About This Site

Yes this is a real estate web-site, masquerading as a blog, masquerading as a web-site.  I've deliberately eschewed the emerging web-site standard: pretty slide show, mortgage calculator, a rap sheet of recent sales.  Nor, do I offer a jazzed up bio, full of hand-picked testimonials, and the usual sing song promises: unmatched service, attentive team, a bouquet of flowers on your birthday.  (For something a bit more in this vein, see our brokerage site: www.citylivingrealty.com)

Instead, I offer unburnished opinions, a lot of 'em, probably enough to build a gallows.  Dig through the archives (500 entries divided among 20 topics) and you'll find years of street-level reporting on the urban experience, architecture, and the real estate industry (replete with criticism). 

I write from the perspective of an agent whose chief conviction, and practice, is the promotion and preservation of historic housing stock and neighborhoods, be they mansions in privileged enclaves or humble folk dwellings in the tenderloin.

Additional notes:

*Occasionally, I detail events, vendors, or services.  Never have I received payola for doing so.

*Listings are grouped under Current Listings (in the side bar), though I've often pocket listings that don't show on the site (inquiries welcome).

*The photowork is my own.

Grassin' Grass

Remember when verdant, clean-edged lawns connoted status and neighborhood standing?

Times change.  Water use restrictions and a burgeoning water consciousness are shifting the paradigm.  

The unbroken carpet effect (seen here in Leimert Park) used to signal pride of ownership; now, it translates as sluggish and lacking progresivity, a bit like Humvee drivers in a gas crunch.  

The new world order is even on display in show-boaty Hancock Park, where many a former putting green browns; and elsewhere, as some homeowners, inspired by LADWP turf removal incentives, embrace landscape alternatives.  

The semantic system is finally under attack, pitted by terms like evapotranspiration and soil percolation.  With a crisis looming, 

will morality oblige?

Sub Modern (Part Two)

More International Style homage, with curtain wall wrap-arounds. More ugliness.  Does this building harbor residences, offices, or civic endeavors?  Modernism's extreme formality eschews the value of distinguishability.

But back to the impoverishment of architecture (see Sub Modern Part One), and the alibis of the art agnostics: "It's too expensive to build the old way".

It isn't necessarily "too" expensive, but choicer materials and refined finishes cost more, regardless of style.  Once consumers, the consortiums, civic leaders, university regents, and mom 'n' pop home buyers accepted minimal forms, be they graph paper-y skyscrapers, or the mass produced post-war housing of Levittown, the die was cast.  

Assembly line home building, minimal ersatz, and the machine aesthetic would forever be promoted, the sometimes lesser 

costs hailed; the traditional picturesque dismissed, as impractical, even vulgar.

When did simplicity become a correlate of potency?

Things I Found in September 2009

The good pickins are slimmer of late, surely in part because I've less time, less will to scale the mighty dumpsters, inspect the curb side rubbish, or traffic the forlorn alleys.  

Wiffle ball bat, found in Inglewood.  Handy for impersonations of Al Kaline or Jimmy Rollins.

The margins in my dayplanner are lined with suspension addled 

scrawl, sightings--seldom requited--like, 'pocket door on 36th', or 'demolition near Hooper'.

Painting found in Jefferson Park.  Most of the discarded paintings I find are small still lifes.  In recent years a growing number of exhibits have considered the art of the "intuitive", "outsider", "found", or "anonymous," including even the ephemera unearthings of Chicago based Found Magazine.

Sometimes the ferocity of the demo demands vigilance, common as investors seek to reduce carrying costs with quick turnarounds that favor the installation of new over the rehab of old.

Pivoting, 24", three piece, turn of the century towel bar, rescued (and subsequently re-plated) from front yard debris in East Adams.  Probably the single best hardware find of my recogedor career.

The Real Estate Market October 2009

With the first time home buyer's credit still ablaze and interest rates remaining near historic lows, consumer sights have re-focused on Los Angeles real estate.

Investor participation has resumed as well, targeting single family housing in "starter markets," for conversion to rentals, or to flip.

Nearly all the reporting agencies, agents, escrow officers, data tracking firms, report a souffle-like rise in transactions, prices.

Has the market got its groove back?  If so, this star turn has confounded critics and swamis both, even the smartest guys in the room.

Personally I expect an up-and-down market over the next three 

years; but, of what I'm most confident: unpredictability.  Just as no one foretold this torrid late summer rally, anticipated the magnetism of  the $8,000 tax credit, foresaw the foreclosure moratoriums, and the inventory choking 'controlled release' strategies of the lenders; nor, will the next round of market manipulations be so clairvoyantly divined. 

In other words, the bets are off.