Recently, our neighborhood found out that the owner of a vacant parcel of land wants to construct a single-family home in our area of single-family homes.
Frightened, angered, upset, scared were many longtime residents who saw the picture of the house with four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two-car garage.
And rightfully so, for they have seen that single-family houses are a great blight. They produce divorces, affairs, bankruptcies, child abuse, and unemployment as owners struggle to pay mortgages.
LAPD is often called out, and has been for many years, to answer calls at single-family homes, many of which are occupied by people who are battling addiction, depression, and a lack of joy which comes from keeping up a single-family home.
Many of these single-family homes are contributors to traffic, with five, six or even seven vehicles registered at one house. They are environmental disasters with their wasteful use of water for landscaping, for pools, and for the many long showers people who live in these homes take.
On the news, fire season has seen the burning of these houses, and the many millions of dollars in resources it takes to protect houses. Firefighters and other first responders put their lives on the line defending single-family houses.
Unregulated procreation often occurs behind closed doors and draped windows which produces children who clog our schools and clutter our roads, impeding traffic. Single family homes, with their many rooms, encourage child production, and this has a negative effect on our ailing schools with their bloated budgets.
News stories often feature drive by shootings at single family homes, as well as hostage taking, and there are neighborhoods all over the Southland which constantly are battling violent incidents at single-family homes.
Some single-family homes have unrelated adults living together in sober living houses, and other single-family houses even have unrelated adults sleeping under one roof, a clear violation of moral and ethical traditions.
So we are organizing a demonstration next week to try and prevent yet another one of these despicable types of housing from blighting our neighborhood.
We will have a protest. And many people will come with signs and scream loudly so that we are not subjected to the unwanted intrusion of yet another home, for someone we don’t know and we imagine we will grow to hate.
In early 1993, I was visiting Larry and Kay, who lived in a beautiful home in Woodland Hills, south of Ventura, of course. They were around the corner from the last large orange grove in the San Fernando Valley.
They were Hollywood people, who had moved out to the SFV, in the late 1960s, from Michigan.
The husband was a TV producer who had success on ABC in the 1970s. The wife played tennis with “Happy Days” star Marion Ross. They had three children. I was friends with their middle daughter Beth, who I had gone to college with.
Their house was up on a hill, atop a long driveway, in a bed of ivy and surrounded by mature trees. There was a large, life-sized cow in front, so you were assured this was a place of wit and irony.
The expansive, beamed, rustically casual interior with a wall of patio facing French doors was paved with polished bricks. A two-story tall front hall, with plants growing up to the ceiling along an open riser staircase, extended back into an amorphous pool that was surrounded by terraced, green hillside and more vintage signs from old roadside advertising.
That year I was considering moving from New York City to Los Angeles. And then, the next year, I did.
The husband was a gregarious, self-confident, big Midwesterner who liked practical jokes, loved making television, and loved Los Angeles. He would have made a good poster child for the LA Chamber of Commerce: family man, in a spectacular house, having fun earning a living in entertainment.
During one conversation Larry said he liked LA because when you drove to the airport “you never had to go through a bad neighborhood.”
Kay said she loved LA because she loved her house, “It’s paradise here in my home and garden,” she said.
I thought then, 26 years ago, how odd and how normal these remarks were, how characteristic of Los Angeles, and a certain kind of person these impressions of life here were. For who would argue, especially in 1993, that a nice home was not the entire object of life and the culmination of Los Angeles dream?
Who cared if there was nowhere to walk, if “Main Street” was a 15-mile-long wreckage of parking lots, junk food, car washes, shopping centers and ugliness; and your downtown was a vacated, forgotten and despised urban renewal zone, strangled by bad air and wide freeways, where lost people wandered aimlessly?
And you never knew your neighbors’ names, and you only saw them from behind your tinted, electric windows.
If you bought a nice ranch house south of Ventura Blvd. you were really set. The city and its attributes or lack thereof were of no importance. The sun always shined on your pool and your garden.
I have lived in this city more years than other city, and still I wonder what I am doing here.
Like Larry and Kay I have a nice house, perhaps not on the scale of their house, but it’s a good, clean, comfortable house, and I like it.
But beyond this house, a few houses down, here in Van Nuys, one encounters a city where 58,000 people live on the streets, and traffic, billboards, mini-malls, illegal dumping, air pollution, and crime are profuse.
A great house would be a great if it were in a great city that took great care of its environment.
The Perfect House could never exist in a city where 90% of the people who can, drive their children to schools in other school districts, because the local schools are inferior, because the nearby, walkable schools are populated by less advantaged kids. What fine city sends its’ kids far away to go to schools in other places?
In our city, desperate for housing, people with homes protest housing for homeless seniors. It reminds me of a man with epilepsy, and an autistic boy, who protested a memory care facility for Alzheimer’s patients near his home in NJ.
The Perfect House would not exist in a city with scattered, garbage-filled carts on sidewalks. And a bus bench shelter was not for bus riders, but a bed for a man without a bedroom.
Los Angeles promotes self-destruction of self and city as public policy. It allows vagrancy, dumping and human defecation into local rivers that empty into the ocean. And its leaders ask you to understand and accept the degradation of a city as the natural order of business.
Straws are banned, smoking is banned, but tens of thousands of trash campers can set up their tents anywhere in Los Angeles.
How are we not calling this an emergency?
14030 Valley Vista, Sherman Oaks, CA. by Gal Harpaz.
In the photo above is a version of The Perfect House at 14030 Valley Vista, Sherman Oaks, CA by Gal Harpaz, photographer.
The architect was born in Ferrara, Italy, a Jew who escaped when Mussolini came to power. Edgardo Contini, (1914-90) who was a founder of Gruen Associates and a planner in many projects in this city including the Pacific Design Center, the Fox Hills Mall as well as President of the Urban Innovations Group, the practicing arm of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He worked with Architect Charles Moore and participated in the Grand Avenue proposal for California Plaza on Bunker Hill.[2]
And during his lifetime in Los Angeles, Mr. Contini seemed to think that this city was in need of urban preservation, reuse of older buildings rather than outward sprawl. He wanted to end our wasteful, continual destruction of historical structures and our voracious consumption of wild lands and agricultural fields beyond the city.
He saw Los Angeles as more than the ideal house. He imagined a city where the health and well being of all was the optimal.
What would he think of Studio City today where $3 million dollar houses are constructed steps away from people sleeping on mattresses along the LA River? Or of Van Nuys Boulevard with its’ boarded up businesses, homeless encampments, and dismal condition?
In 1972, he wrote, “We should place the emphasis on recycling, no further withdrawl from our resources of open land would be required/ and we will not leave urban litter behind.”
Are we better off today than we were in 1972? Or are we still, like Mayor Garcetti, just talking a virtue game and living in a cesspool?
Where are all the big plans for humane and just architecture to heal all the atrocities of modern Los Angeles? Can we just survive and continue to build a city of flat-topped McMansions, backyard garage add-ons and $3500 a month apartments?
Is any large city in America as dirty as Los Angeles? Is any booming and billionaire saturated city in Europe? One looks to India to imagine our dystopian future.
The Perfect House is beyond most of our reach, but the better city should not be.
[2]Obituaries: Edgardo Contini, Architect, Urban Planner; by Leon Whiteson; LA Times, May 1, 1990.
It’s a futile fantasy exercise to go the website Architizer and see what they are building in other wealthy cities around the world where 100,000 homeless people do not sleep on the street and it is isn’t considered normal to have shopping baskets full of trash polluting parks alongside $2.5 million dollar homes.
Here is a new apartment in Nantes, France designed by Hamonic + Masson & Associates. I think it’s rather pleasing, sleek, uplifting and progressive. It must be nice to live in such a bright, spaciousness, well-thought out structure.
Imagine this apartment house along Sepulveda Boulevard between the Orange Line and Victory in Van Nuys, presently a junky, one-story collection of car washes, Pep Boys Auto, Wendy’s, Fatburger, a mini-mall with a mattress store, a paint store, Jiffy Lube, etc. Can you picture the day The Barn is gone and there is nowhere to buy an Amish Shaker Dark Mahogany stained dresser with metal pulls for $953 that even your Aunt Irma in Cerritos would hide in her garage.
How we would mourn if Pep Buys Auto and its grease, graffiti and garage doors full of axles on hydraulic lifts were banished forever and replaced by something modern and residential befitting a city in the third decade of the 21st Century.
What would it look like if all that were replaced by a 15- story-tall apartment with curving balconies and pleasing design within walking distance of public transportation, and convenient access to Costco, LA Fitness, Target, CVS and a Chinese market?
A building like that one replacing all the decrepit garbagetecture that lines Sepulveda between the Orange Line and Victory……imagine that?
Chief Design Officer?
Los Angeles should consider creating a position in city government to promote projects like this. I’m thinking a “Chief Design Officer”, perhaps someone with architectural knowledge and connections, to fire up a redesign and redevelopment of Van Nuys.
I’m surprised they haven’t invented this title yet, since this is such an architecturally minded city.
It reminds me of a coincidence……
I had lunch with a city government man, last summer in Van Nuys. It was July 11, 2018. He rode the bus out to Van Nuys, perhaps for novelty or amusement. I met him on Aetna near the Orange Line. He claimed an important title, one that might be able to bring good things to Van Nuys. I was eager to meet him and see what might get started here.
We were scheduled to walk around the area and really explore how to improve it. I imagined we might go for a few hours along the boulevard, or the Orange Line, and see what kind of housing, lofts, beer gardens, cafes, tech companies could be built here. But the man was interested, obsessed mostly, in watching the semi-finals of the World Cup when England played Croatia.
We walked into the dismal State Office Building in Van Nuys, an awful mid-1980s strip windowed government place, and he was transfixed with it. But he still was eager to get somewhere, anywhere, and watch that game.
Every place we walked past he peered into the windows to see if they had a large screen TV, but alas, none did.
I suggested the Robin Hood tavern so we took an Uber there and sat amidst the packed crowds and watched the World Cup.
He had worked as an architecture critic at the LA Times and was coming to our district to see it for the first time, but first he had to watch that soccer match at The Robin Hood. We spent two hours in The Robin Hood, drinking beer and eating BLTs.
We parted and he promised to follow up and have “my intern” call you. But nobody ever did.
That was over six months ago.
The other night he was attending The Golden Mike awards ceremony where KPCC’s Larry Mantle took a lifetime achievement award. So I read on Twitter.
I’m going to write Mayor Garcetti and Councilwoman Nury Martinez and suggest they create a new government position for someone qualified who can get Van Nuys some top designs and bring up the depressing level of listlessness that infects our forgotten section of Los Angeles. Needed is a person without pretense who doesn’t just kiss the ass of the fashionable, the powerful, the media stars who blow words and wishes over the suffering people of this city.
Maybe I should even be the Chief Design Officer since I actually have a track record of preservation, clean-up, and heightening community awareness in Van Nuys and vicinity. “Option A” which would have obliterated industrial, small shop Van Nuys with a 33-acre Metro light rail repair yard was defeated after this blog united community members to fight for the preservation of local, productive, creative, skilled industries near Kester and Oxnard.
But back to the CDO position…….
I don’t think they would hire me.
Frances Anderton has never heard of me. And I didn’t graduate from Berkeley and I don’t live in Silver Lake. And I have never given a graduation speech to the students at SCI-Arc.
I’m pretty sure those are the qualifications one needs to get hired for being a $200,000-$300,000 (?) a year Chief Design Officer.
The Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) is a second house built in the backyard of a first house to provide additional income for a “single family” homeowner.
Los Angeles has now legally liberalized the lawto allow these types of dwellings to go up all over the city. The moral reasoning: this will increase the supply of housing in a city where rents, not to mention costs, are skyrocketingly expensive.
The so-called maximum square footage of the ADU is 1,200 SF but the one on this page is 1,600 SF.
One can imagine less beautiful and less artful types of ADU’s going up all over this city.
The $99,000 vinyl and stucco ones that will go up in Van Nuys will be built without architects. Hector and his crew will dig, hammer and nail and the Home Depot and Ikea will supply. Four recent college grads from film, acting, and comedy schools will move in and split the $4600 a month rent with parental assistance.
So the tenants will not be someone’s granny.
What will likely occur is a kind of typical Los Angeles situation. Property owners will build in the backyard and in a slapdash way shove driveways in front, destroying trees and lawns to create more parking. Security gates and cinderblock fences and concrete will serve as front yard landscaping.
More renters will mean more cars, so almost every street that once was clean of vehicles, will have bumper-to-bumper cars belonging to renters who live in the backyard house. Curbs will be full of McDonalds wrappers and discarded beer bottles.
That’s the Van Nuys way.
I don’t, ironically, object to ADU’s. If every ADU looked like the one on this page, it would be wonderful for architecture in Los Angeles to see a proliferation of fine design.
But the bottom of the barrel ugliness that is the norm, not to mention the cost of construction, ensures that the homely, crowded, poorly thought out ADU will prevail.
And the ADU on this page will never become the home of a working family. It is, most likely, a guest house for an affluent owner, or perhaps an $8,000 a month rental. So increasing the ADU supply will hardly affect the supply of normal, affordable rentals in Los Angeles.
Urbanize LA is a website showing new development around our city. I get updates from them and see what architecture is going up and what it looks like.
In residential multi-family buildings, modernism is triumphant.
Today, every building is uniquely ahistorical, without any reference to past classical styles, which, in a way is good. Los Angeles, especially in the San Fernando Valley, suffered from 20 years of Neo-Mediterranean buildings, a style that still afflicts much of residential, single-family Beverly Hills.
But the modern styles going up are nervous, jittery, full of multi-colored sections of various colors, so that many buildings do not exude calm or confidence but insecurity. Sections of four, five, or eight story apartments are broken up into light/dark/red/green/white/blue/wood/yellow/purple….. sometimes on one building.
I’m not sure how to psychoanalyse the stylistic quirks of mediocre apartment architecture. I think some of it is due to trying to sell buildings to neighborhoods which are hostile to them. By dividing up larger buildings into many colors, the effect is to reduce the apparent total size.
An apartment building with 40 windows on a wall 160 ft. long in one color appears large. 40 windows in 8/20-foot long sections with 8 different colors seems smaller.
Compare these two examples below. The new Expo Line is 7-stories, while the older one is 5-stories.
Sycamore apartments, northwest corner of North Sycamore Avenue and Beverly Boulevard
An Ugly Example at a Prominent Corner
One of the ugliest of the newer buildings is the retail/apartment built on the SE corner of Wilshire/Labrea which is not only multi-colored but cheap looking as well. LA Curbed called it “possibly LA’s most hated” in 2013. “The building’s facade is a jumble of balconies and discordant frontal planes with the northern and eastern faces designed differently, united by a central tower that seems to lack any elegance or even much design,” wrote Julie Grist of Larchmont Buzz. “It’s a shame the design team couldn’t at least try to borrow some of the sleek lines from other streamline or deco architecture still standing along Wilshire Boulevard.”
Tragically, it occupies an important corner of Los Angeles but has an H&M quality where a fine building belongs.
LA architects and builders built one color apartments from roughly the 1920s through the 1960s with no degradation to the aesthetic fabric of the city. How was that possible?
Southwest corner of Pico Boulevard and Union Avenue
Sycamore apartments, northwest corner of North Sycamore Avenue and Beverly Boulevard
One day, soon, there will be a revitalization of Van Nuys Boulevard.
Gone forever will be the hopeless days when people laughed to mock it, or ran away in revulsion.
All the central gathering places that should be occupied by civilized things, all the lots that hold parking, all the empty buildings along Van Nuys Boulevard, will be replaced with vibrant, happy, upbeat, successful businesses and residents.
It will take nothing more than $5 billion dollars to invest in new transit, new apartments, new multi-family housing, new police officers, a new police station, an army of street cleaners, and law enforcement people who will ticket illegally parked cars, handicap placard abusers, unregulated street sellers, unlicensed signs, and unpermitted businesses.
The narrowing of Victory Boulevard, the planting of 200 oak trees from Kester to Van Nuys Boulevard, will bring about a revitalization of the formerly crappy strip of low rent mini-malls, slum apartments and empty stores. The LAPD Victory Precinct at the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Victory, and its drop-in center there will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
150 new LAPD officers, out of a police force of some 10,000 will be specifially assigned to the area.
Some 50 new apartment buildings, from Sherman Way to Oxnard, with 10,000 new apartments, will be built and 20% of them will rent for under market value.
Security cameras will enforce the law to prevent speeding, red light running, assault, vandalism, burglaries of properties and hold-ups on the street.
There will be decorative streetlights, three new parks, new benches, and thousands of shade trees planted along the boulevard to protect against temperatures that get hotter every year.
Bike lanes, light rail, automobiles and pedestrians will share a new Van Nuys Boulevard divided between all types of transport, from foot to motor to public.
And the architecture will be inventive, modern, and integrate environmentally such necessities as solar energy and district wide free wi-fi.
In a nod to the old Van Nuys, the first orange grove planted in the Valley in 90 years will be manned by formerly homeless men and women who will guard the orchards as they would their own children. There will be 10 houses planted around the grove to ensure the safety and security of the new urban agriculturalists.
The low industrial buildings in the neighborhood around Kester and Oxnard, all 33 acres, were preserved in 2018, and later became an incubator for creatives who settled in the area and built narrow houses near the Orange Line, and worked and lived next to artisans, musicians, brewers, car restorers and craftspeople of every skill.
All of this is possible.
The people who will decide whether this is fantasy or reality are reading this post.
Here in Van Nuys 
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