The cottage-like downtown of Carmel-by-the-Sea (Photo courtesy of the Monterey County Convention and Visitors Bureau)

To the tourists who jam its streets every summer, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., is a fairyland of Hansel-and-Gretel shops and restaurants near a beach of impeccably white sand.

To the people who live there, in neighborhoods that form an open-air museum of arts and crafts buildings, Carmel is a way of life.

But it's a lifestyle intimately tied to the town's physical makeup—its simple, often-handmade cottages nestled in a forest of live oak and Monterey pines. Its residential streets lack sidewalks and streetlights because both are banned. Instead of street numbers, houses display names like No Worries, Lilliput, or Dog House.

"It retains the structure, the tempo, the metabolism, of another century," says J.S. Holliday, a historian and author who lives on Professors' Row, named after the Stanford and Berkeley professors who built vacation homes there in the 1920s and '30s. "This town is quiet and calm and mellow and comfortable and gentle. Those are good words, and they don't apply to many places."

The connection between the look of the town—a "village in a forest," as it's called—and its way of life explains the anger many residents feel when large suburban tract homes replace 1,000-square-foot board-and-batten cottages.

In March, after years of negotiations, the city of Carmel-by-the-Sea and the California Coastal Commission agreed on the outline of a plan to preserve the city's character. Although the agreement pleases many local preservationists, they plan to keep an eye on the city's ordinances that will turn the plan into action. In the past, they say, enforcement of design rules has been weak.

In fact, the city council often overruled planners, approving demolitions and remodels that were, in effect, demolitions, says Enid Sales, director of the Carmel Preservation Foundation. As a result, the city has lost many of its historic cottages. "My lord, it's been like a house of cards here," Sales says.

In the late 1990s, the Coastal Commission, which oversees development of the state's 1,000-mile coastline, became concerned after noticing how many of Carmel's historic cottages were being demolished. Between 1973 and 1990, the commission received applications for only 23 demolition permits. In the '90s, applications increased to an average of 13 per year, and by 2000, applications for demolitions or substantial rebuilding ballooned to 33.

The commission got involved because the state's 1976 Coastal Act named Carmel a "special community" of more than local importance. "Its charm and character enjoy international reputation," says the commission's executive director, Peter Douglas.

So the commission decided in the late 1990s that, until Carmel prepared an acceptable local coastal plan, to give more scrutiny to proposed demolitions. Since then, it has approved only a few. Once it accepts the city's ordinances, the commission will no longer oversee demolitions. (It will, however, continue to oversee development within a few hundred feet of the shore.)  

As city and commission officials hashed out the plan during many hearings, preservationists fought for design controls, a powerful historic-preservation board, and tough enforcement. "We worked really hard on this," Sales says, "and I think it turned out well."

Among the changes that preservationists applauded were requirements that houses "maintain Carmel's enduring principles of modesty and simplicity," bans on "excess mass," greater protection for trees, regular updating of the historic-building inventory, and new incentives for owners to preserve historic buildings. Still, they would like stronger rules to protect the city's historic commercial district on Ocean Avenue.

However, the commission refused to back its staff's proposal that houses on Carmel's standard 4,000-square-foot-lots be limited to 1,600 square feet (with 200 feet of that reserved for a garage). They opted instead for a 1,800-square-foot limit, arguing that it would provide more room for families. Preservationists said the larger homes would destroy trees and harm community character. Besides, they noted, only 12 percent of Carmel's families have children under the age of 18.

"The housing market is not family-driven," Barbara Livingston, Carmel's only fervently preservationist member of the city council told the commission. "Don't fall for that mom-and-apple-pie stuff. Families unfortunately cannot afford to live in Carmel. Investors are buying up second homes because real estate is more profitable than the stock market."

"If Carmel's founders should return, they could not afford to live there." —John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Created at the beginning of the 20th century by a developer who marketed the community to artists, writers and professors, Carmel contains functional board-and-batten cottages, whimsical medieval fantasies by architect High Comstock, massive stone piles including poet Robinson Jeffer's Tor House (now a museum), a house sheathed in bark and another built entirely of doors, Craftsman architect Charles Greene's studio, and Wright's ship-like Walker House.

The town of 4,000 has retained much of its artistic and professorial air, although, with few homes priced for less than $1 million and some for much more, few young artists move in today. Thus, Carmel has become largely a retirement community that mixes longtime residents with newcomers who often occupy their homes only during vacation.

"You get the ones who just love this community and come here and understand why they bought here and understand the ethics, so to speak, of Carmel," says preservationist Melanie Billig. "And then there are the others who come here from suburbia and then once they get here all of a sudden they want to bring all the accoutrements of suburbia to Carmel. And we all don't like that."

Carmel's cottages are much smaller than most $1 million homebuyers are used to. J.S. Holliday and his wife, Belinda, watched in awe as the house next door ballooned in size during a million-dollar renovation and then wondered when they would meet their new neighbors. The house is almost always dark, like so many others on their once-vibrant street.

Absentee owners hurt the sense of community, Holliday says, but they don't kill it. "There are many remarkable people who are rooted and flowering in Carmel," he says.

David Weinstein is a freelance writer living in California and a founder of Friends of the Cerrito Theater.

This story was originally published on Preservation Online on March 28, 2003.

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