Editor’s Notebook -- S.J. Cahn

Ah, the tear-down. The quintessential piece of Southern California

real estate, the little ramshackled, falling-apart home that’s worth a

couple million dollars.

Well, the home’s not really worth anything. But the land -- oh, the

land -- is worth a little something, especially once a three-story, giant

box of a home is plopped down where that “tear-down” once so cutely

stood.

It’s a phenomena that’s come to be called “mansionization,” and it’s

striking beach communities all across Southern California. It’s certainly

happening up and down Laguna’s coastline.

And folks are getting mad, mad, mad about it. Here -- in a community

of Design Review Boards and historic homes -- residents are up in arms

enough to want the City Council to put restrictions on just how big, how

space-consuming, new homes can be.

What I’m trying to figure out is just why, all of a sudden, everyone

is talking about it. Has it intensified that much? It certainly seems

like it is far from a new trend.

I remember the first mansion on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, where I

grew up: late ‘70s, just a year or two after I’d become an avid beach

rat, along with all my friends and our somewhat reluctant mothers.

Suddenly, the metal framework was there, looming like the prow of a

battleship over the beach.

It stayed that way for months and months -- work wasn’t done at the

quick pace you find today. So we had a while to get used to what was

clearly going to be a windowed monstrosity.

We never really did. And today, that first mansion is just one of many

that line the beach, much as they do on the peninsula. It’s nothing

special. In fact, you can almost imagine someone taking a look at it and

thinking, “Well, if we tore it down . . .”

(If you’re ever walking the Strand, it’s the house on the north corner

of 19th Street. Huge, tinted windows. And after many color schemes, it’s

just plain gray.)

Having lived through this phenomena, it’s easy to understand why

“mansionization” has people frothing. In Manhattan, as on the hills above

downtown Laguna and all along Pacific Coast Highway, the very nature of

the community has changed. Now it’s the small, original beach cottages

that are few and far between, that stand out in their puniness.

Instead of frontyards (yet alone backyards), people have sealed

themselves inside the most square feet of home they can. As a result, you

see a lot of kids’ play rooms, since there isn’t a yard for them to play

in.

What’s been lost, I think, is not only the feel of the old beach

communities -- that relaxed, slowed-down evening barbecue sense -- but

the very community, itself. Neighbors waving to neighbors. Kids playing

on the beach in huge, swarming groups. Pauses in walks to talk to someone

you know, just a little bit.

Now people live in impregnable fortresses, lined up one against the

next. It’s a harsh, sterile world.

It’s not the world I grew up in.

I’m exceedingly glad that I’m not one of our city leaders who will be

wrestling with this issue in the coming weeks, months -- years, I

suspect. People who can afford to, have a right to build the home of

their dreams.

But what do you do when that dream crashes irrevocably against the

wishes of neighbors?

I’ll be interested to see what our leaders decide.

What I dread seeing is how this trend will -- hmm, I think I can write

this literally -- hit home. At some point, the house I grew up in and

where my parents still live, the house that was once among the biggest on

20th Street but has for a decade been a tear-down, will make way for a

mansion.

I don’t see any other end to it.

* S.J. Cahn is the managing editor. He can be reached at (949)

574-4233 or by e-mail at o7 steven.cahn@latimes.comf7 .