| Multi-family housing played an important role---thus far unacknowledged---in the urbanization of Los Angeles from the beginning of the twentieth century. This fact challenges a persistent myth of early 1900s Los Angeles as a city of little else but handsome single-family bungalows on landscaped suburban lots, stretching from the mountains to the ocean.; As the City of Angels expanded dramatically between 1900 and the 1930s, booster elites engineered a successful "growth machine" of coordinated place promotion, pushing the powerful image of attractive houses available for purchase by all classes, all in the service of creating an industrial metropolis. Yet the need for conventionally urban rental housing found in many older US cities was also present in Los Angeles, emanating from predictable sectors of a booming populace: families, workers, young single people, and retirees. Moreover, southern California's growing tourism industry drove a huge, additional demand for convenient shelter among a long-term visiting population.; Thousands of apartments, flats, duplexes, and bungalow courts were the result. By the mid-1920s, about half of the city's housing stock was in multi-family units, and their design, construction, sale and operation became a major force in the local economy. Further, local policymakers had no choice but to address the proliferation of housing and related urban development as Los Angeles grew from town to city to metropolis in just a few brief, frenetic decades. Innovative zoning ordinances were just one outcome of these planning activities.; Los Angeles is regularly cited as the capital of suburban sprawl, and current discussions about this phenomenon---a problem to some, merely a market outcome to others---will benefit from a new, more accurate understanding of how this city has grown. |
