Letters to the Editor: I’m not a NIMBY, but new apartment buildings pose serious concerns
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- A Studio City resident raises concerns about a five-story apartment building planned behind their home, citing inadequate parking and potential impacts to residential neighborhoods already dealing with limited street parking.
- Current L.A. zoning laws permit developments of up to 11 stories tall — far exceeding the three-story example cited in recent debate — to be placed adjacent to single-family homes, though major corridors could accommodate such density.
- The concerns underscore a core question facing L.A.: how to balance the city’s critical need for housing density with quality-of-life impacts on existing residential neighborhoods.
To the editor: I am not a NIMBY. I agree that we need more affordable housing in L.A. Deputy managing editor Shelby Grad says he doesn’t know how he would feel if the city proposed building the apartment he described on his block today (“I was a NIMBY. Then my mother got sick and I needed my neighbors,” May 7).
Well, I can tell him how he might feel.
A five-story apartment building with no parking is slated to go up just a few feet behind my family’s house. Our issue has nothing to do with who might end up living there — it’s the sheer size of the building and the fact that we will have hundreds of additional cars now jockeying for already limited parking space on our street. It is unquestionably affecting our “quality of life.”
What Grad does not mention is the fact that many of the apartments currently being proposed and built in L.A. are not three stories, as is the building he uses as an example in his piece; they are up to 11 stories tall. In my part of L.A., there’s room for developments of this size on major corridors, which would make sense — but the current laws allow developers to put them immediately adjacent to single-family homes.
As for the ultimately positive experience Grad and his sick mother had with his apartment-dwelling neighbors: an immediate family member living in my home is dealing with a serious, incurable medical diagnosis and its daily consequences. We at least took comfort in knowing that we had made a home that gave us peace and privacy in which we planned to live for the rest of our lives. We no longer have that comfort.
Darcy Wilding, Studio City
