neighborhoods

• Extreme Makeover = extreme travesty in Raleigh, NC

  I am sad but unfortunately not surprised to read how the television program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently documented the destruction of a decrepit but repairable old bungalow in Raleigh, North Carolina (map). Not only did they allow demolition derby cars to smash into the house as part of its demolition, but they refused to allow architectural antique collectors or dealers buy the many features in the house, including heart-pine flooring and wood trim and original windows – money that could have gone to the family who owned the house, or the volunteer organization that pulled together to get the new structure built.

  Hopefully Raleigh’s Riggins family won’t have the same problems that the Llanes family, who participated in an Extreme Makeover Home Edition moment in North Bergen NJ, had; they now cannot afford the much higher property taxes on their new house. The new tax bill, more than $14,000, makes the family feel as if an ax is "hanging over our head. With all the taxes, it’s like we’re on a chopping
  block."

  The well-built but run-down home in Raleigh, instead of being remodeled or restored (two things it sorely needed!), was replaced with a new house built in one week. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of contractors, custom home builders and architects over the years, and I talked to a few of them about this particular case. Every one said that there was absolutely no way that a house built in a single week could be better than a half-decent, disposable piece of junk, and certainly wouldn’t last half as long as the home it replaced. So: good going, Extreme Makeover. I’m sure the advertisers are happy, though, and that’s really all that matters – the event was really for them, and the volunteers were subsidizing them just as much as engaging in healthy and community-building service. The fact that a needy and deserving family got a nice new McMansion is simply a good PR side-effect as far as the advertisers are concerned.

  Matthew Brown in Raleigh wrote a letter to his local newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, lamenting the loss; many folks in the community share his opinion (although most are happy that a needy family is getting a new house), and Sven Rylesdorn says it better than I could, also pointing out the absurdity of having the demolition derby cars attempt to tear the house down:

  The meager humor is that the cars couldn’t actually do this – they
  pulled the columns off, but the porch roof stayed up. The crew had to
  pre-chainsaw the framing of the house in order to get the walls to fall
  down when the cars hit it. So then it looks like the place really was
  not-worth-saving. After all, if a car can knock it down…

  Mark Turner talks to Myrick Howard, the head of Preservation North Carolina, about the project; Howard had this to say:

  "I believe in charity, but if you really care about good
  housing, then renovate the existing house and it will cost so much
  less," he said.

  Howard added that the Riggins home was not only salvageable but made
  of better building materials than Extreme Makeover would use.

  "We’re replacing real wood and plaster with chip board and sheet
  rock," he said. "They’re getting showered with candy rather than a
  decent meal."

  Personally, I think the Riggins family deserved a lot better than this scripted media event, and they deserve a house at least as sturdy as the old one. These are people who give a lot back to the community – Linda Riggins is a social worker who recently had to stop work due to crippling arthritis, and her husband Bill was a tailor until his degenerating vision caused him to give up that work (he is now legally blind) – and they are actively involved with a local ministry devoted to helping underprivileged children and finding homes for low-income families. But a real restoration project, full of detail work and craftspeople taking their time to do it right, doesn’t sell TV commercial time, and then the network and its owners, Disney, would have had to pay for staff rather than getting free volunteers to throw up a ready-built. Apparently, the show did generate a kind of ripple effect of volunteerism in the community, at least for a little while, and that is absolutely wonderful, even if it may not last too long. It’s a shame that someone had to get a (comparatively) mediocre house for this to happen, though.

  Richard Hart, in his Up Front column in Indy, the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill-area independent weekly, tells us, basically, that we should just shove our cynicism. But I’m not cynical about the effects of the project overall; I think it is wonderful that a needy family got a new home and a community came together to do something not necessarily for themselves. I think it’s sad, though, that the only way this can happen is in a scripted event meant to make a bunch of money for Disney and its local commercial sponsors, even to the point of denying the local charities in the event discounted advertising time during the airing of the program.

  So let’s look at the lessons we can learn from the Extreme Makeover
  experience. Jennings has a few suggestions: The spirit and
  infrastructure for volunteerism it created should be capitalized upon
  long-term; all corporate citizens should make addressing the common
  good part of their business practices; we should support businesses
  that accept that responsibility; and there should be incentives for
  them to pursue it.

  What else can we learn? Shouldn’t we be embarrassed that families
  like the Rigginses have to live as they do? We need to open our eyes to
  the conditions around us and press our elected officials to address
  them. Cities need to aggressively enforce housing codes and create
  powerful economic incentives for poor families (and landlords) in older
  areas to repair their homes, improve their neighborhoods and protect
  our architectural heritage.

  Derek Jennings echoes Mr. Hart’s editorial in his feature article in the same issue; luckily, he also gives us a photograph of handsome carpenter Ty Pennington and writes that "his hunk value is considered one of the show’s attractions." I’m glad the Indy is looking out for their advertisers and sexually frustrated
  housewives everywhere, rather than taking a critical approach to an entire community being manipulated by Disney and its advertisers.

  Last but not least, Betsy, a local high school blogger, has discovered that ABC is not picking up the bill for police, city inspectors and other government services related to the media circus; the city of Raleigh is expected to pay. After all, isn’t it the American way for the public to be subservient to private profit, and for government to subsidize private business? I call it "socialism for the rich."

  more: Scott Parkerson’s photographs of the circus around 207 Poplar Street in Raleigh, NC; a slideshow of "the start and the finish" of the new house being built; a related article and comments at Endangered Durham; Triangle Homeworks, the non-profit that put the volunteer effort together, gives a bit of background on their involvement with the project; TV news, as usual, is not in the business of asking questions because everybody loves a good public interest story – their first story on the program ended with this very telling blurb:

  Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was the 15th-rated show in last week’s Nielsen ratings.

  Multiple emails and a fax to the show’s producers and ABC / Disney have so far been unanswered.

• humankind priced out of housing market: San Luis Obispo, CA

  
    An Example of SLO Real Estate 
  

  Flickr user Vision Aerie gives us a terrific example of how normal human beings are no longer able to afford to do anything other than rent if they want to live in a safe neighborhood with decent schools. After all, those are really only things that the rich deserve.

• Los Gatos Historic Homes Tour

  Well, I missed it this year – the tour was two weeks ago – but Los Gatos’ annual Historic Homes Tour was a big success, raising money for both the Los Gatos Art and History museums.

  The $30 tour visited six homes in Los Gatos’ historic Glen Ridge neighborhood, which is jam-packed with pretty bungalows and cottages, most of them with interesting Craftsman details. Alastair Dallas of the Los Gatos Observer has a good article and several photographs of the tour; homes from the 2001 tour can be visited, online, through Shari Kaplan’s October 2001 article in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

  • 22 Glen Ridge Ave.: A two-story cottage-style house, built in 1904 for lawyer William F.
    Pierce and his family, will have the original architect’s drawings
    displayed in the library. It has two cutaway bay windows, a hipped roof
    with widow’s walk and a front-facing gable over its front porch. Used
    for years as a rental, the home has been returned to its original
    single-family status by its current owner, who tore down a 1908
    addition to build a new kitchen and bath in that space.
  • 133 Glen Ridge Ave.: Look carefully for the subtle decorative elements on the house built
    in 1909 by David Crummey, who started the Bean Spray Pump Co., maker of
    the first high-pressure pump for insecticides. (The company later
    evolved into San Jose’s Food Machinery Corp., a maker of farming
    equipment and, later, huge military vehicles.) Corner towers have
    hipped roofs, cantilevered on the front and sides with decorated braces
    below. A hipped center dormer has exposed rafters under the eaves.
    Stained glass can be seen in the top panes of the tower windows. And
    here’s where you can see the aforementioned quatrefoil windows. The
    house retains its original footprint, front facade and entry porch, but
    the insides have been updated – keeping to the period – by the
    current owners.
  • 219 Glen Ridge Ave.: More fun architectural details are on the cedar-shingled
    Craftsman-style house with its recessed porch and side-gable roof,
    built in 1907 for Frank A. Dixon, superintendent of the San Jose Fruit
    Packaging Co. Carved rafter "tails" show off the skills of a fine
    woodworker, and the stonework at the sidewalk is original. Inside, many
    period features remain, including built-in bookcases and dining room
    buffet, paneling in the dining room and coved ceilings. The current
    owners extended the rear of the house to remodel the kitchen and add a
    family room in the 1990s.
  • 19 Hernandez:The oldest house on the tour was built before 1891 and is known as
    the family home of "Judge" Fowler, although Thomas Fowler actually
    was a senator and may have even died before the family moved into the
    house. The Victorian Queen Anne-style house has cantilevered bay
    windows on the right front and side, a porch with turned columns and a
    central, front-facing gable. The current owner has remodeled in period
    style and added a second story for a master bedroom and bath in the
    early 2000s.
  • 119 Tait Ave.: The newest house on the tour was built in 1993 to replace a
    circa-1890 Victorian that was red-tagged and razed after it was knocked
    off its foundation during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It has
    typical Queen Anne-style features such as a bay window, wraparound
    porch with turned columns and hipped roof – all designed to allow the
    new construction to fit seamlessly into its neighborhood. The current
    owner purchased it in 1994.
  • 142 Tait Ave.: What’s called the "Rene Doolittle House" was built in 1923, likely
    by Doolittle himself. About 12 years ago, the second story was added,
    but the first story retains its original Craftsman features such as the
    stucco under the gables and braces and the exposed rafter tails.
• Flip this house? Not so fast.

  Beth Potter’s recent article in the Denver Post is a wakeup call to the professional flippers who are doing more harm than good to the neighborhoods they "invest" in. Unfortunately, Potter’s article is more fluff than analysis; sure, some flippers need to work to resell houses, but what of the character of the neighborhoods destroyed by flipping? Where I live, self-proclaimed "real estate professionals" have bought up old Craftsman and Mission Revival bungalows, sunk a few thousand dollars into them, and then – while waiting for a seller – rented them out. Of course, the rents price out the working people who used to fill the neighborhood, moving them into clusters of poverty that are a huge spiritual, social and economic drain on them and all other taxpayers.

  Some folks decide not to rent out at all, and just wait for the sale – and a large proportion of them end up in foreclosure, with dead lawns and broken windows. Thus prices go up and then down artificially, at the whim of outsiders who have no interest in the culture of the city or our neighborhood and no interest in contributing to it at all. It’s simply an extension of the "me first" attitude that has shaped the national character in the last decade.

  Nine years ago, downtown Denver resident
  Barbara Baker was up late with insomnia when she saw a "Buy property,
  no money down" infomercial on TV.

  Her job as a gang prevention coordinator at Jefferson
  County public schools was ending, and Baker was trying to figure out
  what to do next in her life. She decided to use the family house as
  collateral for a "no money down" loan on an investment home.

  …

  Late night TV shows like "Flip this House" on A&E
  are drawing first-time investors with visions of quick riches dancing
  in their heads. On the show, Realtors and others make mostly cosmetic
  changes to distressed homes in the Atlanta metro area and sell them
  just months later for huge profits.

  "A lot of people watch (that show). It’s good for the
  market because it’s getting some fresh blood into (it)," said Wilhelm
  Estes, a Broomfield Realtor who specializes in finding such properties
  to sell investors.

  Such TV shows can also be misleading, Baker said,
  because they emphasize homes that need simple changes rather than
  costly infrastructure overhauls.

  "I think it’s tough," she said, which is why she
  consults with people just starting in the business. Said Baker, "Most
  of them don’t know what they’re getting into."

  Read the full article here.

• Oakland’s Architectural Gems: From Victorian to Craftsman & Beyond

  

  Valerie Garry of the Oakland Heritage Alliance was kind enough to write an introduction to Oakland’s architecture with a special emphasis on its great Arts & Crafts properties just for us. In addition, she’s included a number of images in addition to the Glendale house (pictured), all of which are available for view in a special Flickr album. Please forward additional photos of interesting Oakland buildings to us for inclusion in this set.
  

  The Oakland Heritage Alliance – a stalwart organization of grass-roots preservationists – celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005 and what a quarter century it has been.  In 1980, seven people with an ambitious goal scraped together a $150 to get the organization rolling. Their goal: to stem the tide (at times a Tsunami) of urban renewal projects that were paving over, plowing under, and otherwise obliterating at an alarming rate some of Oakland’s precious historic architectural fabric. Whole blocks of Victorians had already been lost. Many of downtown Oakland’s handsome early 20th century commercial buildings were knocked down to make way for dreary paved expanses of parking lots. Even the masterpieces, such as Bernard Maybeck‘s magnificent Packard Showroom by the shores of Lake Merritt, were demolished.  Armed with a fierce determination to protect the precious historic, architectural and cultural legacy of Oakland, the small group began to throw their energy and time into preservation action.

  Oakland Heritage Alliance has now grown into an organization of close to a 1000 members. Although the battle to save irreplaceable old buildings continues, the organization has logged an impressive list of historically significant architecture, cultural assets, and unique green spaces, that it has helped save and restore. There is Oakland City Hall, a magnificent Beaux-Arts skyscraper that was nearly demolished because of damage it suffered during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The Fox Oakland Theater, with its exotic blend of Indian, Moorish, Medieval and Baghdadian styles, which one writer dubbed "one part Arab and three parts Hollywood hokum," narrowly escaped becoming a parking lot.

  One of Oakland’s most distinctive Art Deco buildings, the Floral Depot, with its brilliant cobalt blue and silver glazed terra cotta, was also almost demolished. Now completely restored to its lustrous beauty, it is about to become a stylish restaurant. OHA fought to save Old Merritt College, a rare surviving example of early 20th century California school architecture modeled on California missions, nearly razed to make way for a shopping center. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The list goes on and on.

  Oakland has some of the most architecturally varied and distinctive residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Its architectural heritage includes Art Deco, Victorian, Beaux Arts, and period revivals (Italian Renaissance, Spanish Eclectic, and English cottage), Stick Eastlake and colonial revival. And in the gently rolling hills of Oakland are a seemingly infinite variety of Craftsman homes-charming, rustic, whimsical, modest and grand -many built to provide homes for San Franciscans who moved to the East Bay after the 1906 earthquake, or who sought a sunny summer place to escape the foggy city by the Bay.  There is the exotic Jesse Matteson house, or Sunset House, in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Built in 1905, one writer described it as a cross between a Japanese Bungalow and a Viking ship. There is Bernard Maybeck’s elegant and incomparable Guy Hyde Chick house (1913), which, remarkably, survived the 1991 Oakland Hills fire; there is Julia Morgan’s remarkable YWCA building in downtown Oakland; homes by John Hudson Thomas; and Storybook style homes with witch’s cap turrets by Carr Jones.

  A TAKE ON THE TEMESCAL

  On Sunday, October 15, the Oakland Heritage Alliance will present a house tour of homes in one of Oakland’s most vibrant and historic areas – the Temescal neighborhood. The tour will be from 1-5:30 p.m. Among the houses featured on the tour will be a 1903 Classic Revival house that incorporates a water tower and a c. 1900 house transformed into a mid-century modern house. A 1910 stucco bungalow on the tour features an unusual collection of antiques such as Chinese cinnabar, antique Chinese children’s hats, beaded handbags, Victorian lace dresses, black paper dolls, and 19th century ruby Bavarian glass. The tour will also include an 1880 two-story Italianate, as well as an Eastlake and Arts and Crafts bungalow, both undergoing extensive renovation.

  The house tour is self-guided and easy to walk. The starting point for the tour is in front of Acorn Kitchen and Bath, 4640 Telegraph Avenue. Proceeds from the tour benefit the Oakland Heritage Alliance. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 the day of the tour, and $25 for OHA members and include a reception with refreshments. OHA is looking for volunteers to help with the tour and all volunteers will receive complimentary admission to the tour. Contact 510.763.9218 for information or to make reservations, email info@oaklandheritage.org, or visit www.oaklandheritage.org.

  Valerie Garry, MS Historic Preservation
  Vice President, Oakland Heritage Alliance

  for more information: Oakland Heritage Alliance is a non-profit membership organization that advocates the protection, preservation, and revitalization of Oakland’s architectural, historic, cultural and natural resources though education and action.

  For 2006 summer walking tour and fall house tour information, contact: Oakland Heritage Alliance: 446 17th Street, Suite 301 / Oakland, CA 94612, or send us email or call 510.763.9218.

• Forest Hills Gardens: an American Planned Community

  
  Situated on the edge of New York City’s borough of Queens, Forest Hills Gardens is probably the most successful – and best known – example of an English planned garden community in the United States. Originally built as a commuter suburb – even in 1915, just six years after its construction, it was less than 15 minutes from Manhattan’s Penn Station by rail – the community was originally planned and built by the Russell Sage Foundation and Cord-Meyer Development Co. beginning in 1909. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the father of landscape architecture and a great craftsman and technician in his own right, collaborated with architect Grosvenor Atterbury to make a community that worked both internally and as part of the world-class city they both realized New York would soon grow into.

  This thriving community still offers a lush, green and very much park-like escape for several thousand residents, and suggests solutions for our conflict between limiting sprawl and creating living, working, and above all livable communities. Forest Hills Gardens was home to many visionaries of the time, including Frederic Goudy, one of the foremost typeface and graphic designers of the age and an important figure in the American Arts & Crafts Movement. Goudy even published a monograph in 1915 detailing his own family’s many reasons for relocating to the community; unfortunately, the book has not been reprinted, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a copy today. Gustav Stickley’s own magazine, The Craftsman, also featured articles and drawings on the community in 1911.

  Susan Klaus has written a terrific book on Olmsted’s relationship to the community, focusing on the planning of the community and with many illustrations of its history to the present. It’s worth a read if you are interested in planned communities in general and how the Arts & Crafts Ideal can be applied to so much more than simply architectural design. Additional photographs of and articles on the community are available online.

• New York Times: Far Rockaway Bungalows Under Siege

  Corey Kilgannon reports on the relentless sublimation of all that is old and/or unique, this time the destruction of the beach bungalows lining the path to Far Rockaway Beach in New York:

  Richard George lives in a charming little beach bungalow just off
  the ocean on the eastern end of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.

  Like
  the homes of his neighbors, his small, three-bedroom shack is cooled by
  the salty breeze and surrounded by wildflowers and the sandy walkways
  leading to other lovely old wooden homes that form a beach colony,
  parts of which look more like Fire Island than New York City.

  Mr.
  George’s home on Beach 24th Street has cotton bedspreads, quaint
  tablecloths and kitschy artwork. But don’t be fooled by the
  surroundings: it’s really a war bunker from which he defends his
  ever-shrinking seaside neighborhood.

  At the table in his
  galley-size kitchen, he assembles legal briefs used to sue developers
  and city agencies to ward off efforts to demolish the bungalows for
  newer, bigger housing.

  Back when the Rockaways was still a
  popular ocean resort for New Yorkers, these bungalows were abundant,
  with many built in the 1920’s. Groucho Marx is said to have invested in
  24 of them. Now the largest remaining patch of the historic shacks are
  the roughly 120 that line three city blocks leading to the dunes in Far
  Rockaway.

  With each passing year, more of the bungalows along
  Beach 24th, 25th and 26th Streets between Seagirt Boulevard and the
  boardwalk are demolished by developers building new housing. So far,
  Mr. George has not been able to get the city to declare the bungalows,
  many of which are abandoned, landmarks. So he fights local development
  by filing lawsuits claiming that the projects violate federal coastal
  regulations by illegally diminishing public access to the waterfront.

   
     

  Read the complete article online at nytimes.com.

• TurnHere Brings Neighborhoods to Video

  TurnHere ("short films – cool places") is a well-organized library of short video snapshots of residential neighborhoods around the world, mostly shot and narrated by the people who live there. This would be the perfect tool for real estate agents – especially those who handle lots of corporate inter-city relocations – to help their clients pick where they want to concentrate a property search. It’s also a great way for real estate voyeurs like us to peek into neighborhoods throughout our country and the rest of the world.

  Here’s Albany, California, where I grew up; one of my dad’s favorite restaurants; and my wife’s favorite deli. Pasadena has several films, including one that touches on the Gamble House; you can poke through almost every San Francisco neighborhood in a few dozen short bites, and even take a walk through downtown Santa Barbara – a town with some of the nicest bungalow-full neighborhoods on the west coast.

  It’d be great to get more architecture-centric tours – maybe video versions of your own home town’s historic home tours? – up on the site. Every film on the site was shot and edited by volunteers, though, so there’s certainly plenty of room to contribute an architectural tour of your favorite bungalow neighborhood.

• Missouri Bungalows

  I live in Sacramento, California where a well-built and maintained vintage Craftsman home in one of the older, tree-lined neighborhoods of Midtown runs at quite a premium. I grew up in Berkeley, California, where such houses are even more in demand and real estate costs are so high that dual-earner families must often come close to indenturing themselves or selling off a child to afford a home. However, there are parts of the country where beautiful homes are affordable: for example, this beautiful home, 632 Bonton St. in the charming town of St. Joseph, Missouri, is for sale for $120,000, which makes me shiver when I consider what I paid for my smaller and plainer Mission Revival home. The Bonton house has some unique features, such as this sort of Craftsman / Queen Anne facade with a recessed dormer, an inglenook and a beautiful tiled fireplace, a second fireplace in a formal parlor, a second-floor sleeping porch, sliding pocket doors, and some great internal woodwork. I wonder if I could telecommute from St. Joseph?

• Palo Alto Stanford Heritage

  PAST (Palo Alto Stanford Heritage) might have worked a little hard on their acronym, but the rest of their energy is even better placed: they are constantly trying to bring attention to Palo Alto’s quickly-vanishing historical heritage, as more and more university-related big money renovates, destroys and builds over the historical homes of the area. As of 1997, a huge number of historic homes in Palo Alto’s historic neighborhoods of College Terrace, Crescent Park and Professorville (what a name!) had been either drastically remodeled or torn down to make room for new development. Palo Alto’s city government has never been nearly as interested in large-scale restoration or conservation of its historic architectural heritage, which is unfortunate; a lot of really beautiful buildings have been lost.