Photo-D.O.P.-T.

[weofodthignen]

This pleasantly bucolic corner—two prickly pears, two grapefruit trees, and a little renthouse tucked at the far end under trees—has been replaced by this two-storey double house. The neighbours at the back got a new fence in exchange for having the thing peer down at them.




Meanwhile this building job is finally coming to an end. This massive, albeit interesting house is infill on what had been a wildflower meadow with a split-rail fence. The original house is the tiny brown-painted one-front, one-back visible beside it, behind the porta-potty. (The residents used to park a travel trailer in the driveway; I think it doubled the living space.)

Comments

[altrinc]

Yuk. The first one is almost OK but the second is massive over-development, built almost up to the edge of the pavement/sidewalk. Shame about the loss of the wildflower meadow. It seems the land values are so high that no one wants a yard or garden. All this building will only escalate the increasing temperatures in the neighbourhood.

[weofodthignen]

Gardens are indeed out of fashion; people either replace them with xeriscaping and then fail to maintain it (huge native grasses and California poppies emerge, even ailanthus saplings), or they put in an "outdoor room" and pretty much never use the seating. To be fair, this area has a lot of very hardworking single professionals and at least here near the park, an unusual number of young families, and the families do like to have either lawn or fake grass. Some of the 3- and 4-bedroom tract houses in the neighbourhood are being used almost exactly as they were originally intended, including front and back gardens being used for play (the local wealth means big net-enclosed trampolines in front and glimpses of elaborate skateboard structures through side fences). On the other hand one local has managed to line their back garden with solar panels. From what I read, they probably had to kidnap a PG&E exec's firstborn to get them permitted and connected.

But the main explanation is that the state has been panicking for a couple of decades about a housing crunch, and there have been a series of laws passed to alleviate it. Among them, it's now very hard to deny developers who want to build apartments, especially near transit, and what affects this neighbourhood, it's almost impossible to deny an ADU. They're sprouting behind house after house—like the one rising across from our kitchen window—and new builds are laid out so they can be divided or combined as preferred, and dual numbered like the first one here. (The old unchanged number is behind the little tree.) The real shortage of course is affordable housing, but there's such high demand here, from people with so much money, that big houses sell, whether to wealthy, sometimes multi-generational families or to big groups of housemates, and the existing affordable housing stock is rapidly disappearing.

It remains to be seen whether the unfinished house will be dual-numbered, but I've always assumed the reason that patch of land was left alone was it was too small to be legally built on. As this house demonstrates. There may have been another little cabin on it at one time; they were built for seasonal fruit-pickers and sometimes in twos and threes. I don't know what its legal status was, whether it went with the cabin, which I believe was a rental, but the landlord didn't allow it to be used by the tenants, or whether somebody recently bought it and united them. But since black plastic had been spread there, it grew a short meadow that was the greenest "lawn" in the vicinity '-)