“Lord, I can hear the heads of those holier-than-thou Hollywood Heights snobs exploding already!”
That was one of the many comments on our recent story about 60 new homes being built in the Hollywood-Santa Monica conservation district. No doubt about it, neighbors there are picky about what ends up next door — it is a conservation district, after all.
Hollywood-Santa Monica board president Clifford Nichols believes that the new addition is “ultimately going to be positive,” but “some of the board members have some, I guess, questions.”
This all began in 2007 when the Section 8 housing along Shadyside was torn down, and a buyer came in wanting to redevelop the property in single-family homes. The Hollywood-Santa Monica board got involved to make sure the new builds would reflect the aesthetic of the neighborhood. But the economy turned, and the developer “ran out of money and pulled out,” Nichols says. For about five years, it has acted almost as extra green space for adjacent Lindsley Park.
In the midst of the recession, local real estate powerhouse Henry S. Miller saw this land as a wise investment, and that foresight came to fruition recently when Plano-based builder Megatel Homes scooped up the property. Megatel announced that its plan is 60 single-family homes up and down Shadyside, starting at $500,000, ” but it also can be zoned for multi-family homes,” such as townhomes, Nichols says.
And even though these won’t be townhomes according to the strict definition, “essentially, they are,” Nichols says. “They do have to be Tudors, but a Tudor home can be interpreted a lot of different ways. They’re going to go straight up because those lots aren’t very big.” The builder is required to keep the homes “pretty much” within the conservation district’s guidelines, Nichols says, but the city gave a little more leniency in terms of taller roofs, the option of three-car garages instead of two, and allowing the homes to be built closer to the street and other property lines.
The reason Hollywood-Santa Monica took pains to make this land part of its conservation district “is because we did not want the McMansions, and these are pretty big.”
These new homes will be “fairly isolated from the remainder of the neighborhood, so it’s not as critical as if it were on a major neighborhood entrance route,” says Norman Alston, another Hollywood-Santa Monica board member who is also an architect (and an occasional Advocate writer). On a neighborhood scale, Alston says, this is much like the Gaston-Garland-East Grand redevelopment (which we’ve dubbed “the triangle”) — “an opportunity to do something interesting and perhaps unique to our area. However, also like the Triangle, there is nothing about the players or statements that I’ve heard so far that makes me think we’ll get anything other than Tudoresque McMansions — the continued suburbanization of Old East Dallas.”
Alston also sent the below image, saying, “This photo from the Megatel website photo gallery says it all.”
