Kitchen Priestess (She/Her) on Nostr: Many Popular Houses in L.A. Were Part of a Scam by a Con Artist Who Disappeared - Yet ...
Many Popular Houses in L.A. Were Part of a Scam by a Con Artist Who Disappeared - Yet the homes are still in high demand, by Laura Kaiser November 9, 2023
"...it was cheap land, low taxes, and a booming population that attracted Janes. ...he had dispatched scores of construction workers across dozens of newly cut lots. ...They assembled a house a day. Altadena did not require building permits, so no blueprints were filed, but it appears that Janes tweaked widely available single-story house plans to include English cottage touches such as nested, “cat-slide” gables & steep Coldswold-inspired roofs with warped...shingles.
He then hawked his quaint properties relentlessly... Acting as agent, designer, financier, and booster for one of the country’s first mass-produced housing developments, Janes was “ahead of his time in terms of vertical integration,” says Altadena historian Michele Zack. “For a fly-by-nighter, he must have been kind of brilliant.”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/los-angeles-home-scam
#Architecture
"...it was cheap land, low taxes, and a booming population that attracted Janes. ...he had dispatched scores of construction workers across dozens of newly cut lots. ...They assembled a house a day. Altadena did not require building permits, so no blueprints were filed, but it appears that Janes tweaked widely available single-story house plans to include English cottage touches such as nested, “cat-slide” gables & steep Coldswold-inspired roofs with warped...shingles.
He then hawked his quaint properties relentlessly... Acting as agent, designer, financier, and booster for one of the country’s first mass-produced housing developments, Janes was “ahead of his time in terms of vertical integration,” says Altadena historian Michele Zack. “For a fly-by-nighter, he must have been kind of brilliant.”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/los-angeles-home-scam
#Architecture