Faced with a housing shortage, Los Angeles once had a solution. From the San Fernando Valley to Culver City to La Cienega Heights, developers in the 1950s and ’60s tore down thousands of older buildings and filled in virtually every square foot with aggressively economical two- or three-story apartment complexes — known locally as dingbats.
Subdivided into as many units as the lots could accommodate — usually between 6 and 12 — most of these stucco boxes left little room outdoors, except for an exposed carport slung beneath the second floor. This new format for affordable multifamily living became nearly as ubiquitous as the single-family tract housing that iconified the much-mythologized Southern California suburban lifestyle.1
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“They were this perfect confluence of the need to build increased density in established neighborhoods while also housing your car,” said Adrian Scott Fine, senior director of advocacy at the Los Angeles Conservancy. “They were affordable to a lot of people who couldn’t buy their first house yet or were waiting to be discovered as actors. It was housing for where you start, but hopefully not where you end.”
Today, dingbats remain a bastion of relatively affordable shelter in a city where more than 57% of renters were considered cost-burdened as of 2017 and new housing construction has slowed to a trickle. Their age means that many units are rent-stabilized, and their less-than-camera-ready appearances limit prices to some extent. Life inside a dingbat (like the one in which the author lived circa 2013) is still often characterized by stuffiness, street noise and overheard voices; during earthquakes, there’s an unsettling amount of shaking, thanks to the soft-story carport construction. (That said, dingbats have seen a wave of recent retrofits with strengthened seismic codes).
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- 1. British architecture critic Reyner Banham popularized the term, which both captures the buildings’ somewhat addled appearance and riffs on the ornamental glyphs used by typesetters. But dingbats did provide an essential resource for a growing city: Los Angeles County added more than three million residents between 1940 and 1960, thanks to job booms in manufacturing and aerospace, educational opportunities for returning GIs, and the lure of year-round sunshine. Construction raced to keep up, with more than 700,000 housing units built countywide in the 1950s. New highways allowed much of this growth to sprawl into the suburbs: Vast numbers of cookie-cutter homes replaced citrus groves and ranchlands, sold as one’s own little slice of Elysian movieland, complete with driveway and pool.
