I hope you are doing well.

Before we get onto Design Things to Do, including the upcoming Los Angeles Design Festival, and an SOS for KCRW, let's take a little journey into the birthplace of waltzes, psychoanalysis… and exemplary low-income homes.

Lessons from “Red Vienna”

Spend time with people concerned about quality of life in Los Angeles these days you might hear references to European models: Danish bicycle paths, for example; the Parisian 15-minute city, Lisbon’s property prices but, most of all, Viennese public housing.

During its radical Rotes Wien, or “Red Vienna,'' period, which lasted from 1919 to 1934, the City of Vienna built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, rehousing around 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, writes Francesca Mari in a lengthy article published last week in the New York Times. They came with community amenities from childcare to swimming pools, and some of the buildings were strikingly Moderne, like the Karl Marx-Hof, designed by city architect Karl Ehn. The program has been maintained and today, more than half of Viennese residents live in this “social housing,” or Gemeindebauten. The homes are available to middle as well as low-income applicants, who can live comfortably on a fixed rent for life.

The NYT article cements Vienna's current role as a poster child for effective housing policy. In recent months more than 100 California planners, elected officials, housing advocates and designers have gone on study tours to Vienna, among them State Senator Scott Wiener, Assemblymember Alex Lee, LA’s Deputy Mayor of Housing Jenna Hornstock, and Mercedes Márquez, Chief of Housing and Homelessness Solutions for Mayor Karen Bass.

The model has even popped up in the least expected of places: The Line –– the 100-mile, mirror-walled, 1600 feet high, linear city for nine million people designed as part of NEOM, a vast new development of cities and resorts in Northwestern Saudi Arabia. Spearheaded by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, NEOM reportedly involves prominent architects including Morphosis, David Adjaye, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bjarke Ingels. Even though The Line feels more like the fever dream of a SCI-Arc professor than the world’s most liveable city, the project's Executive Director of Urban Planning Tarek Qaddumi stated (at a recent pitch to potential investors at Neuehouse Hollywood) that they plan to incorporate social housing inspired by Vienna. “It's not just about equity. It's about social sustainability. This is how cities survive,” said Qaddumi. (More on The Line and its LA connections in a future newsletter.)

The Viennese model (echoed, to varying degrees, in most major European cities) is exemplary, but one wonders about its relevance to Los Angeles today. It was birthed in extraordinary circumstances, following the devastating First World War and the fall of the mighty Habsburg Empire, amidst widespread worker revolt against capitalist excess and terrible housing conditions. It was part of a total approach to city planning that combined efficient mass transit, and public parks, schools and healthcare, and was generally supported by Viennese citizens of all walks of life.

Meanwhile, America took its catalytic events –– the Depression and World War II –– and used them to promote home ownership and suburban living for middle class white people through mortgage insurance and tax deductions, and consigned public housing to the very poor and people of color, creating a racial and class divide through residential options that prevails to this day.

That said, on the heels of Red Vienna, the city of Los Angeles realized thousands of low-income, rental homes. They were built by the public housing authority (HACLA) and by private developers, both with Federal support as part of the New Deal (explored in my book, Common Ground). Designed by talents of the day such as Paul R. Williams, Lloyd Wright, Ralph A. Vaughn and Heth Wharton, Robert Alexander and Richard Neutra, they took the form of low-rise garden apartments on landscaped superblocks, including Channel Heights, Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs and Aliso Village built by HACLA; and Village Green, Park La Brea, Wyvernwood and Lincoln Place among several built by private developers. Residents enjoyed grassy common areas, shared laundries and airy interiors.

Due to various factors including the antipathy to “socialist” housing by homeowners and real estate developers (who themselves enjoyed plentiful government subsidies), the privately owned complexes have tended to fare better over time than the public ones, several of which have been torn down or remodeled. But they stand as testament to a time when LA had its own utopian housing movement. Neutra, incidentally, was a true believer, having moved to America in the early 1920s from, guess where, “Red Vienna.”

So what can Angelenos learn from Vienna’s Gemeindebauten? Perhaps some financial and construction cues for building at scale, on city owned land. Or maybe the lessons are largely inspirational. According to Gerhard Mayer, an Austrian-born architect who co-founded the Livable Communities Initiative (LCI) and helped launch the study trips to Vienna, the city demonstrates that high quality rental housing can be a lifelong choice for mixed economic levels and household sizes. “I think that there are models of urban living and multifamily living that can be appreciated and desired and looked for rather than feared and rejected,” says Mayer. Since these exact themes drove the writing of Common Ground, of course I agree with him, as long as apartment living can offer the stability and financial security of homeownership.

Going Big with Adaptive Reuse

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles many creative designers, developers, financiers, housing advocates and planners are working to crack the nut of delivering well-designed, low-income and missing middle housing via a patchwork of strategies. One of the tools under consideration is the adaptive reuse of existing buildings: defunct office towers, parking structures, mini malls.

In 1999 the City of Los Angeles passed the truly transformative Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which enabled the creation of some 12,000 dwellings in DTLA through converting vacant commercial structures into housing, writes Urbanize LA. These in turn stimulated the construction of thousands of new buildings, making downtown today’s thriving residential neighborhood for people seeking a more urban lifestyle. The main sweetener for developers was eliminating the requirement to provide costly parking.

Currently, only buildings completed before mid-1974 in a few Central Los Angeles neighborhoods have been eligible for conversion. Now the city proposes to expand the ordinance citywide, to all buildings citywide which are at least 15 years old, and even any parking garage that is at least five years old.

ARO 2.0, as it is sometimes referred to, sounds like a no-brainer. Office buildings have historically high vacancy rates of around 26% percent. Housing is desperately needed. Moreover, there are environmental reasons for reusing existing buildings instead of wasting resources. “We have been talking about this ordinance as a means of addressing housing, office vacancy rates and the climate crisis. There is an argument for recycling and reusing existing buildings. The greenest building is the one that is already there,” says Ken Bernstein, Principal City Planner for the Los Angeles Department of City Planning.

But that’s not to say it will be a shoe-in for implementation. It turns out that adapting modern office buildings to homes can be challenging due to their large floor plans that don’t let in natural light to the center of the building, continuous glass walls with no windows, and a need for seismic upgrades. But smart designers can figure out solutions –– as discussed on this Greater LA with Steve Chiotakis, in conversation with me and architect Roberto Vasquez, whose firm Omgivning has been responsible for thousands of loft conversions in DTLA.

If you want to learn more about ARO 2.0, attend these webinars, taking place June 6 through June 8. Check out the draft ordinance here, and a fact sheet here. For updates, sign up here.

Message in a bottle

Coming up next, some Design and Architecture Things to Do this June. Before that, I am going to making a little ask: if you like this newsletter and KCRW's programming, please consider donating to help keep the station afloat. Media outlets are facing challenges these days — and KCRW is no different. So we are putting out an SOS — Save Our Summer. Go to KCRW.com/give –– and be sure to attend our Summer Nights concerts this holiday season.