Find Out If You’ll Like Living in the Neighborhood <i> Before</i> You Make Home Purchase

You’ve found the perfect house. You’re calling in the experts to inspect it, roof to foundation, to make certain it’s as perfect as it seems.

While the inspectors are elbowing through crawl spaces, turning flashlights on dark corners, you should be doing a little inspecting yourself: sizing up the neighborhood to see if it’s as perfect as it seems.

Noisy neighbors, parking problems, the apartment or condo building next door--they can make or break the tranquillity of life in your new nest more than a leaky roof can. You can fix a roof. But you have no control over who parks in front of your house, the weekend woodworker next door, the shadow an apartment house casts over the yard where you envision your vegetable garden.

Sizing up the neighborhood involves a three-pronged approach: driving the area, making a few phone calls and, most important, knocking on doors to ask neighbors for their assessment of life on the street. The talk-to-the-neighbors strategy works best if you talk to more than one and you size up the neighbors before you knock.

“Pick out the nice houses,” said Ron Capotosto, general manager of Re/Max Masters Real Estate in Covina. “Talk to neighbors who keep up the paint and the landscaping.” Don’t knock where there are weeds, cars on the lawn or a heavy-metal band practicing in the garage.

“People are usually very helpful and willing to talk,” said Fran Flanagan, a regional manager for Jon Douglas Realty in Brentwood. “Ask them what they think are the pros and cons to living on the street. And if there’s a (neighborhood) association, call the president and ask for an assessment.”

Here are 10 areas to think about when you’re sizing up a new neighborhood:

1--Pride of ownership. Look carefully at how neighbors take care of their homes and yards. “You have no control over neighbors,” said Capotosto, “only over the house you’re buying.” After you’ve fixed your roof, landscaped your front yard, painted your house, you still have to look at theirs. It’s the house across the street that you’ll see when you open you door every morning.

How are the other homes maintained. “Is it Christmas in July? Are the lights still up?” Capotosto asks. This may be a sign of a general lack of interest in keeping property in tip-top condition.

Temmi Walker, president of James R. Gary & Co. Ltd. East in Studio City, points out that some year-round lights in hard-to-get-to-but-inconspicuous places are not as serious an infraction of the pride-of-ownership code as those left around the front door.

Are there cars parked on the front lawn? Walker says that she’s seen cars parked on the lawns in the best of neighborhoods “and it really drags it down.” A good detective looks farther: car tracks on the grass, heavy oil drips in the driveway. Someone who doesn’t maintain a car may not maintain a house.

If there’s an alley behind the house, drive down it. In many areas, alleys are maintained by the people who live adjoining them. Cynthia Szegeti, an actress who recently bought a home in North Hollywood, drove the alley behind the house she was interested in buying. She noticed that it was kept immaculately clean--by the residents who would be her immediate neighbors. Good sign. Driving the next alley a block away, she discovered debris and garbage strewn down the block. “The contrast was startling,” Szegeti said.

2--Traffic. Are there traffic lights at either end of the block? A stoplight is there for a reason: to control traffic. So ask yourself: what traffic? The light may have been installed to allow pedestrians to cross the street safely between two faraway intersections.

Or it could indicate that the street bears the brunt of traffic in an otherwise tranquil, residential neighborhood. Your quiet little street may be a nightmare at rush hour. Traffic backed up half a block. Drivers speeding up to catch a green light.

In the Larchmont area of Los Angeles, there are five quiet streets north of Beverly Boulevard that seem almost interchangeable at quick glance: modest, one-story houses on all of them. But one, Windsor Boulevard, has a stoplight at both Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard.

The light at Beverly is mostly a convenience to pedestrians. But three blocks away, at the Melrose light, is the main gate to Paramount Studios. Residents on Windsor must live with the considerable traffic generated by Paramount employees and visitors. Homeowners a block away are oblivious.

Is there a “Paramount gate” in your prospective neighborhood? Do college students use your block to cut to and from campus? Are you fronting a not-so-secret shortcut to the freeway? Consider both the amount of traffic and the speed. Do the stoplights encourage drivers to drive faster or slower?

When Enrique and Ana Maria Villasenor fell in love with a 1920s English Tudor house in San Fernando, they began sizing up the neighborhood by studying traffic in the area. “We went at different times and on different days to see traffic patterns,” said Enrique Villasenor, a teacher adviser with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Noticing increased traffic during morning rush hour, they asked several neighbors about it. “We were told that commuters often used the street to connect between Glenoaks and San Fernando,” he said. The couple found the traffic minimal the rest of the time and decided that it was something they could live with (which has proven to be the case).

3--Noise. Drum sets in a neighbor’s back bedroom? Table saws buzzing every Saturday afternoon in the garage across the street (door open)? Dobermans barking all night?

While there are legal recourses to dealing with some noise problems, they are usually limited to intrusions during traditional sleeping hours (dogs barking at midnight; all-night parties). Dealing with over-zealous wood-shop hobbyists or teens with heavy-metal bands can be tricky. Either way, do you want to put the energy into dealing with chronic noise offenders? It can quickly sour your good feelings about your new home.

While you can’t guarantee a noise-free neighborhood forever, you can cut your risks by asking neighbors specifically about dogs, buzz saws, stereos and other nuisances. Do helicopters frequently circle overhead at night? The Villasenors’ future neighbors knew that members of a rock band lived around the corner. They also knew that the house was completely soundproofed and no one heard them practicing.

When Walker bought her first house in Chicago in 1960, she found the neighborhood very quiet on the weekends she was there before buying it. When she moved in, she discovered that the house was directly under the flight pattern to O’Hare airport (“I could shake hands with the pilot,” she said.) with planes landing every 30 seconds starting at 7 a.m. on weekdays. If she’d knocked on a few doors before buying, she’d have learned what was in store.

These days, sellers are required to disclose any noise problems. “But noise is very subjective,” said Flanagan. “That’s why you have to go yourself and check it out.” For some people, even a fountain gurgling in a yard across the street can be jarring. Asking about noise is especially important if you or family members sleep at odd hours: day sleepers, napping children.

Besides airport noise (not limited to Los Angeles International Airport; dozens of small airports are capable of generating enough noise to make your life miserable), what about helicopters, buses, trucks and trains? Are they close enough to bother you? Railroad tracks, even 10 blocks away, can be clues to a sleep-robbing 5:30 a.m. train.

4--Parking. You want to know two things: Who parks on your street and where will your guests park? Driving the neighborhood, several blocks in all directions, will alert you to possible problems: churches, schools, restaurants, shopping malls, theaters, apartment complexes. Canvas the area during work hours, weeknights and on weekends to rule out heavy parking problems that occur only at certain times. A busy restaurant two blocks away may generate no parking during the day but after six, valets may run a shuttle back and forth 50 feet from your front door.

You may discover a park a block away from your prospective home and think “what a bonus”--a bonus on a Tuesday morning when a few mothers are leisurely swinging their children on the playground. Will it feel so good on weekends when the park is packed? Do park-goers park on your street, blast boom boxes, gather in menacing groups? The only way to know is to sleuth the area on a busy park day.

Shopping malls and large schools can cause parking problems several blocks away. If the house is close to a school, drive around when school is in session. Residents on blocks adjacent to malls and schools may have instigated special parking districts (restricting parking or limiting it to residents with permits) causing shoppers or students to park blocks away.

If your block has restricted parking, how will that affect you? Some residents feel such a cure is worse than the disease. Sure, movie-goers or students may be kept away but your guests, abiding by the same restrictions, must park in your driveway, run inside for a temporary permit to put on the dashboard or be otherwise inconvenienced. How will the parking restrictions affect you? If you have a barbecue on the Fourth of July or a 5-year-old’s birthday party, where will everyone park?

5--Crime. “There are no low-crime areas in this town,” said Walker, “only medium-to-high crime areas.” Real estate agents steer clear of discussions of crime with their clients. Instead, they will suggest calling the local police department for an assessment. Do it.

Ana Maria Villasenor, a preschool teacher, called the police officer in charge of the Neighborhood Watch program in the San Fernando neighborhood they were considering. The officer knew the area well and was able to tell her that there were no significant crime problems. Buyers should ask about patterns, statistics, not a lurid double murder down the block. “Ask if a lot of cars are stolen around there,” Walker suggested.

Ask neighbors about crime and police response time. Do the police come when called? How safe do neighbors feel? How do they live their lives--behind bars and mean-looking fences? Does the neighborhood look under siege?

“There’s a junior high three blocks away,” Villasenor said. “We asked the neighbors if that was a problem. Kids that age can get a little wild sometimes.” No problems reported.

6--Neighbors. Who lives on the block? Definitions of “ideal” neighbors vary considerably. Are you looking for a friendly borrow-a-cup-of-sugar neighborhood, where there’s a lot of visiting back and forth? Would you rather be where people keep to themselves? Or a midway point: where neighbors introduce themselves and wave but that’s about it? Good for emergencies but not much camaraderie.

“For us, it was important to live in a mixed community, ethnically and economically,” Villasenor said. “‘We liked what we saw. The street is also mixed age-wise--we have a 90-year-old lady living across the street and the neighborhood has lots of kids.”

Look for a general population of children in the neighborhood. Individual children come and go and even the ones that stay may not turn into playmates. “When we bought our home in Tarzana,” Walker said, “there were three girls on the block, the same ages as mine. They never did get along.”

Drive the neighborhood before and after work and on weekends you’ll see who your new neighbors might be. In mid-afternoon, you’ll see children coming home from school. At other times of the day, you might see clues (bicycles, toys) but not people.

Flanagan suggests “asking neighbors if any homes are used for other purposes such as meetings or nursery schools and if that’s been a problem.”

7--Neighborhood services. How easy will it be to run errands? Where will you be doing most of your grocery shopping? Will you feel safe running over to the neighborhood 7-Eleven for milk on a Saturday night? Are there dry cleaners, video stores, hardware, fast food outlets? Make a list of the services and stores you frequent in your present neighborhood and investigate their counterparts in your prospective area.

If you’re moving from an area rife with yogurt shops, bookstores, sports clubs, coffee houses and other treats that you’ve come to regard as essential to a well-rounded lifestyle, will you find them in your new neighborhood? Or will you feel so parched for a sense of culture and the arts that you’ll wind up driving long distances on weekends to keep up the life you love?

If you have young children, are you near a Chuck E. Cheese’s? Just a joke. Is it easy to run out for a package of diapers or a box of cereal? Are there parks nearby? Do local families feel comfortable using them on sunny afternoons or have they been written off as gang territory by the neighbors?

8--Neighborhood stability. Is the block stable or in transition? If you like the makeup of the neighborhood, you want it to stay that way for awhile.

“Are there a lot of ‘For Sale’ signs on the front lawns?” Flanagan asked. “Find out why.” Is it typical of the times or particular to this neighborhood?

“Perhaps the neighborhood has had a lot of older owners who are moving on with young families moving in,” Flanagan pointed out. “That may be to your advantage if you have young children.” Or those signs may mean that people don’t tend to stay long in the neighborhood. Ask the neighbors if there’s been a lot of turnover in homes recently and what they think the reasons are.

9--Apartments (or condos) on your block. You may have lived in an apartment for most of your life and then suddenly, when you’re buying a house, you don’t want any apartment buildings on the block. Elitist? Well, a little. But practical. Apartments and condos are higher-density housing than single-family housing: more people, more cars, more visitors, more potential for noise.

“We noticed a small apartment building on the block,” said Villasenor, “built before zoning changed. We asked around and found that neighbors felt the building was well-maintained and there’d been no problem with the tenants.” Some apartments are occupied by long-term, responsible tenants who contribute positively to the neighborhood; others may have less caring tenants and have a high turn-over rate.

If there’s an apartment or condo complex close by, figure out if they cast unwanted shade on the property. Does the pool or other facility generate noise?

10--Future development. Commercial development and new housing starts may be sluggish now, but when they pick up again, how might that affect the properties in the area?

“In an area where half the homes have been upgraded,” said Walker, “and half haven’t, you can be sure that once the economy gets going again, those houses will be upgraded.” Maybe that prediction appeals to you. Or maybe the area is appealing because of the small, older houses on large lots. Will monstrous, over-scaled-but-meeting-code remodels take over the block? Is this neighborhood ripe for that kind of change?

And remember that “any empty lot will be built on eventually,” Walker said. Don’t buy a house because of the empty lot next door or to the rear--unless you buy that lot too.

John Spear, a broker associate with Mulhearn Realtors in Lakewood, bought the “top condo in Signal Hill five years ago for its fantastic, panoramic views.” It had a vacant lot next door. Knowing enough to check with the zoning department, Spear learned it was zoned for a single-family house which, if built, he calculated would not be a view-buster.

After Spear moved in, the property changed hands and the new owners were able to get the property rezoned to allow a two-story duplex to be built on it. When finished, the duplex will block 75% of his view (“It’ll wipe out Catalina,” he said). The moral, according to Spear: An empty lot next door is never a given.