North Long Beach is set to get its first historic district after the City Council voted Tuesday night to direct the city attorney to draft an ordinance establishing a section of homes in the Grant Neighborhood as historic.

The neighborhood is located between South Street and Artesia Boulevard just west of Orange Avenue in the city’s 9th District. The homes, noted for their minimalist design, harken back to the city’s early developmental days when transportation by automobile was an expanding option for the city’s working class.

A total of 19 homes on the 6000 block of Walnut Avenue could be designated for historic status after the ordinance is drafted and approved by the council.

“Hopefully this allows us to understand that an entire area of town—mostly districts 9, 8 and 5—which were all built around the same time, that this is the first of a whole effort to begin recognizing those histories which were largely made up of working class communities and their histories,” said Councilman Rex Richardson, who represents the area that includes Grant Neighborhood.

The city currently has 17 historic districts with over half of them existing in the southernmost portions of the city. With the passage of the future ordinance the Grant Neighborhood historic district would become the first to exist north of Bixby Road.

Richardson said that now that the demands of the neighborhood are changing, this effort will help preserve some of the working class history that helped build the neighborhood. He added that it would also potentially help homeowners keep up their homes by seeking tax relief through the Mills Act.

https://lbpost.com/local-history/north-long-beach-hopes-to-get-its-first-historic-district/

Approval for the designation was recommended by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission in December.

The commission stated that the block was eligible for landmark designation because of its representation of a distinguishable part of Long Beach history as an “intact cohesive automobile suburb” that was constructed in the late 1920s. The block also met the 60 percent requirement for properties within the proposed district meeting the historic designation standards.

“This cohesive collection of residential properties reflects long Beach’s booming economic growth in the 1920s and corresponding rapid residential expansion in the city periphery, in particular through North long Beach, as the rise of the personal automobile made settlement feasible in areas far from the City center,” said a December staff report given to the commission.

The report noted that the designs of the homes were tied to Federal Housing Administration programs that sought to build affordable homes for veterans returning home from war. The “Minimum House” met minimum thresholds for square footage and amenities that would be approved and funded by the agency.

While the city does have a number of these minimal homes, North Long Beach area has the largest concentration of them. The Grant Neighborhood has the highest percentage of the homes as of 2018.

Jason Ruiz covers City Hall and politics for the Long Beach Post. Reach him at [email protected] or @JasonRuiz_LB on Twitter.