Ranches, Rowhouses, and Railroad Flats

Apartment living is back in vogue now. Actually it never went out of style. It just changed and evolved along with changing mores and lifestyles and current economic trends. Apartment living, just like city living, is especially in fashion among millennials. Of course, it doesn’t help that the starting price for a starter home now hovers between $400,000 to $500,000 in many parts of the country.

Major, mid-sized and even smaller cities are now being peppered with apartment projects where once condos held supreme. San Francisco seems to be leading the charge with its infusion of the ‘creative class’ and escapees from Silicon Valley.

Even though apartment living ebbed and flowed with evolving lifestyle choices and tastes, it has always been a part of the American lexicon ever since its inception before the 1700s. Actually, it was even before that period in American history with the pueblos of the southwest and Mayan cities further down south.

It’s no different around the world. Until recently in Europe, apartment living had been the norm for centuries. Multiple generations often lived in the same building. When I was hanging around Amsterdam in the mid-60’s, my good friend lived with his parents and girlfriend in first floor apartment, his grandparents occupied the second floor and an aunt and uncle were on the third floor.

For the most part, America had been a country of apartment dwellers up until the end of World War II. In her book entitled: Ranches, Rowhouses and Railroad Flats, author Christine Hunter chronicled the evolution of various American housing forms and the ways they shaped and limited the neighborhoods surrounding them.

After World War Two and for almost sixty years, home ownership was the zenith of success that many families strived to achieve. Burning their mortgage papers after the last final payment became a ritual that many of our parents and grandparents enjoyed. But the recession of 2008 and a different attitude among millennials changed the perception of home ownership and shifted desires toward more freedom of movement, downtown living and less perceived value in home ownership.

Like most cyclical trends, apartment ownership has grown and, in turn, waned over the decades. There was a period in the early 80’s when apartment buildings in the Twin Cities were apprecia-ting at a very fast rate. Then tax changes by the Regan Administration eliminated many tax exemptions and other lucrative benefits of investment properties. Values plummeted and real estate was no longer a foolproof way to make money.

Yet the basics of apartment management never changed. In fact, I even wrote a book about just that fact. Aside from the financial matters, managing apartment units really boils down to observing another person’s life under the microscope. It’s like studying the socio-economic behavior of subjects who pay you for your efforts. You can’t help but notice their living conditions, eating habits, mating habits and general lifestyle.

For an introvert like myself, thrust into the lives of other people, there seemed to be just one business model that would work. It was driven by one simple philosophy. The idea that the owner of the building was not dealing with rental property or investment property or apartments for that matter. To my way of thinking, the obligation of a landlord is one of providing safe and clean homes for the residents. Semantics aside, it was an important differentiation.  In the same light, it meant thinking of the folks living in those units as residents instead of renters or tenants.

But business is still business. Both parties understood their respective responsibilities. The landlord-renter agreement wasn’t a benevolent relationship. Residents paid the landlord for a place to live. The landlord’s part of the bargain was to provide a safe and clean living environment. He wasn’t their boss but he wasn’t their pal either. Hopefully they saw him as a nice guy who was fair but firm and one who responded quickly to their relevant concerns.

I was in the rental business for more than thirty years. Over that period of time and because of the transient nature of young folks, I dealt with more than several hundred renters. Ninety-eight percent of them were fantastic folks whom I’d rent to again in a heartbeat. In fact, there are several that still exchange Christmas cards with us each year.

                                    

What I learned over the years can be reduced to one simple sentence. ‘Treat your residents and their units with respect and not as rental property.’ If you do that, 98% of your folks will respond in kind. It was a philosophy that served me well.

While I’ve moved on with my life, that philosophy has served me well in a myriad of other exchanges with my readers, business clients, friends, associates and family. They are simply good words to live by.

Changing Perception

Aerial of Palm Springs

Sometimes if you’re too close to something, it can change and evolve and morph into a new stage of its existence and you don’t notice it at all. Palm Springs is a good case in point. This desert town, long synonymous with mid-century modern architecture, had been the playground of the Hollywood elite and well-heeled retirees for many years. Then gradually as tastes changed and old movie stars passed on, the city grew tired. Now within the last couple of years it’s become a hot spot for hipsters, telecommuters, and members of the LGBT community.

The changes were subtle and gradual at first. It was a transition as fluid and smooth as a river changing course. Other communities down Valley haven’t experienced the changes as much. Their miles and miles of gated communities are well established and reticent for any kind of major change. They’re content with their tee times, Four O’clock cocktail hour and early bedtime.

Palm Springs began its acceleration of changes after the recession of 2008. Sharon and I began coming out here in 2000 and have lived and experienced the changes as we ourselves morphed from vacationers to knowledgeable visitors to homeowners to being a part of our neighborhood and, we hope, a fabric in our community.

Photo courtesy of Melvin Hale

The village of Palm Springs was first developed in the 1930’s as a weekend getaway for the L.A. crowd. But it wasn’t until the 1950’s that it gained a much broader appeal when the Alexander Construction Company built more than two thousand contemporary, stylish and most importantly affordable tract homes. The key then as now lies in its affordability.

Granted, affordability is a strictly California oxymoron as far as housing is concerned. Past reports of outrageous prices for housing are not an exaggeration in many California cities and communities.

As of January of this year, the average price for a single-family home in Palm Springs was about $495,000 and a condominium unit for around $220,000. Compare that to the median price for a single-family home in Los Angeles at about $704,500 with a 2.9 percent projected increase by 2019. Crazy but true, it’s cheaper to live in Palm Springs than L.A.

The most visible changes are taking place downtown. In its heyday, L.A. had its Sunset Strip and Chicago had its miracle mile. Many cities across the country have their own branded tentacles of food, drink, lodging and entertainment. Now Palm Springs has done them one better with its own small-town village atmosphere cloaked as a 21^st century hotspot.

Back in its glory days, Palm Springs was a classic example of heighten expectations clashing with the reality of desert stargazing. In reality it was only the well-heeled or coastal-connected that got to hang out with the stars. For the average visitor Palm Canyon Drive was just a welcome respite from the normalcy back home even while it harbored high hopes for seeing one of their favorite stars passing by on the sidewalk. Over the last several years Palm Springs has slowly regained its panache.

West Coast hipsters, designers, remodelers, artists, musicians and actors are all rediscovering what their forefathers knew all along. They’re finding that wrapping those warm blue pools with a healthy shot of alcohol can bring out a hedonistic nature in the best of us.

Saguaro Hotel Pool

While the hint of change had been in the air for a long time, it took the turnover of an old motel to kick-start this new make-over process. Most observers agree it was the conversion of an old Howard Johnson motel on Palm Canyon Drive into the new hip ACE hotel that became the catalyst for the hipsters to start coming to town. Now there is a whole cache of hotels like the Saguaro changing hands and branding themselves as ‘hip.’

Aerial of the Coachella Valley

Palm Springs and its surrounding locales have always attracted an eclectic assortment of artists, musicians, painters and other veterans of the school of hard knocks. It’s a mecca for the rich, the famous and the enfranchised. This new Palm Springs fits in nicely to this new composite form of creativity.

Some chose to express themselves and show their wares in galleries in the valley or in the high desert. Others are off radar and like it that way. It’s as if there is another world just beneath the surface of shimmering pools, lush green golf courses and cloud-less aqua skies. Whispers come from the wastelands surrounding the Salton Sea as do siren calls from the high desert. Like a resistant drug, fatal attraction or sinful thought, it keeps drawing me back for more exploration. It is a world that offers the opposite of the known, contentment and comfortable

The high desert of the Morongo Valley, Yucca Valley, and Joshua tree continue to attract musicians now as it has since the turn of the century. Far from the crystal clear pools of Palm Springs and its emerald green golf courses lies another world of vast nothingness peppered with the sad remnants of past lives. It’s a place where stillness thunders louder than the wind and God did some of his finest paintings. A vast virtual sound studio for the creative musician.

Map of the high dessert

The Salton Sea

The footprint of the Salton Sea edges alongside nowhere which is north of nothing of interest…for the casual outsider.  It is a briny morass of faded real estate dreams and dead fish scales underfoot. The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake measuring more than 35 miles long and 15 miles wide in spots. It has a surface area of over 380 square miles and sits at 332 feet below sea level.

Today the salinity level of the sea stands at 45 ppt. Only the tilapia fish is able to survive in such waters. While fishing is still good for the tilapia, fish kills continue to plague the area with their harsh smells.

Salvation Mountain is one of the premiere examples of folk art in the middle of nowhere America. At least that was what all the travel guides say. The site has become a mecca for those influenced by and intrigued with this kaleidoscope of painted hills, crude cave dwellings, and religious scriptures.

Slab City otherwise known as ‘The Slabs’ is a snowbird campsite used by recreational vehicle owners alongside squatters from across North America. It takes its name from the concrete slabs that remain from an abandoned World War II Marine barracks of Camp Dunlap.

The artists at Slab City describe it as an experimental, sustainable art installation. East Jesus is a colloquialism for the middle of nowhere beyond the edge of services. Made from discarded material that has been reused, recycled or repurposed, East Jesus encourages visitors to imagine a world without waste in which every action is an opportunity for self-expression.

Intertwined with the remote outposts of creativity are other artist colonies such as the one up in Idyllwild or the other mountain enclaves in Big Bear and Arrowhead. Laguna Beach is two hours and a world away from the desert but offers the same kind of mind-expanding atmosphere in which to play.

There is still something magical about the surrounding mountains, desertscape, warm winter months and hip happenings all over town. Palm Springs is now a virtual cornucopia of cultural, artistic, sensual, musical and intellectual stirrings for just about everyone from the art culture-types to the more modest of minds. It all seems to be happening here.