Many popular houses in 1920s L.A. were part of a scam | Hacker News Reader

Many popular houses in 1920s L.A. were part of a scam

atlasobscura.com

86 pointsvo2maxer49 comments

Well Griffith Park and Observatory are named after someone who shot his wife in the face and spent less than two years in San Quentin. LA was the wild west not that long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffith_J._Griffith

LA named it Griffith Park years before the shooting, which was from his wife and him donating the land. but curiously it seems the theater and observatory were named for him years after the shooting. Strange world

IIRC, they refused when he was alive. But his will left a good chunk of his fortune to the city under the condition they build on the land in his name. The construction also lined up with Griffith's son becoming president of the city's parks commission. Not sure what kind of relationship he had with his parents.

The Griffith family also went on to sue the city when they violated their land deals building the Toyon landfill.

That's why you don't name places after living people.

And then ideally wait a hundred years for all the dirt to come out.

Ain’t nobody have time for that.

Could just not name things after people.

I vote for abstract geometric concepts.

Or we accept that all people do good things and bad things, and that a very good thing someone does might inspire others to name a thing after them without any implied endorsement of other bad things that same person has done or will do.

What a terrible person. The way he treated his wife and his son. Hope at least his son got a good education.

I live in Altadena and I see those homes. They don't seem all that bad. By the way, Altadena has nice mountain cold air at night, accompanied by the sound of owls hooting. The night time views of Downtown LA are awesome. So, Altadena gives you country living, and within a 20-minute drive, you can be in Silver Lake, DTLA, or Los Feliz to check out a band or a dinner.

I refuse to believe anything in LA is within a 20 minute drive unless you’re going at 4am.

That place has the wildest traffic!

It's funny how LA traffic in the movies (especially from the 80s and 90s) always looks pretty good. Driving fast through those hills and canyons.

A lot of it is like that if you stay outside downtown.

Or just outside of rush hour.

rush hours*

Kind of like all the car commercials today, they never show people stuck in traffic.

All you need is a long involved permit that lets you block the road for half a day, and you could experience it too!

Those roads are also fast in real life, not a lot of people live out in those more undeveloped canyon parts to generate a ton of traffic. Tons of car and motorcycle clubs race up and down roads in the santa monica mountains and angeles national forest every day. They will actually ride your ass to try and get you to pull over at a scenic overview if you are too slow.

LA is big and has a lot of traffic for sure, but most adjacent neighborhoods can be reached within a 20 min drive. It’s only when you want to go from one side to another that it will take you more than an hour.

yes, a 20 minute drive to an adjacency, we're talking a handful of miles. Beverly Hills to West Hollywood, they are cheek by jowl, and an exhausting drive apart, and so on for every adjacency.

Everywhere in LA is accessible in 20 minutes. That has been a long running statement/joke forever. It’s not untrue; you just have to give yourself an hour.

One of the most unique things about the city of Austin is that it is around 1 hour from Austin.

Go ahead and look at how the freeways are designed. Altadena to Silver Lake in about 20 minutes takes advantage of the fact the 2 is a stub freeway that only gets backed up when some catastrophic car accident happens. Its a huge region and driving across it seems daunting, but hardly anyone does that regularly. Average commutes are 30 minutes about the same as anywhere else. There's enough redundancy within the region where you rarely feel the need to venture out of your little 5-10 mile sphere of influence, since all your boxes are already checked within that bubble. Other cities its more common to be traveling back and forth across town, but there's no need for that here. You hardly need to leave your neighborhood most of the time.

Used to live in Pasadena and I second all this.

> Altadena gives you country living

I grew up about a mile from the rose bowl, and spent many years in sierra madre. I would definitely not call this area country living. I do miss the smell of the chaparral though.

It seems he latched onto a great business opportunity, and if he'd been able to resist scamming people, he could have become very wealthy.

It's kind of amazing isn't it. The guy clearly was very entrepreneurial and capable of talking investors into giving him money. If he'd just followed the rules he probably would have been really successful. Or at least not had to run away every time things failed.

Sounds like a number of recent disasters too, no?

It's a common story. If he had succeeded, because he had gotten somewhat further with the public infrastructure and avoiding bad luck like the rains, it would simply be some 'colorful anecdotes' in his biography. Success redeems all, while if you fail, everyone knew all along that it was 'obvious'.

I was expecting these to be shoddily built (like the Sudden Valley show home on Arrested Development) but not so:

> “Well built but not overbuilt” is how former resident Zac Matthews describes them. “Janes actually used good materials like oversized redwood rafters,”

FTA:

> “‘Nothing Down’ Plan Proves Undoing of Landowner,” read one headline in The Honolulu Advertiser. Turns out those who couldn’t afford a down payment couldn’t keep up with monthly ones either.

Imagine that.

Yet the federal US government subsidizes 0% down mortgages:

https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/single-family-hous...

>The Section 502 Guaranteed Loan Program assists approved lenders in providing low- and moderate-income households the opportunity to own adequate, modest, decent, safe and sanitary dwellings as their primary residence in eligible rural areas. Eligible applicants may purchase, build, rehabilitate, improve or relocate a dwelling in an eligible rural area with 100% financing. The program provides a 90% loan note guarantee to approved lenders in order to reduce the risk of extending 100% loans to eligible rural homebuyers – so no money down for those who qualify!

https://www.va.gov/housing-assistance/home-loans/

>For example, nearly 90% of VA-backed loans are made with no down payment.

Not far off are 3.5% down payment mortgages:

https://www.hud.gov/buying/loans

The VA-backed loans are a benefit for joining the military. It's not exactly charity, but they certainly aren't doing it because it's a good financial investment.

It's actually quite hard to get a low/no money down mortgage, even with those programs, there are limits to the total price of the house, for example.

None of it is charity to (newer) homeowners. If it was, they would just give people cash. It is a subsidy to people who already own property, by creating a greater supply of buyers who can pay more.

Altadena still doesn't have sidewalks. Now I know how the pattern started!

That home in the last picture is a lot prettier than the McMansions that gets built these days.

If only all modern houses in US were designed as well as this.

Be thankful: most homes in Texas have all of the architectural design sense of Microsoft c. 1985.

The core issue is the permitting processes are missing design and aesthetics reviews and approvals. Instead, they're intent on keeping people like Bill Maher from using solar power.

Damn, building homes fast and loose like that would probably solve our housing crisis, unfortunately no politician would allow for that

What’s really needed is an end to zoning. It’s absurd that bunch of houses built when LA had a fraction of its current population are still standing, when the free market should have replaced them with higher density housing decades ago.

> steep Coldswold-inspired roofs

Cotswold

Honestly, I don't see the appeal. Most Eichlers have a more serene feel to them.

Interestingly, there are many more Eichlers (and lookalikes) than listed on the Wikipedia page. For example, there's a development in Woodland, CA (NorCal).

"Today the average price of an original (but modernized) E. P. Janes home is around $1 million, even with only one bathroom due to the small footprint."

$1M 1-bathroom home? Just another day that ends in Y in CA.

At the peak of construction, Levitt was building one house every 16 minutes. Each house cost around $8,000, a price that was reduced to about $400 with GI bill benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown Soldiers coming back after WW2 could get a house for 400$. And it had 2 bathrooms

Not all soldiers:

    African American GIs, who served with honor in World War II, could work on Levittown construction crews but could not join the hordes of people pressing into Levittown rental and sales offices.

This was very much the root of one of the great economic divisons in modern US times .. the post WWII boom and generational multiplying effects were segregated.

https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/installati...

Those homes are half a million today per zillow. Much better appreciation than the Altadena homes, 7 fold thereabouts.

My grandfather was a WWII, Korea, and Vietnam vet with the GI Bill. In 1968, there was no housing discount, only low interest loans. Their house cost $10k then and sold for $2.1m in 2018. I have the original copies of the deeds and of their loan.

Multiple bathrooms in houses is a relatively modern thing. And it's the sort of thing that's often hard to retrofit. So houses that are otherwise desirable may otherwise be short of bathrooms by modern standards.

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