The beachfront city of Santa Monica, California, with its stylishly laid-back restaurants and hotels, plus freeway access to downtown Los Angeles, may not seem the obvious place for affordable housing.

The 28th Street YMCA opened in Los Angeles in 1926 on an upbeat: the Spanish Colonial Revival building offered the African-American community a sparkling recreational facility with an indoor pool and affordable accommodations for young men who were migrating from other regions (and prevented by color barriers from staying at ordinary hotels).

Back in 1975, when the Eden Institute was founded in a New Jersey church basement to serve children with autism, the disorder was considered relatively rare, then estimated at a nationwide rate of 1 in 10,000 births.

When architect-developer Jonathan Segal named one of his recent buildings “The Q,” he says he was looking for “the cool factor, the debonair suaveness” of James Bond.

Step through the filigreed entry gates, and you've clearly entered another world.

A 1960s postcard shows a Newport Beach, California, building in its early heyday.

Just a few years ago, the idea of planting a hip, upscale restaurant on a sleepy alley in San Francisco's China Basin neighborhood might have seemed nuts.