This past Sunday, many residents of the Bassett/Cedros neighborhood in Van Nuys, whose homes are under the threat of LAUSD condemnation, held a block party in unity against the plan to destroy their neighborhood. LAUSD wants to build a school on this land using bulldozers, attorneys and eminent domain.
I met people who have lived there for many years, an island of stability surrounded by the blight of Van Nuys. I was shown around the home of Norma Jean, who moved here in 1970, and is now leading an effort to fight the death ray aimed at her pocket by the massive money machine of LAUSD invaders.
Van Nuys has many, many undesirable slum apartments and broken down mini-malls covered in trash, graffiti and obsolescence. There are enormous industrial areas, empty parking lots, vast sections of junk along Sepulveda, Vanowen and Van Nuys Boulevard. The entire area needs new housing and schools, which naturally should be built in conjunction.
Drug dealers, gang bangers, prostitutes and illegal immigrants who pack the third world apartments will be left alone…..while hard-working homeowners are kicked out! How can this benefit Los Angeles?
Somehow the city thinks that tearing down a longtime village full of elderly and struggling middle-class homeowners is desirable.
Shame on LAUSD, shame on Mayor Villaraigosa and shame on anyone who can turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the insanity of clearing out neatly kept homes and paying rock bottom prices to those “grateful” enough to take the money for what they have saved their entire lives to keep.
Here in Van Nuys 
While I hope we don’t reach the point where every siting of a school is opposed , we should also not be allowing, without protest, the destruction of the homes of 22 families, for “the greater good”. Everything political is always tagged for “the greater good” including taxes, pre-emptive war, and even the right to own a gun. Despite the fact that real people suffer senselessly just because a more powerful and less responsive government deems it so.
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It’s unfair to say “shame on Mayor Villaraigosa” because the City government is completely seperate from LAUSD and does not have to consult the City when it sites schools. I assume that the City’s planners would say the same thing you are — locate the school in an area in need of redevelopment — but those areas are probably zoned for multi-family, commercial, or industrial. Parcels zoned for single-family use are cheaper, so LAUSD builds where it can save money.
A lot of people criticize Mayor Villaraigosa’s plan to take over LAUSD because they think he simply wants power over the construction budget. I think (at least hope) that part of the motivation is that City planners can have control over LAUSD real estate decisions.
Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the argument you are making now was made against a different “public purpose,” the freeway system. Caltrans seemed all powerful, so these protests by “working homeowners” mattered little, but the political climate changed in the 1970’s and CEQA came into effect. After the costly consent decree that allowed construction of the Century Freeway (105), Caltrans simply stopped building new freeways in L.A. One can argue that the City is worse off because many freeways were never built; however, freeways aren’t necessary. Schools are. This town will never build the political will to stop new school construction in the way it stopped new freeway construction.
There are other concerns too. Do the hard-working people living in “third world apartments” have less of a right to stay in their homes than hard-working homeowners? By opening up school siting to (potentially) greater public scrutiny, even hearings, and asking the Mayor and City Council to intervene, aren’t we opening the doors for NIMBYism and petty politics? It’s one thing for the government apparatus to delay the construction of an apartment tower or shopping center and quite another for it to delay the construction of a school that children need.
As always, the needs of the greater public must be balanced against the needs of individuals. That’s what urban planning is all about.
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