Our Little Two-Car Garage Project
by Tony Chavira
One of my jobs is working in program development and marketing for my father’s architecture firm in downtown Los Angeles. RACAIA specializes in corporate architecture and interiors for clients like the California Institute of Technology, the Bank of the West, Kaiser Permanente, the Hillstone Restaurant Group, and Chevron Energy Solutions. My dad has been working as a board-certified architect for almost 30 years now, and has done corporate headquarters for MGM Studios, Warner Brothers, ARCO, and the Metropolitan Water District, to name a few. He’s always believed in putting more than the architect’s due diligence into a project, and this became especially problematic when we took on a single-family home project in El Sereno. Once he got fed up with the way that a project manager in our office was being treated by the Building Department in Los Angeles, he decided to get involved himself.
Mildly edited, here’s my Dad’s take on the inconsistencies in vision, policies and support in the City of Los Angeles’s network of bureaucracy.
This is a tale of dealing with the West L.A. Building Department. A project in El Sereno requiring us to go to the West L.A. Building Department is entirely due to a decision made by the Metro LADBS (Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety).
So back to West L.A. To begin, the backroom supervisor wanted to help our project. He approved our drawings and our request to maintain an existing garage space on the lot. Not terrible, except that the main use would have required that it be demolished, even if “the existing garage complies with all zoning regulations.” A strange contradiction.
Let’s back up and give you some preface. A few years ago, an affidavit was obtained by our office and approved with the City of Los Angeles to maintain an existing garage that was engineered and permitted in the 1990s while the existing house was demolished. The house was built in the 1940s and had foundation separations. It was a hazard to the community, with constant complaints about loitering and neighborhood vandalism based from the vacant house.
The owner’s timeframe to build a new house was eclipsed due to the economy and high prices for construction, which isn’t uncommon. When I met recently with the backroom supervisor, it was smugly stated to me that he would now not approve the original modification and that the garage would need to be torn down and moved three feet back into the hillside, to comply with today’s hillside setback requirements. Why does this ordinance now exist? Why will all new buildings require a three-foot setback from the curb? This is a car culture, and it’s not going to change. They were asking us to move an entire garage three feet in a historical neighborhood for the future of vehicle access.
So we asked to speak to his supervisor. Let’s call him “Joe.” Move up the chain of command, just as I had been asked to do by the Metro LADBS in a prior visit there. With me going right over him, the backroom supervisor was not a very happy camper. Joe was amicable, but I did have to wait quite a while before they both came out from the back room. Joe stated that if I were to get the exemption approved at Metro LADBS, he would happily sign the extension. Being the ping pong ball that I am, I went to the Metro building department downtown and met with them once again. Unsurprisingly, I learned per a conversation with Joe and the backroom supervisor that Metro and West L.A. do not review or make comments on each others’ drawings. So I was back to West L.A.
In discussing the issue of our little two-car garage (a perfectly good structure) with others I’ve met in planning, zoning, and the building department, I found it is not uncommon to extend this kind of modification at all. And what a waste of money it would be to build a new garage in roughly the same location, especially when Metro LADBS had technically approved it before!
This time I wrote a letter to the Big Boss, the head of West LADBS, requesting a meeting to discuss my puny garage project. Obviously our project is not significant to them in any way, so I was passed back down and received the Dear John letter. “Big Boss wants to help your project ...” Signed by Joe.
I was dismayed. It was clear that a discretionary decision could have sufficed just as easily as writing a letter of rejection. By the book is just one way to look at life, I guess.
But common sense is lacking in West L.A.’s approach if they “want to help your project,” a LADBS theme. There’s no doubt in my mind that there are many other instances where this type of ambivalence has occurred. It is easy for individuals (or their requests) to get lost when they try to weave their way through bureaucracy to make some sense of it all.
The lesson of common sense and common trust is lost on some public officials.
After all, our little two-car garage is about trying to figure out something simple: “For a client building their home on a limited budget, what is the right thing to do?”
tony@fourstory.org
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