Central Park, New York

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This boondoggle is a classic high-low team-up against the middle. Granted, in Manhattan the middle class is making six figures. But they”€™ve been sold these tax subsidies for new construction under the logic that a supply of new buildings will soak up demand from their rich neighbors making seven figures, relieving pricing pressure on themselves. Instead, however, the new construction is snapped up by overseas oligarchs with off-the-charts (and off-the-books) wealth, doing little for the local bourgeoisie.

In the Los Angeles area, high rises are less of a tradition and an attraction. (It’s been 21 years since the Northridge earthquake, and quakes are like housing busts: the longer since the last one, the worse the next one will likely be.)

The big story at the moment out here is mansionization: tearing down ranch houses and replacing them with multistory shoebox-shaped dwellings that loom ominously over neighbors by taking up as much of the lot as can be gotten away with.

The demolition of the late science fiction writer Ray Bradbury’s home in the pleasant Cheviot Hills neighborhood south of Beverly Hills has excited much outrage.

The lamentation over the Bradbury teardown has some curious aspects, since the house was architecturally undistinguished. And its purchaser is not some tasteless moneybags, but is instead a famous Santa Monica architect, Thom Mayne. (Granted, Mayne is an exceptionally hostile starchitect, designer of foreboding edifices in which Darth Vader would feel at home.)

Nor was Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, close to being the most famous person to ever live in Los Angeles, a city not lacking in celebrities. Still, he was a personable man of letters who devoted countless hours to fundraising for local libraries, making him a hero to Los Angeles’s surprisingly large platoons of the bookish.

In his stories, though, Bradbury tended to treat Los Angeles as an object of satire, reserving his genius for nostalgia for depicting his boyhood hometown of Waukegan, IL. 

One reason that the destruction of Bradbury’s old house made such a splash was that he was representative of the kind of modest Midwesterners who largely built Los Angeles. (For example, my father was from Oak Park, IL and my mother from St. Paul, MN).

The expectations of these northern Midwesterners shaped how Angelenos would live. For instance, almost every house has a front lawn, even though water is expensive here in the semi-desert. Houses were supposed to be moderate in size relative to their lots and not fill the property from lot line to lot line (even though lots in the Los Angeles area tend to be small by American suburban standards).

But the Midwesterners who settled Southern California were generally the ones who, much as they might look back with Bradburyian longing, weren”€™t wholly happy dealing with snow, mosquitoes, prying neighbors, and small-town conformity.

Thus, Southern Californians diverged from Midwestern norms of open yards by building high walls around their backyards. The usual justification for this custom was that swimming pools had to be isolated to keep neighbor children from sneaking in and drowning, but high walls are standard for yards without pools as well.

I”€™ve always suspected that among Midwestern transplants“€”such as Bradbury’s mentor in Los Angeles’s 1940s sci-fi scene, Missouri-born Robert A. Heinlein“€”there numbered more than a few unobtrusive backyard nudists. Thus, while Midwestern lots are typically open to public inspection from all four sides, their cultural offshoots in California usually present a pleasantly welcoming face to the street, but the other three sides are more private.

The backyard sunbathing hobby strengthened Angelenos”€™ prejudice against neighbors having two-story houses (perfect for peeping toms). Combined with the small lot sizes, the prevalence of single-story ranch houses meant that most Los Angeles houses have traditionally been short on square feet.

For instance, the extinct house owned by Bradbury, a prosperous celebrity who not only sold eight million books but earned 87 credits writing movies and television shows, was 2,450 square feet on a lot of 0.22 acres, or 9,500 square feet. (It sold for $1.76 million, well over the asking price: a lot that size is considered “€œgenerous”€ in L.A.)

But small houses were okay, because part of the point of moving from Waukegan to Los Angeles was to be outside in the sunshine getting tanned.

Over time, though, Los Angeles has largely been repopulated by people from Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures in which being as white as possible is the ideal. The darker-skinned new Angelenos want more indoor living space to avoid the shame of tanning, which accounts for some of the cultural conflict between old-timers and newcomers over mansionization.