The Cape Townhomes

Fourteen in-fill townhome condominiums in Tarzana, Los Angeles, 1990 to 1991, at $3,950,000. The smallest unit count of the Rigney Development era and the highest cost per home in it.

It is also the last new development that company built. The era closes the following year with The Oaks Townhomes in Encino, a two hundred and forty-four unit workout taken over for Independence Bank, and the workout is the work that shapes everything after: Los Angeles County Housing Development Corporation, then Project West, then thirteen years at AIG-SunAmerica. The Cape is the last time the job was simply to find a site and build on it.

In-fill is the through-line. Fourteen townhomes threaded into an existing Tarzana street in 1990, and seventy-two townhomes threaded into an existing Round Rock street thirty-two years later. The photograph is from the first of April 2016, twenty-five years after completion: a blue-grey row seen from across the road, hedges grown in, still doing the job.