Research Notes: The Hidden Cityscapes of Informal Housing in Suburban Los Angeles and the Paradox of Horizontal Density

Several years ago, in the densely populated, working-class, and predominantly Latino city of South Gate, a suburb located eight miles south by southeast of downtown Los Angeles, a middle-aged man named José put the finishing touches on a new structure located behind a house that he owned.¹ After arriving in Southern California from Mexico and following years of hard work as a skilled tradesman, José acquired a modest collection of investment properties including this house. He had managed to buy it for $70,000 in 1989 from one of the many white families departing South Gate at the time. He soon developed plans to build a new three-car garage topped by a spacious three-bedroom apartment behind his family’s new home, but his wife did not want heavy construction to take place while their two children were young. Years later, with José’s children grown to adulthood, he was ready to take the plunge. It was now or never, because South Gate had recently changed its zoning ordinance to restrict residential construction in the area, and José wanted to make sure that he constructed his new building in time for it to be permissible before the rules changed.

One step remained before José could add the garage and the apartment above it to his investment properties: a building inspector needed to certify the structure for occupancy. While the inspector was examining José’s new building, his view of the neighbor’s backyard aroused his suspicions that something was not as it should be. Recently, some tenants had moved out, and the absentee owner decided to take advantage of the vacancy to have some construction work done.

The troubles were evident on the neighboring property. The front house had been rented to tenants, and the garage had been as well, in contravention of South Gate’s zoning ordinance. The neighbor was building an unpermitted addition to the main house, and he was executing work inside the garage because he intended to improve it as a living space. To be sure, similar living arrangements, usually hidden from the public street, could be found on virtually every block in South Gate. Indeed, José and his family had long tolerated the neighboring property that housed as many as three families. Between them, they parked up to nine cars in the driveway and on the street. But it was José’s neighbor’s bad fortune that a building inspector had happened to be working next door and had tipped off code enforcement inspectors.

As a result of the inspection, José’s neighbor had to dismantle the garage apartment and demolish the addition that he had started on the main house. The garage apartment and the addition were not simply physical structures: they were the physical embodiment of a common local practice of building cheap, unobtrusive, and frequently unpermitted living quarters, often for occupancy by family members or, as in this case, to earn some extra income. They were representative of an ethos of self-building that has been part of the fabric of South Gate and nearby communities since their founding a century ago.

This small incident reveals broader forces that have come to shape cityscapes, specifically working-class Latino cityscapes, throughout the Los Angeles region. It illustrates the mechanisms by which what I somewhat paradoxically label horizontal density has come to define vast areas. Observers have long remarked on the open, sunlit appearance of the residential streets of Los Angeles.² But L.A.’s persistent reputation for spaciousness has also become increasingly outdated in the face of ongoing urban transformations. The century-old stereotype of Los Angeles as the world’s pioneering exemplar of decentralized and car-dependent metropolitan growth is haltingly giving way to the dawning realization that in 2015 the urbanized region of L.A. ranks second or third in the United States in population density, depending on how it is measured.³

An increase in horizontal density differs markedly from the typical pattern in U.S. city neighborhoods experiencing growth pressures...