The Peninsula Housing Association (PHA), composed of intellectuals and liberal businessmen living near Stanford University, began collecting funds with which to buy land in 1944. The PHA hoped to set up a housing cooperative, a somewhat utopian concept, where landowners would pool their money to purchase land parcels and set up community amenities, such as meeting houses, swimming pools, tennis courts and playgrounds. The effort was to create an inter-knit sense of community more profound than typical in tract sub-divisions. The Ladera group, as it came to call itself, hired landscape designer Garrett Eckbo (1910-2000) to site their project, and architects John Funk (1908-1993) and Joseph Allen Stein to design residences. Because lenders would not make loans to tracts that did not include restrictive covenants in deeds, the Ladera experiment in cooperative housing quickly fizzled due to a lack of mortgage money. Only a few residences were erected in the late 1940s before a conventional real estate firm, Hare, Brewer and Kelley, bought the tract and finished the project. The effort by this group of idealistic liberal families paralleled other cooperative housing ventures of the same period including the Mutual Housing Association of Brentwood, Los Angeles, CA, and the Hilltop Community of Bellevue, WA. Joseph Eichler, the enlightened residential developer, created Ladera Unit 2 on some of the original PHA land.

PCAD id: 2533