Finding a buildable lot

We purchased a tear-down/lot in Culver City, CA, in Sept, 07. It's triangular, being at the point of two angled, intersecting streets -- what the city calls a "through lot." We were attracted to it because neither street is a through street and we will have just one adjacent neighbor. In addition it's a ten min walk from downtown, important for our preferred lifestyle.



We envisaged a 2500 sq. ft., single story house with a two car garage -- so the key question became could be build it on such a lot?

While going through the offer/acceptance process we researched the city planning regulations, particularly the impact of applying the normal setback rules to this lot. We also had meetings in order to discuss the direction we wished to develop our house design. "Direction" is the key term here as no planning dept will approve a plan without going through the full planning process and yet we only had so much time before the "no going back" phase of our offer. This particular slide became key to illustrating that direction.



We found acceptance of this direction, hearing enough assurances that left us comfortable. One key assurance was that the city applies flexibility to lots like this as they exist because of how the streets were laid out.

We had also started interviewing architects at this point so those interviews became an additional sanity check on our direction.