Daily Archives: October 8, 2007

Letter to Belmont Heights Residents On Mansionization Ordinance, Long Beach

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Those of you who are interested in the Belmont Mansionization stir will be interested to go to the Belmont Height Community Association.

The Association has been very active in listening to residents who voiced serious concerns over how many local authentic bungalows had been destroyed making way to big homes, one normally sees in Orange County neighborhoods. One of the problem is that a big home started to sprout on streets filled with quaint bungalows and breaking the Belmont Heights charm. Neighbors were not happy seeing big homes overshadowing theirs. ON the flip side, can anyone tell you what to do or not with your home? Obviously, there needs to be a balance and obviously again, we all live together. No man is an island.

The Association posted an open letter to the community explaining why it has done to represent residents’ concern to the city. You can see it here.

Here are the high lights:

The Neighborhood Preservation Committee has met with city staff and formulated a working plan until a more permanent one.

1. To qualify as a remodel, a homeowner may demolish no more than 30% of the existing structure.
2. Additions or new construction exceeding 800’ sq. must be submitted for a staff site plan review through the City of Long Beach Planning Bureau. Current zoning limitations will remain in place. Site plan review outcomes may be appealed to the Planning Commission.
3. Demolition requests must be accompanied by building plans.
4. Site plans submitted to staff must include a written project description that includes the proposed design’s concepts and materials, and photographs or graphs that depict the relationship of the home to the character of the neighborhood.
5. Timely notice shall be sent to the BHCA for all site plans submitted to staff. Comments provided to city staff by BHCA shall be considered but are not binding.

One thing I would like to see added to this and not just for the Heights but in general is to have the city follow through on projects. Too many times a plan will be given, approved but not carried out accordingly. That’s part of what started the complain in the first place, homes that have exaggerated the original plans.

More to follow on this in the future.

Market, Market, Oh Where Are You Going? Long Beach

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I had another real estate conversation at the gym the other day. It started the usual way: “What do you think will happen with the market?”.

Well, if I had a penny… It’s hard to answer questions like that. First you don’t always know the motivation behind the question or the amount of awareness the person has. It turned out, he fully understood the market. We agreed on all the essentials, affordability ratio out of proportion, loans hard to get and falling through, many sellers are still price their properties too high and buyers, well buyers are still shy, roughly.

It was nice talking to someone who clearly was not emotionally involved in his rational. We ended up talking about the state of the mortgage industry. The only thing I can say we need to watch for, given all stated above, low affordability and prices coming down is why would a lender lend money in a deflating market? Until they feel the market is stable, they have little incentives lending money if a property is going to be less in a few months.

I am sure many lenders think like that. Obviously, it is shortsighted. For one thing, there aren’t a lot of properties anyone can flip around in a few months anymore and second, lenders would want to lend money to people who are serious and wanting to stay in the property for a few years. This would seem to be a win-win situation for both lenders and buyers.