Windows into a whole new world

The changes had been noticeable around town, if anyone was really paying attention, for a couple of years. Mainly you could see it in the windows.

I first remarked on it at the eighth-grade graduation. The newly tall boys slumped into the ceremony to the beat of a wobbly “Pomp and Circumstance,” wearing regulation baggy clothes just barely appropriate for the occasion. The newly curvy girls, though, were eye-openers in sophisticated, strapless garden-party dresses straight from “The Princess Diaries.”

Oh yes, another mom confided later over orange juice, between dress and shoes for the graduation party, and an ensemble for the ceremony, some parents had spent close to $1,000. You know, she added in response to my dropped jaw, there’s a lot of money in Laguna Beach these days, with real estate prices the way they are. (If a house is listed for under $1 million, people ask what’s wrong with it.)

There have always been people with money in Laguna Beach, even in its more modest areas. But this woman is right: There are a lot more of these people now. The real estate boom or bubble (or is it both?) in Southern California has done more than price many first-time buyers out of the market. It is subtly transforming the character of my neighborhood and many others like it.

Of course, look-alike, cost-alike tract houses still predominate in Southern California, and more often than not architecturally homogenous neighborhoods are socioeconomically homogenous too.

Until recently. Houses on my street that went for $400,000 just a few years ago, for instance, are well over $1 million now. Some buyers are simply trading up, but others are first-time buyers managing mortgage payments that make the old-timers gasp. That’s when the delicate financial ecosystem of the neighborhood is thrown off balance.

One way to measure the imbalance is cars. My street, once populated by humble Toyotas and Hondas, is now home to a Saab, a Volvo convertible, an Infiniti SUV. (For a few months, there was even a Mercedes S-class. It looked distinctly out of place among the 1965 ranch houses; maybe that’s why the family moved away soon after.)

More commonly, though, new buyers bring their houses up to the level of their cars. If you’ve bought your house on a $200,000 mortgage, a $100,000 renovation would increase your indebtedness by 50%. But if you’re taking out a million-dollar mortgage, a mere $100,000 to fix up the place is a good investment. The carpet comes off the concrete slab, replaced by distressed cherrywood. Formica gives way to granite. Out pop the aluminum windows, in go Craftsman-style casements. The ivy-covered hillsides are replanted with clumps of lavender dispersed among carefully scattered boulders.

This new landscape can be awkward. For the most part, though, we’re all making friends in our economically diverse corner of suburbia, noticing the little changes out of the corners of our eyes. And just as surely as neighborhood old-timers look in wonder at the new crown moldings in these plain old houses, newcomers probably look around and ask when their neighbors are going to spruce up the place with some taupe paint and eggshell trim.

Me, I’m just waiting for aluminum sliding-glass windows to come back into style. Then I’ll be vintage.

Karin Klein