From the Publisher/Arnold York
Over the years, ever since we rebuilt our house after the 1993 fire, Karen has had a yearning to build another house. So we’ve been playing with the fantasy of selling the house and buying a fixer upper or a vacant lot and building again. I say we, but that is the imperial we, because the truth is, it’s highly doubtful you’ll ever catch me out there with a hammer and nails. Nevertheless, if we want to build a house, we are going to build a house.
Recently, we looked at a 1-acre plus lot here in Malibu, in a canyon, with beautiful trees long since neglected and an old, run-down, 1,600 or so square foot 1950s house. It has a kitchen straight out of the “Donna Reed” show for those of you old enough to remember.
The uniform for this kitchen would definitely be a poodle skirt with several crinolines underneath, and about the only thing you could do with the entire house is tear it down and start over.
Trickling through the center of the property is a little stream, bucolic and gurgling. To some, a bubbling brook may be pure Malibu, but to me, seeing a stream means only one thing-an ESHA (environmentally sensitive habitat area). Finding an ESHA on your property is roughly equivalent to walking your lot and finding that a fire-breathing dragon lives in the middle. Except the dragon is probably preferable to an ESHA because chances are the dragon is going to be more reasonable than the California Coastal Commission and the sequence of other agencies protecting the trees, streams, fish, the potential fish, the animal transit zone and whatever else is out there.
Then there is the about-to-be LCP (Local Coastal Program), which, if it passes as presently proposed, will impact this little lot and house in a number of ways.
The owner wants to sell the lot now. But a 1-acre lot on which you could build a 5,000-6,000 square foot house is worth infinitely more than one where the most you can get is perhaps 1,700 or 1,800 square feet (old size plus 10 percent), which, I’m told, may be the case if the new LCP passes.
Real estate brokers are in a terrible dilemma because no one can be certain with this new, very overreaching LCP just what the language means and how hard it will be enforced and what the courts are going to do with it. Executive Director Peter Douglas and Chuck Damm of the Coastal Commission have been out telling us we’re overreacting, but would you be willing to risk a million or so on the good intentions of the Coastal Commission? The brokers are going to have to disclose everything and promise absolutely nothing, and insist you bring in your own experts for everything.
The city is put in a terrible spot because if this passes, it will be expected to enforce the new rules. As people begin to realize the havoc the rules are causing, they’re going to sue.
If the propossed LCP passes, we’re going to end up in a situation where the city might have to defend a set of rules it opposed-rules it believes are totally inappropriate for our community-or risk being sued itself by the Coastal Commission, the Sierra Club and a host of other nonprofits that are in the litigation business. The homeowners, of course, are going to sue everyone when they see a lifetime of value significantly erased with one stroke of the pen, because they’re going to find it hard to understand why their neighbors can have larger newer houses in the same area and they can’t.
Back to that little house. The lot and the setting are beautiful, but have been sorely neglected. The trees need major cutting, pruning and replanting to make them healthy and beautiful again; however, it’s highly doubtful you could do that under the proposed rules. Perhaps if you hire an arborist, who stands by every day during construction, and you get all the permits, do all the studies and you plant only native drought-resistant plants (lord knows what that means in the context of greenery along the stream), you might just be able to clean it up, if you don’t go bankrupt first.
So what can you do?
I suspect that you pretty much are going to be left buying and selling things as is for a while, a long while, as the cases make their way through the courts. Of course, if you already have a newer existing house, it’s probably going to be worth more. But one thing is for sure-this plan is going to make life more difficult and expensive for most of us. As for us personally, we finally just decided that we don’t need this aggravation because we probably don’t have enough years left on this planet to ever get all the paperwork finished in time.