Where the Suburbs End

A single-family home from the 1950s is now a rental complex and a vision of California’s future.

By Conor Dougherty

Sixty-five years later, Margie Coats, 79, still remembers the tour. Her father drove the six of them — two parents, four sisters — to a weekend showing where in her teenage naïveté she asked a salesperson if the furniture was included. The family paid $13,250 for Lot 118 and a year later moved into 5120 Baxter Street. This was in 1957, back when the surrounding Clairemont neighborhood was booming with new subdivisions and mass-produced suburbs were still a national experiment.

Neighbors in Clairemont Villas picked from a selection of four ranch houses that had the same cabinets, similar floor plans and an option to add a washing machine. (Clothes still had to be dried on a line.) Most of the residents were young families with parents who worked a mix of trade and professional jobs that had roughly the same paychecks.

Ms. Coats’s father, Paul Shannon, was an aeronautical engineer who had left the Navy to work in private defense. This afforded them the relative affluence of a four-bedroom house with a yard that was bigger than any of their neighbors’. It became the block’s social center.

“That was where everybody congregated on the weekends,” Ms. Coats said. “People would pitch in: Somebody would bring beer, somebody would bring hamburgers, somebody would bring hot dogs, and we would just all gather.”

Ms. Coats has not ventured far since: She moved about 40 feet away and has spent almost her entire adult life living across the street from her childhood home. Her former yard is the first thing she sees whenever she leaves the house, a view that allowed her to follow the daily progress of a construction project that over the past few months transformed 5120 Baxter from the suburban vision of the 1950s to a projection of California’s tighter, taller future.

In June, as Ms. Coats told me about the house and the neighborhood from her doorstep, she gazed toward a fresh foundation that had entombed the back half of Lot 118 in concrete. Over the next few weeks, a construction crew erected a two-story building that filled in a green rectangle from the Clairemont Villas brochure. A few feet away, the original four-bedroom house was loudly gut-renovated into a pair of apartments.