Los Angeles in a league with cities like New York, Paris, and London.

Detractors cite $40 million to $60 million in tax breaks for developers over the next 20 years, and suggest taxpayers may be the losers if the makeover fizzles.

“The trouble with subsidized projects like this is that developers and politicians benefit, [and] the taxpayer gets shafted,” says Joel Kotkin, author of “The City: A Global History.” “The city often ends up with something market forces don’t support.”

Some lament, too, that the new high-rises might clutter the downtown and further diminish open space, obscuring crosstown views and vistas of the district’s new visual centerpiece, Disney Concert Hall.

But L.A.’s giant plan has more promise than failed projects in the past, say some observers, because it includes a long- missing link: housing for all income levels.

“So far downtown Los Angeles has followed a corporate- center strategy of creating skyscrapers and islands of sports and culture where people come to visit and leave,” says Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chair of the Urban Planning Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Other cities have tried to revitalize their downtowns by creating housing aimed at just one income level. Or they have created shopping and office space that is not connected to the region in which it is built. The many-decade struggle of Detroit’s Renaissance Center fell into this trap, says Dr. Loukaitou-Sideris.

Posted by M at 09:25:50 | Permalink | No Comments »

Think Small

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Matthew Adams outside his 120-square-foot house by Modern Cabana on his 160 acres near Red Bluff, Calif. He wanted a well-designed dwelling that would have the least effect on his land.

By BETHANY LYTTLE Published: February 16, 2007

WHEN John Friedman and Kristin Shepherd of Berkeley, Calif., purchased 160 acres in the mountains near Telluride, Colo., it was with the intent to build — just not right away. Before designing a small, ecologically sensitive second home they wanted to spend a year or two visiting the land to determine the most suitable building site. But at an elevation of 9,600 feet, living in tents was out.

Tiny Houses: Less Is MoreManufacturers: Sleekly Modern or Storybook
T.C. Worley for The New York TImes
Scott and Lisa McGlasson’s 700-square-foot weeHouse from Alchemy Architects in northern Minnesota.

So, early last summer, Mr. Friedman, 69, an industrial photographer, rented a truck and trailered a pre-built 65-square-foot Tumbleweed Tiny House up mountain roads, into a meadow and parked. To compensate for the lack of interior space, the couple cook, entertain and, for the most part, live outdoors. “We live in our view rather than look at it,” said Ms. Shepherd, 58, a retired youth counselor and an avid hiker. At night the two nestle in a sleeping loft with three feet of clearance, gazing at stars through a skylight. “It’s shelter, pure and simple,” Ms. Shepherd said.

A wave of interest in such small dwellings — some to serve, like the Shepherds’ home, as temporary housing, others to become space-saving dwellings of a more permanent nature — has prompted designers and manufacturers to offer building plans, kits and factory-built houses to the growing number of small-thinking second-home shoppers. Seldom measuring much more than 500 square feet, the buildings offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as second homes.

This reduction of scale makes sense for a lot of people. Second homes are often geared toward outdoor activities, so for several months of the year interior space is superfluous. Minimal square footage means reduced maintenance costs, less upkeep and reduced energy consumption. Prefabricated and pre-built models can require little or no site preparation, which means no anxious weekend drives to the country to make sure construction is moving along. Add to this an element of instant gratification (once the planning stage is over, most houses go up in days, even hours, and many are delivered, turn-key, to the site).

Choosing a house starts to resemble buying a car.

Hardly the slapped-together hunting camp that belonged to your uncle, these buildings even offer instant curb appeal. They are often equipped with airplane-size bathrooms and tiny kitchenettes. Styles include romantic, rustic and designer modern. Jeanette Andersen, an agent at Sotheby’s International Realty/Santa Monica, said that in theory this could contribute to an increase in sales of undeveloped land. “When the design is appealing,” she said, “buyers are more willing to buy one and spend the money they saved on land.”

This is the case for two retirees, Gail Conti and her husband, Tom, of Rockledge, Fla. Attracted to a charming porch, pastel hues and compact size, they hope to buy a 308-square-foot Katrina Cottage, originally designed for hurricane relief by Cusato Cottages, when Lowe’s stores begin selling them this year. “To me, they’re reminiscent of the bungalows I used to see in the 1940s,” Ms. Conti said.

With a 3,000-square-foot primary residence on the Intracoastal Waterway — with sailing just outside their door — the Contis don’t need a vacation house. Instead, they plan to put their Katrina on land they will buy in Virginia or Maryland, near Washington and close to their daughter, son-in-law and young grandson. “It would allow us to visit for stretches of time without intruding and without incurring great cost,” Ms. Conti said.

PRICES for tiny houses vary by region, but in general reflect degrees of finishing, who does the building, types of materials and design options. In general, count on spending anywhere from $35 a square foot for a very basic structure to more than $200 a square foot for designer models built with specialized or luxury materials.

Manufacturers’ prices do not always include delivery fees, and there can be other costs, including site preparation, foundation work and installation of electric, water and sewer services. “You have to go into this with open eyes,” said Jay Shafer, owner of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. “Zoning laws, land covenants, building permits, restrictions and codes vary within states and across the country, and these impact what has to be done at the site, and how.”

For $90,000 in 2004, Scott McGlasson, 40, owner of Woodsport, a custom furniture design studio in Minneapolis, and his wife, Lisa, a human resources coordinator, bought a 700-square-foot weeHouse by Alchemy Architects. It has plumbing, tall glass doors, Andersen windows, laminate flooring, recessed lighting and Ikea cabinets. It is comfortable and attractive. “But people confuse prefab with inexpensive,” Mr. McGlasson said. “On a middle-class budget, this was doable, but not easy.” They bought the land — a small lot on Lake Pequaywan in northern Minnesota — in 2002 for $80,000. It already had a septic system, a well and access to utilities.

One rectangular module serves as the main floor; above it is an additional square module that serves as a second bedroom, which must be entered from outdoors via a ship’s ladder. Guests love it because it’s separate from the rest of the house. “And because they can lock out our three kids,” Mr. McGlasson said.

Still, it’s hard to resist doing the math. Five people sharing about 700 square feet has to present challenges — especially when three of those people are still growing. To make the most efficient use of the space, Mr. McGlasson designed and built much of the furniture, some with birch from the surrounding forest. He also added a free-standing sauna and a deck for outdoor living. “But when friends come, we’re pretty packed in,” he said. The trade-off is that when the time comes to leave, they just sweep it out and go. “We’re here to swim, fish, hike and cook,” Mr. McGlasson said. “If we wanted all the conveniences of home, we’d be there.”

Living tiny, however, does not require deprivation, thanks to modern technology. Gregory Johnson, president of the Small House Society, who lives in a 140-square-foot house in Iowa, noted that people once needed “a stereo system, countless LPs or CDs, photo albums and a small library of books.” Now, everything can take up no more space than a laptop or an iPod.

Stephanie Arado, a Minnesota Orchestra violinist, said that it took living in a tiny house to learn how little space she really needed. For about $45,000, she bought a 392-square-foot weeHouse with no electricity and no bathroom as the solution to a siting problem on her 32 acres in western Wisconsin. Ms. Arado, who has two children, planned to use the tiny house as a springboard to building something bigger.

But four years have passed, and she now has no intention of supersizing. “Something happened,” Ms. Arado said. “I started to see the beauty in how it works.” There is a queen-size bed for her and a bunk for her two children. When friends visit, sleeping pads and cots are pulled out. “The glass walls make the house feel much bigger than it is,” she said. “People are surprised to hear it’s only 14 feet wide.”

The tiny-house movement complements another vacation-home trend: buying land with an eye to conservation. John Friedman and Kristin Shepherd will return to their Tumbleweed Tiny House in Telluride this spring, not only to hike, but also to observe wildlife patterns and work to ensure that the land, which they purchased with the express purpose of conservation, remains protected.

MATTHEW ADAMS, 30, a San Francisco lawyer, shares this approach. On Feb. 2, he watched as the four walls of his $24,000, very modern 120-square-foot house went up on a very small portion of his 160 acres near Red Bluff, Calif. From the beginning, Mr. Adams said, he had an ecological agenda and intended to serve as a steward of the former ranch property. “I was committed to finding a tiny house that would have no lasting impact on the land,” he said. “But truthfully, I wanted something with design value, too.”

Modern Cabana offered both. The structure rides on concrete piers, so there’s no need to pour a foundation. To minimize waste, the builder, Nick Damner, works exclusively with eight-foot units of plywood, glass and wallboard. Recycled denim is used as insulation.

“It feels acutely more sheltering to be in a tiny house rather than a big one,” Mr. Adams said of the glass-and-wood structure, which sits like a jewel box on the land. “Looking out at the vastness of the environment heightens your sense of containment.”

From a set of design options, Mr. Adams selected operable windows on four sides and sliding glass doors. “You won’t find any quilts or knickknacks here,” Mr. Adams said. There’s no kitchen or bathroom, either. He plans to put in a well, he says, then order a second cabana to use as a bath house. Cooking will continue to be outdoors.

Posted by M at 09:22:59 | Permalink | No Comments »

A house turned inside out

By Morris Newman, Special to The Times
February 15, 2007

A house turned inside out

CARMEN ROGERS found her new home almost by accident a couple years ago while flipping through the pages of a magazine at the supermarket checkout line. There it was photographed on a steep hillside in Montecito, the home that architect Barton Myers built for himself and his wife in 1998.

Divided into three separate structures, the steel-and-glass house is uncompromisingly industrial in style yet is still in harmony with the unspoiled, oak-filled hillside.

Carmen and her husband, Rick, knew this was the home they wanted, but they didn’t know if it could be adapted for a corner lot on a busy Westside street.

They contacted Myers, who was intrigued by the challenge. Could the new house retain the qualities the couple most admired in his home, particularly the sense of openness to landscape, in a single-family neighborhood, near Olympic Boulevard?


Myers had been toying with the idea of designing a series of houses, each repeating a few signature elements: steel frame, floor-to-ceiling windows and roll-up doors. These projects — and the Rogerses’ home in particular — would explore steel home construction and test the idea that the hard-edged design of his Montecito house could fit any location.

The newly finished Rogers house resembles the Myers house in some ways but is anything but a replica. The individual pavilions of the Montecito house march straight down the hill like stair steps. The Rogerses’ house, in contrast, sits on a flat double lot on a busy Westside corner and is built around in a “classic Los Angeles courtyard,” Myers says.

THE architect formed the courtyard by arranging three separate, steel-framed structures in a “U” shape around a long, narrow courtyard. Two of the buildings have roll-up doors filled with windows. (The architect calls them “roll-up curtain walls.”) The more conventional walls have rows of clerestory windows along the roof line to maximize natural light.

At the center is the main house, with a large living-dining room with 16-foot ceilings facing south, while a guest house faces west. On the opposite end is Rick’s home office and pool parlor.

The most dramatic moment occurs when doors on the main house roll up out of sight, literally opening to the courtyard. In this configuration, the house looks almost as if no walls ever existed between indoors and outdoors, much as those walls seem to disappear at Myers’ Montecito house.

For the Rogerses, their new house is the culmination of the couple’s personal passion for architecture and design. After serving as a young actor in television and several beach-party movies of the 1960s, Rick transitioned into fashion design, creating beaded denim garments. He also logged five years at UCLA’s interior design program. Carmen Rogers is an interior designer who recently spent three years refurbishing a hotel in Park City, Utah, where the couple have a second home.

The main building, with living room, dining room, kitchen and two bedrooms, has been sparely furnished with carefully chosen Modernist furniture, much of it chosen by Carmen. Few possessions are on view beyond some small paintings, books and a remarkable wood-burning stove in the shape of a gorilla that the Rogerses bought in France many years ago.

His respect for Myers’ architecture was great enough, Rick said, that he was willing to part with rare furniture and other belongings he thought incompatible with the spare, steel-framed house. “We got rid of a lot of things we didn’t want to get rid of,” he says, “but the idea of insulting the integrity of that architecture is not worth it to me.”

Rick found he had to make other compromises as well. He was ambivalent at first about having a roll-up door on his pool room, which he prefers dark, to avoid glare. To accommodate him, the architect provided a dark, roll-down screen to shade the room from the window-filled doors. Rick, an expert pool player, has filled a basement room next to a wine cellar with his cherished collection of inlaid pool cues. (He calls the room “the cue-midor.”)

A lap pool of black-tinted concrete runs along the foot of a wall that separates the courtyard from the street and serves as a reflecting pool when not in use. Like a fountain, the water spills continuously from the pool into an outer trough, and the sound of water helps to shield the courtyard from the sound of intense traffic during rush hour.

One section of the wall is made of poured-in-place concrete, a material strong enough to support a massive, folded-steel, white-painted sculpture by artist Betty Gold. Attached to the wall by thick, horizontal bolts is the steel artwork, which “weighs as much as a Mini-Cooper,” according to architect Thomas Schneider, who served as Myers’ project architect and chief assistant on the Rogerses’ home.

The notion of a walled house in a dense urban setting appealed to Rick, who said it reminded him of cities in South America, “where you walk down the street and it’s all walls, and suddenly you walk into a beautiful courtyard house.”

MYERS, who built two steel houses in Toronto before the one in Montecito, is one of a small but quickly growing number of architects who are popularizing steel construction in houses for a variety of reasons (see box).

The strength of steel, he explains, allows architects to “compress” a home’s structural frame into a minimal metal skeleton. Unlike a conventional wood frame, the steel structure seems almost to disappear, allowing room for floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as broad, column-free spans.

“Steel allows a kind of transparency that is possible only with a highly confined structure,” says Mark Mack, an architect who teaches a steel-house design class with Barton Myers at UCLA School of Art and Architecture.

The idea of the steel house is not a new one. The first one, according to historians, is the famous Maison de Verre or glass house in Paris, designed by Pierre Chareau in 1932, in which the large spaces on the exterior walls left open by the steel frame are filled with glass block. (Myers often speaks admiringly of the glass house; Rick says he made a special effort to see it during a trip to Paris, decades before hiring Myers to design his own steel house.)

In the 1940s and ’50s, the experimental Case Study houses reinvigorated the use of steel in housing. Perhaps the most famous, and one of Myers’ acknowledged inspirations, is the Charles and Ray Eames House, a pair of cubic volumes built in 1949 on an ocean bluff south of Malibu. (The first so-called high-tech house, the Eames House was built entirely of existing industrial materials available from catalogs.)

Another of Myers’ favorite courtyard designs is an unbuilt house by Ralph Rapson, assembled in a mock-up version for the Case Study houses exhibit, “Design for Living,” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991. Like the Eames House, the Rapson house introduces a courtyard between two small, square-edged structures. For the Rogerses’ house, Myers first proposed to emulate the Rapson design with only two structures with a courtyard in between.

Currently, steel construction is enjoying another revival, this time due to the popularity of prefab housing designs by young architects and designers such as Jennifer Siegel. (While expressing admiration for prefab projects, Myers says he designs his houses for specific sites unlike many prefab architects, which offer ready-made solutions for any sites. “You have to solve the architectural problem in each location,” he says.)

For Myers, the Montecito house was a return to steel houses, a building type that the architect has been designing for more than 35 years — he built two steel houses in Canada in the 1970s — and in which he is an acknowledged pioneer. The high level of interest following the publication of the Montecito house seemed to offer Myers the chance to plunge into a new series of steel houses.

“I got about 50 requests from people who wanted me to design houses for them in that style,” says Myers, “although about half of those dropped out when I told them I required a retainer up front.” The Rogerses were among the clients who decided to hang on to their dreams of a steel house. “I had a picture in my mind’s eye of the house I wanted, and that was it,” Rick says.

Carmen, who had been nervous about building on a busy corner, said she is pleased with the results: “It’s amazing how warm the house is.”

The landscape design by Katherine Glascock is one of the things that Carmen likes most about the house. In the center of the courtyard stands a mature stone pine with twisting, expressive branches and long needles. Unable to dig in the side garden because of buried utility lines, Glascock built a hill out of terraces and filled the terraces with papyrus sprays and other exotic plants.

“There is so much glass in the house that we wanted something really good to look at out those windows,” Rick said. “The garden became the artwork for the rooms,” he added. Said Carmen: “When you look out the bedroom window, it’s like being in a garden.”

The architect, for his part, seemed pleased when a visitor calls the courtyard the best room in the house. Although Myers would not disclose the budget of the Rogerses’ residence — the 4,000-square-foot house has several high-end features that skew the cost of construction above the standard range — the architect says that steel houses start at about $500 per square foot, which he says is comparable to the popular high-end housing types, including those he describes derisively as “terrible, Taco Bell Tuscan.” (The skyrocketing costs of construction materials may soon make that figure obsolete, however.)

“There’s two kinds of architecture right now,” says Myers, a man of strong opinions. “One is about making objects, the other is about making spaces,” he says, adding, “I’m interested in making spaces.”

home@latimes.com

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Steel is strong and sustainable

Why use steel instead of wood to build a house? The versatility of the material makes it attractive to architects and consumers for both aesthetic and structural reasons. And there’s less waste when using steel rather than wood.

Strength: The most obvious appeal of the material is its strength, which allows the same level of structural stability, or more, as a conventional wooden frame, using far less material. Steel can help minimize structural elements or achieve daring effects, such as Pierre Koenig’s famous Case Study House No. 22 of 1960, a vertigo-inducing structure suspended above Laurel Canyon by cantilevered steel beams.

Cost: Compared with wood framing, steel costs more, although architect Barton Myers says the comparison can be misleading and argues that home builders should look at the overall budget when comparing steel with wood. “Steel is competitive with high-end wood construction, when viewing the budget as a whole,” he says.

Speed of assembly: A skilled crew can frame a steel house in a comparatively short time, sometimes a few days. Although the Rogers’ house took about a year to build — not much of a time savings over a conventional home — Myers said he is working on a second house, this one in Santa Barbara, using prefabricated wall panels and windows, and expects to cut construction time to six months. A shorter construction time can translate into savings in labor costs.

Sustainability: Wood framing involves a large amount of waste: construction of a typical 2,000-square-foot house generates 3,000 pounds of unused wood, or about a quarter of the project’s total waste stream, according to the National Assn. of Homebuilders Research Center. In contrast, the individual parts of a steel frame can be prefabricated in a factory and assembled on-site with virtually no waste. Steel is also more sustainable than wood because the material can be recycled easily. Most of the steel on the market is, in fact, 60% recycled material. “The Rogers house is made out of recycled Buicks and Fords,” Myers says.

— Morris Newman

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