LA's famously bizarre apartments could never be built today

If you roam around Los Angeles for long enough, you'll start to notice the smattering of apartment buildings nestled all around town that look like they just burst out of a time capsule . These squat buildings, simple two or three-story structures built in the mid-century modern style often with carports tucked underneath them, are ubiquitous sights — even within the disparate set of communities, individual cities and unincorporated areas that make up Los Angeles County, from Gardena to Glendale.

These units are known as "dingbat"-style apartments — and that's not a slight, that's what they're called apparently because of the midcentury-esque visual motifs on their exterior. Many even have a name nailed to the side in large, curving fonts. There's The Hauser and Hauser Havens, both nods to their micro-neighborhoods, and then there's the famous Chee-Zee and Crapi (yep, Crapi) apartment buildings, both in Palms. The uniquely Southern California living spaces became extremely popular in the 1950s as a solution to the region's need for housing after World War II.

While LA is still home to tens of thousands of dingbat apartment buildings, inhabited by countless Angelenos and often rent-stabilized (as most were built before 1978), they're a dying breed — and effectively impossible to build in the same way ever again.

But that hasn't stopped many dingbats from sticking around, becoming visual icons in the process — one local artist has even immortalized them as miniatures. But even in a city that loves to pave itself over and over again, how have the dingbats remained unusually ubiquitous?

Back in the 1950s, LA had a rapidly expanding postwar population in dire need of housing. The solution for dense urban housing came when developers — taking advantage of updated zoning regulations and different building materials, notes LA Conservancy — quickly built efficient, cost-effective apartments: the dingbats. While dingbats had existed before that decade, they exploded in popularity then, says architect Thurman Grant, of Grant Gillis Architecture. From "basically the mid '50s and the mid '60s," Grant says, "the code correlation between parking space requirements and units and bedrooms coalesced into this ideal formula so that you could have a densely packed building." They were inexpensive to build, given their no-frills exteriors and bare-bones interiors, and often only took up the same lot size as a single-family home. Plus, they came with built-in off-street parking.

According to Bloomberg, more than 700,000 dingbats went up all across LA County during that decade and through the 1960s, and tens of thousands of young families and couples moved in. Grant says that this "hyper-efficient model for just cramming in as many units" as possible earned the living spaces nicknames like six-pack, eight-pack and 12-pack. (The term "dingbat" is often credited to Reyner Banham, who popularized it a bit later in his landmark 1971 architectural study "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.")

BEST OF SFGATE

| The smallest park in San Francisco is also the most haunted | To hike this Calif. wonder, you need to climb a bunch of ladders | I went to Gravity Hill, the Bay Area's most confusing road | The story of the Bay Area man who still runs the first-ever Round Table Pizza

The aesthetic preferences of the 1950s are all over the dingbats' DNA. It's immediately evident from the visual outdoor flourishes adorning these apartments and their kitschy names that they are meant to be striking and noticeable from the road. The exterior motifs range from geometric patterns to atomic-esque icons to, as this deep dive from Metamodernism on YouTube notes, more unexpected themes like the Cuban Revolution.

Not everyone loved the look of these buildings: Local architects were particularly outspoken about their dingbat hate, calling them blights on the city.

But the dingbats had bigger problems that emerged as the years went on. In 1964, the Los Angeles Planning Commission changed parking spot requirements to be based on "habitable rooms," i.e. living rooms and bedrooms, Grant says. That meant that most apartments would now need more than one parking spot per unit — posing an issue for the dingbats, historically built with one spot slotted per apartment. "While some developers shifted towards only including studio and one-bedroom apartments, that proved unpopular and the dingbat type trickled out," Grant says.

Around that same time, a new ordinance banned cars from backing out of residential building carports and directly into the street — but many dingbats happened to feature parking spots right up front, built into the square footage of the building. That meant those looking to build dingbats had to construct new parking levels instead, which proved to be exorbitantly expensive. "The added cost of that just made it not economically viable to do that on a single lot," Grant says. That change, combined with the parking spot ordinance, "probably killed" off the dingbats in their original incarnation, he adds.

Then there's the fact that dingbats tended to fare disastrously during earthquakes. During the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake, a slew of dingbats cratered, notes Fast Company , their carport poles unable to bear the shaking and weight from the housing unit above. As earthquake awareness — and preparedness — grew in the wake of that disaster, there has been a more widespread effort to seismically retrofit older buildings. (Retrofits are now required for buildings , like dingbats, that have what's known as "tuck-under" parking.)

Imperfect as they were, the dingbats did respond to a very real shortage in affordable living spaces across the city. In recent years, some have wondered whether revisiting and updating the dingbat model could potentially help assuage the area's contemporary housing crisis. Plus, as some argue, they offer an alternative look to the ubiquitous 5-over-1 mid-rise apartment buildings that have begun to crop up everywhere in California.

In 2010, Grant helped helm an architectural competition that re-envisioned the dingbat for the 21st century, and submitted concepts, essays, and other materials were collated into the publication "Dingbat 2.0." Some ideas involved making use of ADUs, or accessory dwelling units, that can exist alongside apartments. Interestingly, "some of the ideas that came out in the competition in 2010 you can do now," thanks to new legislation regarding ADUs, Grant adds. "You can fill in carports, vacate the parking requirement, or build on top."

But, as Urbanize LA notes , it's now challenging, if not impossible, to build some of LA's most recognizable building structures today. That ranges from dingbats to bungalow courts — the same buildings that distinguish the city from any other place in the world.