The female prostitutes, who walk along Sepulveda, frequently stood at the corner of Kittridge, three blocks north of Victory. But now they’ve opened a branch in another location.
Their numbers have now moved south, to solicit business near the parking lot of the MTA Busway and in front of the nearby SavOn Drugs on Erwin and Sepulveda.
Several times in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen them. They look different from the usual women in this area, because they aren’t obese. All kidding aside, the Busway, while bringing a positive benefit of public transportation, has also brought along the usual social problems that accompany bus stations.
Parking lot users who exit the Busway area are prohibited from turning left, so as to spare nearby homeowners a lot of traffic. Instead, they must turn right and head east, supplying the prostitutes with a steady stream of customers at the end of the day.
The architecture of SavOn contributes to street crime by not having any clear windows overlooking Sepulveda. The typically anti-social LA style of locating the main entrance of the drug store in the rear, means that no healthy pedestrian life is possible on the sidewalk in front of the building.
Here in Van Nuys 
Many years ago, small single family homes and duplexs were replaced by all those apartment buildings. That began the downfall of Van Nuys. Cleaning up of Van Nuys would need a down zoning of all the properties that currenty have apartment buildings.
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Chesterfield-
The Kester situation is caused, I believe, by lax enforcement of the housing codes. For example, nowhere in Sherman Oaks do I see open trash dumpsters adjacent to the front of an apartment building as I do on Kester at Gilmore and Sylvan and Kester. Grafitti is a constant, but so is lack of sidewalks, of street lighting, and the owners of these buildings refuse to clean up their properties.
At the corner of Victory and Kester on the NE, there is a slum mini-mall with garbage piling up behind it. There is a van that has been parked there for three months and never has been moved. There are illegal aliens sitting on the wall, day and night. Maybe the owner could hire them to clean up the garbage around his slum mini-mall.
The condition of many homes near Kester is actually quite high and there are many well maintained homes in Van Nuys. But the busy streets such as Victory, Van Owen , Kester and Sepulveda is disgraceful. This is what the drivers see who travel through Van Nuys. This is what provides the image of Van Nuys to the Southland and helps produce a perception that we live in dump where “nobody cares”. In reality, we all care.
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I live in Van Nuys as well. For the record, I care immensly about the neighborhood. In fact, I take better care of my home than many of the people in Sherman Oaks, etc. What can we do about the over crowding in the buildings on Kester? Those buildings need to be demolished. Everytime I drive down Kester or Woodman I cringe. I can’t imagine the conditions inside. For the record, there are many people moving into Van Nuys that want the neighborhood cleaned up. My friend is a real estate agent (office in West Hollywood) and she has sold three homes in Van Nuys this year to young couples who all formerly lived in either Hollywood or Culver City. And recently a section of Van Nuys was added in the Historic Register. There’s hope yet! We need to band together!
On a different note, one of the overcrowded buildings on Valerio (near Van Nuys Blvd) is going to be turned into Condos, so that should help with the overcrowding in that area.
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Hey, now. I’m not a complete racist. Close, but not 100%.
I believe that Peter Galbraith’s concept of “private affluence and public squalor” is the key concept to understand here. Los Angeles’ late-19th/early-20th-Century fathers intensely distrusted public space, infested as it was in the cities of the Midwest and Northeast by white “ethnics,” and associated with Mexicans in the Southwest.
The city’s shortage of park space and its obsession with the single-family detached house and the private automobile are the fruits of this distrust. It’s a lot easier to ignore visual blight of the sort you see on Kester when driving past it at 25 mph than when walking by it at one-tenth the speed.
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Actually Wad, I went to Sherman Oaks yesterday and parked in a graffitti and trash filled public garage near the old La Reina theater. They don’t care about their public property in Sherman Oaks. They merely have higher property values in the homes. There is a lot of shabbiness in Sherman Oaks, from the trash along the freeways, to the crappy apartments along Woodman, Hazeltine and Sepulveda.
The worst of Van Nuys (Kester) is partially caused by slumlords who don’t live in Van Nuys, but live in Sherman Oaks and Brentwood and own property they don’t look after in our neighborhood.
I will leave it to Pete to name the ethnicity of the slumlords, but I assure you they aren’t poor Mexicans.
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That’s crap, Andrew.
The problem is vandalism and prostitution will never go away. The reason why Van Nuys gets the worst of it is because Sherman Oaks, Encino and Studio City residents care enough about their neighborhoods and won’t tolerate this stuff. The crime stays away from these areas and goes to Van Nuys, because the miscreants know that nobody cares about the neighborhood and they can run free.
If it has to stop, it should begin with you. Any other Van Nuys residents reading this should help out Andrew.
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I saw mostly black women, yes.
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are the sw mostly black?
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And adding to things like “a thousand new tags” being repainted or “whores more numerous than librarians,” it seems just about impossible for any of the various streets of Los Angeles to not invariably include the charming, attractive presence of…well…
http://www.laobserved.com/biz/2006/07/who_is_to_blame_for.php
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As you might notice I have no links to the deaf police or blind government of Los Angeles. We live in the midst of an area controlled by the insurgents, and as soon as you remove a couch or paint over a wall, a new couch appears, a thousand new tags are re-painted, cars go through red lights, dogs bark, music blasts, garbage lies in the gutter, cars sit on the street with flat tires, untowed for weeks, slumlords never fix their broken windows, and thousands of illegals live ten to a room, and whores are more numerous than librarians…….and you just become tired of it after a while.
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Ride the bus and get a BJ. I can just imagine the new ad.
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Andrew has just helped double Orange Line ridership! :>
Seriously, Andrew, speak with a commander at your police division and make contact with your council member’s office to resolve this problem. It would take a few phone calls but persistence pays off.
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Helpfully, LAPD Chief Bratton has mentioned that one of the things he’d like to see in his (presumed) second term is for the Buildings Department to adopt a set of codes for new buildings to discourage criminal activity on the streets around them, the same way that there are fire prevention and seismic safety codes. “Eyes on the street” seems to be the name of the game.
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