Building a more beautiful L.A. in an age of ugliness

In the last five years, California has prudently upzoned big parts of its cities, particularly by unlocking multi-family housing in single-family zones with major transit stops. This kind of “transit-oriented development” is uniquely virtuous in allowing us to tackle homelessness, rent burden and climate change simultaneously.

But while the state has told cities “you need to allow more of this housing,” it hasn’t given them a clear playbook for what that new growth should look and feel like.

The people of L.A. have our own views on what a beautiful building looks like. We drive our friends and visitors around Hancock Park and Beverly Hills to openly gawk — or walk them around the grand, revivalist Bradbury Building with its gorgeous facade.

When it comes to housing, Los Angeles’ old-and-owned housing retains its charm. But development defaults for new, multifamily rental housing are generally depressing. In an age of unprecedented wealth and technical prowess, an astonishing share of what L.A. builds today looks and feels utterly soulless. Think big white boxes with stepbacks, pop-outs, jagged rooflines and plane changes, all designed to make new development look small.

These buildings may perform admirably by commercial standards, but they don’t register positively in the human heart or the civic consciousness. Yes, it’s housing, serving its residents. But it’s not serving the street.

The people shaping our urban form have other priorities beyond aesthetics. Developers rightly complain that excessive building costs leave them little financial or mental bandwidth for appearances. Our city’s design standards focus on function — with form following — rather than beauty, with guidelines emphasizing pedestrian, environmental and community benefits and encouraging conformity. And something about the proliferation of the mid-rise “5 over 1,” an L.A. invention that combines 5 stories of residential use with a single story of retail, seems to have standardized the looks of mid-rise multifamily development around a baseline of mediocrity.

We are living in the consequences of this banality. Historic buildings are treated with increasing cultural and policy reverence while Americans gaze longingly at the stone and tile veneers of places like Portugal and Iran. Political opposition grows against new housing, especially when it smacks of the “gentrification building,” a powerful but apocryphal meme that actually captures the drab look of both new luxury housing and new affordable housing.

The fervent opposition to ugly suggests that beauty is not icing on the cake. When every new building feels hostile to the street, the public says: keep your growth, your climate goals, your housing affordability. As we prepare to build much new housing under state law, Los Angeles has a mandate: ensure that what’s new is beautiful.

Civics culture is, to some degree, literally built. The “broken windows” theory of urbanism — while disputed in its implications for law enforcement — should at least teach us that the look of a place influences how we engage with it. Beauty is part of how a city shows respect. If a street is beautiful, most of us will feel some subconscious instinct to respect it back.

Perhaps more urgently, more beautiful buildings would also be good politics. New research from professors David Broockman at UC Berkeley, Christopher Elmendorf at UC Davis and Josh Kalla at Yale confirms that the look of a building greatly matters to how it’s received.

In a test of hypothetical developments, the group found that people are “extremely sensitive to [aesthetics], being far less likely to support allowing the building if the design appeared ugly rather than pretty.” Beyond just attractive and artistic qualities, the group found that height and neighborhood continuity matter. The findings echo work from the writer Virginia Postrel suggesting that, since the turn of the century, Americans have grown more invested in aesthetics both personal and commercial. Motivating support for new housing means designing something that moves people. Down with the interchangeable modern box!

Darrell Owens, who authors The Discourse Lounge, an urbanist Substack about housing and the Bay Area, shows this pleasure principle at work in Berkeley. More expressive, often revivalist design proposals tend to charm the average person (the “housing-agnostic voter,” we might call them) and win grudging appreciation even from detractors. Public support becomes more obvious and dominant once the thing is built. The average resident of Berkeley, for example, now considers the downtown Trader Joe’s, with its stories of housing above and neo-classical look, to be “an iconic symbol” of the neighborhood.

L.A. could learn a lot from Berkeley’s experience, such as by adding an “ornamental facade alternative” to the design standards that guide streamlined development (known as the Objective Design Standards). States, cities or even neighborhoods could create “pattern books” that save developers cost and spare them the guessing game by offering preapproved designs, as New South Wales in Australia has done and as many California cities already do for backyard units. New materials and methods, including timber-based and manufactured housing, can also unlock fresh aesthetics. Our state and local building codes will need to keep up, encouraging innovation and revisiting low-value requirements pertaining to double staircases and elevators.

Of course, the line between an intervention to improve development and an intervention to stop development has always been murky. Not all opposition to housing is argued in good faith. If design requirements or preapproved designs require rare or expensive flourishes without equivalent offsets, they’ll fall on the wrong side of that line.

Still, we should try. Beauty cannot be considered a bourgeois indulgence. It is a demand from our city and it is a calling; we know that to live in a beautiful city will bring out the best in us. People’s experience of their streets and buildings — what they walk past, what they see from their car or bus stop — affects them. A city’s thoughtful, humane, dignified urban form recognizes their own dignity, humanity and capacity.

Ed Mendoza is a research associate at Metropolitan Abundance Project.

Joshua Seawell is the head of policy at Inclusive Abundance.