Recently I posted here about an old building I’d discovered in my neighborhood in West Los Angeles (picture here).
I thought this and several other structures in the immediate area must be at least a century old, but according the the Los Angeles County Assessor’s website their “effective building dates” are no earlier than 1930. With regard to such old buildings, what does “effective building date” actually mean? Could it be the date a building was first inspected, although it might have already stood for forty or fifty years? The neighborhood was settled in the early 1880s when the L.A. Old Soldiers’ Home, now the Veterans’ Administration campus, was opened.
Might be the first date that the county has record of the building. Not necessary the first inspection. Could be first time building was appraised dor tax reasons.
I’m not an assessor but I work in a related field. Assessment of property values in cities are generally done using a computerized model using various inputs, one of which will be the year of construction of the property. In the case of older buildings, “effective year of construction” would basically be the year of construction to use in this model as opposed to the actual year of construction.
In your example, you have a building that was built earlier, but most likely underwent significant renovations or additions in 1930 so that essentially what you are seeing/using/living in today was built in 1930. That way, the assessor’s model, in arriving at an assessment value for the property, will spit out a figure similar to other buildings built in 1930, and not try to use values of comparable buildings built in 1880, or a depreciation model that goes back to 1880, or whatever.
As far as I know it’s always been a commercial building. Come to think of it, the first big Southern California earthquake of the twentieth century was in 1933, so I imagine that a lot of existing structures that survived the quake had to undergo extensive repairs. And this is in what was then considered a rather distant location with respect to the downtown County offices, although technically within the city limits of L.A. Also this building doesn’t seem to have any of the Art Deco or Mediterranean style flourishes you would expect in a Los Angeles commercial building of the 1920s or 1930s. It looks more like 1880s Tombstone AZ or Virginia City NV than Los Angeles between the world wars. If it weren’t for all the cars and asphalt in the picture, you’d just about expect to see a stagecoach pull up.
A further observation I meant to make is that this neighborhood has never really gone through a major economic upheaval or shift. It never was really considered terribly good or terribly bad, although the residential rents are a little high and the house prices astronomical, although perhaps now a little less so. As a result, the local business district has always hummed along, unlike many other old areas of the city which have gone through white-flight type abandonment, and the structures have stayed in continuous use.
In saying this, I do have to acknowledge that there was at least one occasion on which an act of the federal government led to far reaching social dislocation. The neighborhood has always had a strong Japanese American presence, and when Japanese Americans were forcibly transported to concentration camps during the second World War, the local impact must have been unbelievable. According to the Wikipedia article on my old high school, which is in the neighborhood, a third of the 1942 class did not graduate because of the internments. One can only imagine that scores of people had been disappeared from virtually every block. Making it all the more disturbing is the fact that nothing of this was ever mentioned to us when I was in school there. “We will never forget” indeed. (I’m not singling out my own country in this regard, I think it’s something which just about every society is guilty of at times.)
