Learning from Park Planned Homes

Kate Wolf considers Gregory Ain’s Altadena housing development in the wake of the Los Angeles fires.

By Kate WolfMarch 14, 2025

• Environment

• Politics

• Art & Architecture

EARLIER THIS YEAR, a few weeks after the fires had begun in Los Angeles, I attended a panel discussion on the recovery process to come. It was convened by the nonprofit group FORT:LA and held at the Central Library downtown. (The library’s own conflagration in 1986, which destroyed a million books and closed the site for seven years, was referenced at the outset of the discussion by one of the panelists, the journalist Sam Lubell.) An “in memoriam” slideshow played, marking buildings that had been lost in the blazes. To the tune of the Beatles’ “In My Life,” the audience watched a staggering amount of landmarks and historical monuments flash past: homes designed by revered architects such as Richard Neutra, Ray Kappe, Eric Owen Moss, and Greene and Greene; the restaurants Moonshadows, Cholada Thai, and the Reel Inn on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu; the Pacific Palisades Business Block; Altadena Community Church and the nearby Zane Grey Estate; Will Rogers’s ranch house. I noticed people wiping away tears. Another one of the slides showed Park Planned Homes, the pathbreaking modernist development in Altadena designed by the midcentury architect Gregory Ain. Out of the 28 houses in the development, 21 had reportedly burned in the Eaton Fire and were now gone.

Following the slideshow, historian Heather Goers and Adrian Scott Fine, the president of the Los Angeles Conservancy, talked with Lubell about the importance of historic architecture: what buildings mean to us, how they serve as sites for common history and heritage, and how they become tangible measures of our lives and tell the story of a place. Park Planned Homes in particular called to mind legacies of progressive modernism in Los Angeles. The development, said to be the first modernist tract in the country, was completed in 1948, at the height of Los Angeles’s postwar housing crisis. But it was perhaps rooted more in the New Deal–era pragmatism of the previous decade, in which Ain began his work as an architect and became dedicated to seeking solutions to the “common architectural problems of common people,” as he is often quoted as saying.

Aside from its historical resonance, though, Park Planned Homes was also a place where people still lived; their loss was of a more personal variety. One recent resident whose home burned, who had just moved into the neighborhood in December, told The New York Times that “she had been amazed by the cluster’s sense of calm and connection,” saying, “It was such a beautiful and serene space […] We immediately got the feeling that we had a really great community we were going to be immersed in.”

That sense of community was by design. Though it was conceived around privately owned, spacious, individual lots, Park Planned Homes’ moderately sized (by today’s standards) houses of around 1,350 square feet were closely situated, lending the development urban density even in the suburban setting of Altadena. To speed production amid the high demand for housing, Ain created a single floor plan for the homes. But he staggered them dynamically, alternating the placement of neighboring houses and adjoining their driveways, which served both an aesthetic and social function. It broke up monotony and gave residents opportunities for spontaneous socializing and interaction. It also helped blur the lines of private and public space, as did the lack of property barriers, such as fences, and the continuous landscaping of front yards whose use and maintenance were also shared, and which were planted with a colorful variety of flowers and trees by the landscape architect Garret Eckbo; taken together, these islands of greenery were meant to realize the stately “park” of the development’s name. Meanwhile, the shared aspects of the homes’ exteriors were balanced with an eye to privacy inside that included walled courtyards, a functional open floor plan buffered by clerestories, and a swimming pool in the backyard. Paradise.

Park Planned Homes’ communal elements were a natural outgrowth of Ain’s approach to both architecture and politics. He came by the latter through the influence of his father, Baer, a Menshevik from Russia who moved his young family to the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1911, when Ain was three, and later, for a year, to Llano del Rio, the short-lived socialist colony on the outskirts of L.A. County. As a teenager, Ain briefly studied architecture at the University of Southern California, but became galvanized when, during this same period, he sought out the father of modern architecture on the West Coast, Rudolph Schindler, at his West Hollywood house on Kings Road. There he encountered another statesman of California modernism, Richard Neutra, then at the outset of his career.

Ain studied under Neutra and later worked for him before beginning his own practice in 1935. Alongside private residences, often drafted for émigré artists and political activists, that consisted of compact, tightly organized spaces to accommodate their placement on hillsides in Hollywood and Echo Park, another early Ain project was One Family Defense, planned modular housing for farmworkers. Even as Ain gained recognition, receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1940 to pursue his studies of low-cost housing, he would eschew the kind of publicity and inutility he saw at the heart of the famous Case Study program—launched in 1945, the same year as Park Planned Homes—which he did not participate in. As the historian Anthony Denzer writes in his 2008 book Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary, by the end of the war, Ain felt a renewed purpose and optimism in turning to large scale housing initiatives: “The design of idiosyncratic custom homes, which had sustained his practice in the 1930s, now appeared inconsequential.”

Like many of Ain’s most ambitious postwar projects, however, Park Planned Homes was actually foiled by circumstance. Originally, it was meant to encompass 60 houses, and Ain devised plans for an infinite amount to follow, including homes with smaller floor plans, which would conceivably make them more affordable. But, Denzer writes, as brilliant as Ain’s innovations were for speeding up the construction of Park Planned Homes—including precut wood, predrilled holes for wiring, and centralized plumbing—they were also naive. Carpenters balked at the precut lumber and raised their rates, and the plumbers and electricians also rebelled. The construction boom at the time meant that materials were scarce. One night, according to the writer and critic Esther McCoy, a champion of Ain’s, thieves stole stockpiled lumber for a few of the houses, and another night, half of the packaged bathtubs.

Unlike William Levitt, who also used prefabricated elements for his housing tracts but eventually gained total control of the building process (to questionable effect), Ain wasn’t a developer, just an architect. The rising costs pushed up the prices of the houses in Park Planned Homes, capping construction. Still, Ain went on to design more developments. Some of these projects were successfully built in Mar Vista and Silver Lake, while another, Community Homes, a cooperative with 280 houses and generous amenities across 100 acres in Reseda, was blocked by the Federal Housing Authority because of Ain’s refusal to impose racial segregation and due to his perceived involvement with communism. (Ain was believed to be a Communist Party member for a time—a liability that resulted in harassment, government surveillance, and, to some extent, the sidelining of his career.)

Park Planned Homes before the Eaton Fire. Photo: Kyungsub Shin.

It’s easy enough to transpose the challenges Ain faced in the postwar years to the present day: a rapacious building industry, dramatic supply chain shortages, and a conservatively run FHA (now part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development) that is pro-business, racially biased, and dubious about innovation, especially anything with a whiff of Marxism/socialism/communism—all interchangeable in the eyes of the current administration, ranking as epithets alongside “diversity and inclusion.”

Yet it is easier, critical even, to imagine that something like Park Planned Homes, and Ain’s legacy itself, is an answer to what lies ahead in post-disaster Los Angeles. Preceding the fires, L.A. was already in the midst of a housing crisis that deepened in 2024. The added stress of losing thousands of homes to the Palisades and Eaton fires will undoubtably intensify the calamity in the years to come, despite Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent executive order to waive all forms of statewide regulations, including environmental ones, as well as permitting barriers, in order to speed up the rebuilding process. The need for rebuilding, along with other forms of construction, is desperate, but the need for planning is equally important. Ain’s take on the matter, written toward the end of the war, is still applicable to today:

Tens of thousands of families, now compelled by circumstances to occupy substandard dwellings, will be in a position to start building as soon as priorities are lifted … The problem is a problem in planning, which, if not well solved now by the architects, will be badly solved later by the jerry-builders.

The architectural historian Anthony Fontenot, who edited a book on Ain’s social housing, pointed out to me that, in naming his tract Park Planned Homes, Ain was a making a conscious effort to draw attention to the significance of planning. “Ain believed that planning was the central idea behind these developments,” he said. Fontenot conceded that urban planning was given a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s—and arguably before, with something like slum clearance measures in many L.A. neighborhoods as early as the late 1930s. But “there’s a need to revive large-scale planning without the fear of the top-down hysteria that was associated with that stuff in order to address climate change, the environment, and housing issues that are so pressing,” Fontenot cautioned. “I think smart planners could learn from Ain just the basic concept of shared resources,” he told me. “Even if one doesn’t want to revisit the architectural form, I think the basic concepts are still extremely relevant.”

Even before the war, Ain had tried to impress on clients that, rather than building a single house on a single lot, it was more feasible, through collective organizing to leverage builders, to get something like 10 houses constructed on a lot. His first example of this was Dunsmuir Flats (1937–39), in Los Angeles’s Mid City neighborhood, which features four homes on a narrow 49-foot-wide parcel. “He argued that each house at Dunsmuir Flats had to have all the qualities of a typical single family house in the suburbs,” Fontenot said. “It had to have a garden, it had to have light, it had to have all the qualities, but he organized them in this brilliant way, in a very poetic way.” The experience of living at Dunsmuir was apparently revelatory enough that one of its residents, Robert Kahan, became the main financer of Park Planned Homes. “The cooperative has always been a way of simply achieving what the individual cannot do,” said Fontenot.

At the FORT:LA presentation, the architect Greg Kochanowski spoke about his own experience of losing his home in the Agoura Hills community of Seminole Springs, a former mobile home park turned cooperative, during the Woolsey Fire of 2018. He was initially drawn to Seminole Springs for the financial miracle of mixed-income housing only 15 minutes from Zuma Beach. Following Woolsey, though, he said the cooperative was what allowed residents to reconstitute their community. The cooperative became “a mechanism through which to […] channel resources, channel education, [and] channel support systems,” including mental health counseling for both individuals and groups who had gone through the trauma of the fire. In the dawn of climate change, sharing resources also means pooling even more essential elements like water and energy. A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times argued for social housing mainly in terms of issues of sustainability and carbon neutrality, a seemingly far cry from Newsom’s executive order to do away with these considerations and rush quickly back to “normal.”

But already, residents of Altadena and beyond are demanding more than just slapdash efforts at rebuilding. A petition circulating online that calls for an update to code and the reconstructing of the town with natural fire-resistant materials has gained 5,000 signatures since January 15. Another online petition with almost 3,000 signatures calls for action that “maintains our diverse, middle-class character through thoughtful development,” among a bevy of other requests, including the preservation of historic architecture and character, protection against displacement, and direct community involvement. This all flies in the face of the political showmanship and power-grabbing that seems to be shaping up among developers like Rick Caruso and billionaire L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who have proclaimed themselves “rebuilding czars.” The controversy sparked by L.A. mayor Karen Bass’s recent naming of businessman Steve Soboroff as the official rebuilding czar of the city, with a salary of $500,000 for just three months of work (which she quickly rescinded after public outcry), would be better replaced by a different kind of communication from city hall: the kind that ideally spurs the thousands of architects, designers, urban planners, and housing policy experts who work in Los Angeles to draw on the city’s rich history in order to create a more sustainable and equitable vision for the future, by way of programs like major design contests, serious public outreach, education, and true collaboration.

Looking to the future, it’s also inevitable to ask if Park Planned Homes itself could be rebuilt. “I think it would be tragic if it just disappeared,” Fontenot said. “My personal opinion is that I absolutely believe it should be rebuilt. Should it be rebuilt one-to-one, absolutely to the specifications of what the original buildings were? Not necessarily. There were actually a few problems with the design.” The clerestories, for instance, had some water issues, he said:

So things like that, of course, you’d want to correct or try to develop differently, things that were not ideal. But in terms of planning and the layout, I think the footprint of the original houses would still make a lot of sense; the overall collective spaces, the way they’re laid out with the private property, I think all of that as a starting point makes a hell of a lot of sense.

He suggested employing other architects to challenge and perhaps update Ain’s designs in order to find smarter ways to approach collective energy and water access and insert these into the existing property footprint, and to add other things that are necessary for living today, perhaps even a vertical element to complement Ain’s mastering of horizontal density. Fontenot, at least, is hopeful. “I think it’s completely doable,” he said.

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Featured image: Julius Shulman. Job 40: Park Planned Homes (Altadena, Calif.), 1947. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10), getty.edu. Accessed March 12, 2025. Image has been cropped.