In all the days since the disastrous fires destroyed vibrant and sparkling communities of people and their houses and businesses in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, flat and socially unpopular Van Nuys, miles from any combustible forests, sat silent, its empty parking lots and vacant stores along Van Nuys Boulevard mute and abandoned, its daytime as empty and lifeless as its nighttime. 

You live here and just like people anywhere yearn for the same normal things that civilized places provide: safety, cleanliness, affordability, and lawfulness. But all you get are sirens, speeding cars, helicopters at 2am, Woodley Park set ablaze monthly.

After nearly 25 years here I see nothing but decline in the environment around Van Nuys. 

The same neglected mini-mall that I complained about in 2009 is still the same trash strewn dump it always was. Its owner used to live in Bel Air. He complained about my criticism when all I asked him to do was hire a $10 an hour worker to sweep the sidewalk weekly and install a security light on the side of the building so people didn’t sleep and urinate and tag the walls. 

The stores that line Van Nuys Boulevard from Vanowen to the Oxnard are largely empty, many are built with gigantic parking lots behind them that are also empty, parking for thousands of cars that once shopped here, but those shoppers have left or died.

The Valley Municipal Building is where CD 6 Councilwoman Imelda Padilla reigns over the neglect and the ugliness. She replaced Nury Martinez who had to resign in disgrace after she was recorded by covert means saying ethnically insulting things about other Angelenos. Martinez came after Cardenas who went to Congress where he now serves.

Cardenas, Martinez, Padilla. It sounds like a nursery rhyme with its melodic Spanish surnames. It might well be a soundtrack set to an ever- present social disaster of Van Nuys with its hundreds of homeless sleeping in the plaza, along the Orange Line, or in the parking lot of the CVS on Erwin Street. 

How is it that the so-called heart of the San Fernando Valley, the place that once bustled with prosperity and good infrastructure, including light rail and neatly tended homes and businesses, has been allowed to die for so many decades? 

Is it callous to also point out that Van Nuys is less prone to fire than other areas that have boomed in recent decades? Would Van Nuys Boulevard, lined with 13-story tall Park Avenue apartment houses be a higher fire risk than thousands of wooden McMansions shoved up canyons in Bel Air, Brentwood, Malibu and the Palisades?

And when Van Nuys gets light rail, might it be possible to imagine a walkable, pleasant, less expensive part of Los Angeles where the vaunted word diversity can be used equitably as all types of inclusion would occur with young, old, well-off, not so well-off, living in nice apartments with patrolled and orderly parks and streets? 

Perhaps some of the displaced people would live in well-maintained buildings if such a thing existed in Van Nuys. 

With so much focus on rebuilding Los Angeles a good place to start an experiment in civilization would be Van Nuys. It’s the only corpse that has been screaming for rescue for decades.