Ask the desk

The desk answers readers' questions about the houses and blocks of Northeast Los Angeles. A question becomes a slip, a slip becomes an answer, and the answer is filed on a shelf where the next reader can pull it.

What makes a good slip

A good slip is one question, asked plainly, about something real: a house type you keep seeing on your street, a hillside lot you are trying to read, a word on a disclosure you do not understand, a line on a ZIMAS report. The narrower the question, the better the answer. The desk answers questions about houses, hills, escrows and permits, the four shelves, and says so on the slip when a question belongs somewhere else.

What the desk does with a question

Every question is read by the keeper of the desk. If it can be answered from the public record, planning documents, assessor rolls, preservation-zone minutes, survey maps, it is written up, dated and filed with a call number. Questions the record cannot answer come back to the reader with a note saying where the record stops.

Leaving a question

Write to the desk at [email protected]. Give the question in a sentence or two, and name the street or the neighborhood if it helps the answer. The desk reads the mail in order and files new slips as the answers are finished.