Virtual

People + Places: L.A.’s Multifamily Housing Origin Story: From Bungalow Courts to Dingbats

Name: people-places-l-a-s-multifamily-housing-origin-story-from-bungalow-courts-to-dingbats
Start: 2025-04-10T12:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-04-10T13:00:00-07:00

Thursday, April 10, 2025

12 p.m.

Join us as we discuss the past and future of multifamily housing!

Multifamily housing in Los Angeles and much of the U.S. has a complex but illuminating history.

Where multifamily housing was built, and for whom, is wrapped up in zoning reform and the separation of land uses, innovative types of new housing typologies, and fundamentally rooted in bias and segregation. This strained and uneasy relationship between single-family and multifamily housing persists today, prompting further debate and division. This is described more fully in the Conservancy 2025 Preservation Award-winning project, City of Los Angeles Historical Housing and Land Use Study.

Despite its origin story, Los Angeles has some of the most beautiful examples of older and historic multifamily housing, serving more than sixty percent of Angelenos who rent rather than own. From bungalow courts to courtyard apartments to dingbats, L.A. consistently responded to the need for multifamily housing throughout the years and produced a wide range of options.

People + Places Virtual Series
L.A.’s Multifamily Housing Origin Story: From Bungalow Courts to Dingbats

Thursday, April 10, 2025
12:00 – 1:00 P.M.

FREE Virtual Event | Registration is required.

Can’t make it? Click here to register to get the recording by email.

This event covers a range of stories about multifamily housing and offers a prelude to the Conservancy’s upcoming Marvelous Mid-Wilshire Multifamily! neighborhood tour on April 19th! Join us for both!

Join us on April 19th for Marvelous Mid-Wilshire Multifamily! Through three separate tours, we’re celebrating L.A.’s historic multifamily housing in the Mid-Wilshire area!

Leimert Park in South Los Angeles is a planned community from the late 1920s where single family and multifamily housing were intentionally designed to coexist in harmony, and still do today.

The dingbat apartment building is a very common Mid-Century Modern apartment type in Los Angeles – so common, in fact, that it often goes unnoticed. That is unless you visit Hayworth Avenue in Hollywood, a cluster of 1956-65 dingbats. | Photo by Lisett Chavarela

Beverly Fairfax Historic District in Mid-Wilshire is a pocket of two-story multifamily apartment buildings designed to look like large single-family homes, and became a haven for Jewish Angelenos starting in the late 1940s. | Photos courtesy of Fred Zaidman.

Los Angeles has the second-largest concentration of garden apartment communities in the nation, first developed in the 1930s. This includes Park La Brea in Mid-Wilshire, with nearly 4,500 apartments, the largest multifamily development west of the Mississippi. | Photo courtesy Architectural Resources Group

Dale Kendall, founder of Save Beverly Fairfax joins the conversation to share his stories about the living in and preserving Beverly Fairfax Historic District.

Author Max Podemski Podemski's book interrogates the American values that have equated home ownership with success and led to the US housing crisis, asking, “How can we look to the past to build the homes, neighborhoods, and cities of the future that our communities deserve?"

Elysha Paluszek, Senior Architectural Historian at Architectural Resources Group shares findings in the City of Los Angeles Historical Housing and Land Use Study.