Former KCRW host Frances Anderton discusses LA housing in book ‘Common Ground’
The writer and radio host aims to change the perception that an apartment is just a temporary stop before purchasing a single-family home.
From bungalow courts to granny flats, Los Angeles has a rich, and under-explored, history of multifamily housing. In her recently published book, “Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles,” journalist Frances Anderton shines the spotlight on the architecturally eclectic mix of buildings that so many Angelenos have called home.
Anderton aims to change the perception that in Los Angeles an apartment is just a temporary stop before purchasing a single-family home. She points out that even “Melrose Place,” the 1990s evening soap opera that was a hit around the time Anderton arrived in L.A., focused on apartment life as something for the young.
“It was full of young, beautiful people in their 20s partying, and you didn’t have older families,” she recalls during a recent phone interview. “It was very much modeling that kind of lifestyle as a cool thing you did in your 20s. And then it didn’t really show what happened next, but the implication was that you wouldn’t really live there forever.”
Anderton, though, chose apartment living. Specifically, she settled into a Frank Gehry-designed building in Santa Monica. “The apartment that I moved into was an incredibly comfortable and satisfying place to live, just very well planned and arranged in a way that had lots of natural light. The light was really gorgeous,” she says. “I had access to my own personal space, a balcony. Also, the building was configured in a way where there was a real sense of connection with my neighbors. We all shared the same external staircase.”
Years later, after the birth of her daughter, Anderton and her husband considered buying a house. “Even if we had been able to buy a place, we would have had to move from where we were living,” says Anderton, who readers might recognize from “DnA: Design and Architecture,” the KCRW show she hosted from 2002 until 2020. “Where I lived was very near where I worked and it was in the public school district that she was in and it was a very good, convenient lifestyle that we were having coupled with the fact that the apartment was so great to live in.”
Anderton and her family ultimately moved to a larger apartment in the same building, a decision, she notes, wouldn’t be unusual in so many other parts of the world. “In many other cities, one wouldn’t have even thought of that because that’s how people live,” she says. “But in L.A., there’s such an intense pressure to buy the single-family home and to not raise a family in an apartment. I became acutely aware of how I hadn’t met social expectations.”
In “Common Ground,” Anderton shares her own story while exploring the architectural movements, political decisions and social experiments that shaped the region’s multifamily residential landscape. While pointing out the many practical reasons for renting an apartment, there are also drawbacks, which Anderton acknowledges. “I could not be Pollyanna-ish about the wonderful life of living in apartments without acknowledging that it’s only wonderful if it’s tied to rental stability and some sense of agency over your own environment,” she says.
Anderton also notes that rental stability might be a reason for the amount of Santa Monica and West Hollywood buildings in the book. “Their recent politics have been built upon the rental struggles of the 1980s,” she says. “They have both been relatively supportive of affordable housing and they both have strong design reviews, so they emphasize good design in new multifamily buildings.”
She also highlights residences such as the sustainability-minded cooperative housing community L.A. Eco-Village and movements like the one towards low-rise multifamily housing made possible through the legalization of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), also known as granny flats, all of which provide examples of possible solutions for L.A.’s housing crisis.
In many ways, “Common Ground” is a conversation starter that might prompt people to rethink how they view L.A. life. Anderton notes that she’s encountered plenty of people who love their apartments until they start thinking about kids or future retirement funds.
“Before you know it, they’re looking for the single-family home and, in a way, repeating old patterns that really don’t really fit with the LA of today,” she says, “because now, to achieve that lifestyle, you’ve probably got to go and live somewhere miles from where you work and you’re going to be paying just such a massive chunk of change, to have that lifestyle.”
And that option isn’t a practical or sustainable one for many people. “I think we’ve got to focus on what is the viable option for the majority of people and, if the viable option for the majority of people is some form of multifamily living, let’s look at what the legacy is,” says Anderton.
“Let’s make it the best that it can be. Let’s celebrate it.”