The Sunset district in San Francisco is a quiet beach town 15 minutes from the urban core…
…and five minutes from miles and miles of off-leash sand. I have friends who live here and it’s always fun to visit. When I stay over I take their dog for a run in the morning mist.
Many of the houses were built in vast tracts over sand dunes by Henry Doelger, much in the same vein as Henry Kaiser built Panorama City. They have a standard template: 2-3 bedrooms/one bath over a single car garage. As the Sunset gradually slopes toward the ocean, the elevated configuration offers every house a water view.
They may look small from the outside but are actually quite substantial: my friends have built two additional bedrooms and baths in the undeveloped downstairs space adjacent to the garage, fully within the footprint for the foundation. Doelger houses may not wield the aesthetic pull of the Victorian but have stood up well over the years: old-growth timber, oak doors, coved ceilings, terrazzo steps rising from the street…
Doelger went on to develop the Westlake district in Daly City, immortalized in the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds, later by Pete Seeger, and covered by just about everybody. Cultural condescension notwithstanding, the little boxes of ticky-tacky have become a $1.2 million proposition. Our California moment can be summarized thus: the mockery of the boomers is now the desideratum of Gen Xers, and the reason Millennials must move to Texas.
You may know the song from the TV show “Weeds”, which was about rather big boxes in the outer reaches of the San Fernando Valley (Amazing how many pop reference points have a Valley tie-in). Though it went off the air in 2012, the transgressive premise was a widow dealing marijuana in the suburbs to pay bills. Sunday night, ganja in the cul de sac! Now they sell it off of billboards next to the convenience store. You couldn’t make this show today.
I met a guy last month who works in a weed warehouse in North Hollywood producing 100 pounds a week, all the workers with W2s. One of three jobs he had. The other gigs were downtown, tending bar. His wife worked at the swank Nomad Hotel. A hundred hours of labor a week between them. They were from New York.
“If you get your hustle on, you can kill it in LA,” he told me. They had a dream. The dream was to afford a condo. If they had a condo, no one could stop them from having a dog. They loved dogs.
A little box was beyond their expectations.