by Garrison Frost

As the median home price in Los Angeles County hovers in the $500,000 dollar range – and the median prices in the South Bay climbing much, much higher – options are dwindling for people wanting to open their front door and breathe that clean ocean air. Actually, it's not the ocean air they want – it's the ZIP code, the prestige, the good schools and the property values. While there's no getting around the price tags for single family homes in the South Bay, people have shown a remarkable ability to fudge definitions in order to close escrow. They've bought the condos and the townhomes – and proven that it's not necessary to own both the inside and the outside, or to own the whole thing. And they've bought the subdivisions, the duplexes and the lot splits – proving that a piece of the whole is just as good as the whole. Mobile homes are going at a fast clip, too – a home is a home, no matter where you park it.

And then there's the option of buying a home that isn't mobile, but isn't really attached to anything either. In fact, it may even be floating in the air.

That's the deal at 1800 PCH, the so-called "lofted community" that is already a few years old in Redondo Beach. At 1800 PCH, you get a modest beach house nestled in what looks to be a quaint pedestrian neighborhood. No cars, just pleasant little lawns and garden pathways. At 1800 PCH, residents are free from all the unpleasantness of modern life – the traffic, the cars, the storage, the trash bins. But this unpleasantness hasn't been removed altogether. In fact, it has merely been tucked underneath that quaint neighborhood we were just talking about. The developers of 1800 PCH solved the intractable riddle of how to create a peaceful community atmosphere with a paucity of space by simply building the community they wanted and hoisting it on top of a parking structure.

Right now, these lofted homes are going for prices between $700,000 and $800,000.

While one might be tempted to compare 1800 PCH to a balcony or a shopping mall, that wouldn't do it justice. While, sure, it's a bit creepy to think that your dyno Cap Cod is actually floating in the air, there is something undeniably romantic about an improvised community. In a way, it's not unlike a gentrified Atlantis, or what one might expect if it was RE/MAX that oversaw those bio-dome projects and not a research institute. We talk all the time about double-decking our freeways to get more out of the space, what is so wrong with double-decking our cities as well?

As for me, I like my property to come with dirt. And not just a few feet of dirt, but pretty much solid dirt all the way to the earth's core. Call me selfish. It comforts me to know that I'm attached to a continental shelf. But if all you want is a house, then you might think about 1800 PCH. Heck, in a few years, it might be people like me who are the losers, and people whose homes are at increasingly higher levels of our stacked city that pull in the really big dough.

(June 13, 2005)

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