LAX-Adjacent Westchester is Getting Super Popular and Pricey (Up 25% Silcon Beach)
Friday, January 2, 2015, by Bianca Barraga
[Image via John Sequeira / Curbed LA flickr pool]
Redfin hasn’t come out with their Hottest Neighborhood of 2015 prediction yet, but what are the chances it could be Silicon-Beach-adjacent Westchester? The neighborhood best known for sitting next to LAX is seeing a surge in interest, a lot of it from people looking for a single-family living situation who have been priced out of nearby Venice or Santa Monica, according to the LA Times. A local real estate agent sums up the ‘hood’s appeal: “You can have a lot more house for your money. You can get a single-family home and good-sized yard.” What about those airplanes, though?
The area’s been rising strong for at least a couple years. Housing prices in Westchester have gone up 25 percent in the last two years, and in the third quarter of 2014, the median price for a single-family house hit $795,000. It’s becoming more common for houses to sell for more than $1.5 million, though the top of the area’s market sits at about $2 million. As one Westchester resident tells it, the neighborhood is so hot, even people from Brentwood are hoping to move in. Brentwood!
Those high prices are usually commanded by newer houses, so a lot of the older stock in Westchester is getting razed. Many of the 1940s- and 1950s-era one-story houses are being replaced by “fully updated two-story affairs” with open floor plans. But there’s yet to be the kind of anti-mansionization uprising that other Westside ‘hoods have seen. “There’ve been a few homes that have popped up and they really kind of max out the lot, but it hasn’t gotten bad,” says the president of the Westchester/Playa neighborhood council.
As for noise from the airport, which lies just south of Westchester, it doesn’t seem to be a big issue anymore. “[T]hose planes have gotten quieter over the years, residents and real estate agents say, and in much of the community they can barely be heard at all,” says the Times. It was unclear whether the planes have actually gotten quieter or everyone is just slowly going deaf.