About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
“Next week, the South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission will consider an appeal of Buckingham Crossing, a proposed small lot subdivision near the Expo Line.
The proposed development from Charles Yzaguirre, which would replace a single-family home at 4011 Exposition Boulevard, calls for the construction of four small lot homes. The houses would each stand four stories in height, featuring three bedrooms, two-car garages, and roof decks.
Los Angeles-based architecture firm Formation Association is designing the project, which is portrayed as a collection of boxy low-rise structures in conceptual renderings.
The appeal, which was filed by residents of a neighboring home, argues that the project does not comply with the City of Los Angeles’ Small Lot Subdivision guidelines, and have bolstered their case with a petition signed by nearby residents, as well as a letter of opposition signed by City Council President Herb Wesson, who represents the neighborhood.
However, a staff response notes that the project was filed with the Planning Department before the new regulations were adopted, and are thus not subject to them. The staff report also rejects claims that the four proposed homes would increase traffic congestion and create a “‘wind tunnel’ spreading toxins” through the passing of Expo Line trains.”-Urbanize LA
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As this blog has shown, many times, we live in a city of homelessness for those who cannot afford a home, or are too sick to attend to the normalcy of paying rent.
At the same time, the dire need for housing continues to be opposed by vast segments of the city who will take any proposed multi-family dwelling, even one as small as four stories, and attach some fear-mongering lawsuit against it.
The condition of Los Angeles in 2018 is comedic in its insanity, with ostriches of all sorts screaming about “overdevelopment” inside the second largest city in the United States, a spread out sprawl of parking lots and shopping centers where residents complain about lack of space, lack of parking, and too much traffic. Yet lack the political and moral will to remedy an ongoing tragedy.
These same NIMBYs oppose even the tiniest increase in density, along light rail lines and public transport, refusing to allow the city to progress economically and logistically, and also, quite cruelly and callously, perpetuating the expensiveness of all housing, by limiting its supply.
One-hundred years ago, Los Angeles was a much more modern and progressive city than today, a place where tall apartments were welcomed, possibly because they looked aristocratic, well-proportioned, and they brought economic growth and well regarded architecture to a growing city starved for development. They wore their best European tailoring, even if they were overdressed, because they had pride and self-worth and a city which respected those qualities.
By contrast, many of today’s multi-family dwellings are self-effacing, timid, obsequious, broken up into many little pieces to ward off attackers, erased of any individuality or identity. So even when the architects surrender to the bullies, that cannot mollify the attackers. The NIMBY mob wants the city to stay exactly as it is, even if that means that 100,000 people sleep on the sidewalk every single night.
Imagine the screaming in Encino or Palms or West Adams if anybody proposed the old styles seen below next to any existing single family homes. (source: LAPL)
Among the promises of the new age online is that our words and deeds would somehow, individually, amount to something greater, collectively.
And since 2016, we have lived inside the dark promise of that fantasy. We are hostages, basically, to a little computer that we keep in our pocket, a device that beeps and buzzes and infiltrates our life, not always for good.
Nextdoor is an app that you sign up for to keep in touch with your neighborhood. Lost cats, block parties, break-ins, yard sales, all of everything that used to go on without you knowing, is there for you 24/7.
I signed up with some hesitation since I publish this blog without monitors, group opinions or censorship.
But hell, I thought, why not join Next Door, since I can report suspicious activity, life-threatening crimes in progress, and the local bank robbery along with saying I saw Mrs. Lopez’s lost cat.
Last week, I came home from the gym and saw a middle-aged man riding a boy’s bicycle. He was wearing a backpack and pedaling slowly and looking to the left and the right as he passed every home on my block.
I had recently seen a NextDoor post about a porch theft. The thief had ridden up, then backwards maneuvered to a front door, swiped a package and rode away without his face becoming visible to the home’s security camera.
I probably posted something like this about the slow-riding man on a bike:
“Man pedaling slowly, wearing backpack, looking at every home on the street, possibly Latino?”
The reaction? Not neighborly gratitude or appreciation but this:
“You probably don’t go out much do you? He is on the street every day and I’ve never seen him steal anything.”
“I wonder if you would have posted this if he were white?”
A few months earlier, I had posted about a person walking their pit bull who let the dog crap on the grass and never picked it up.
That elicited this comment:
“Not all pitbull owners behave like this so I hope you don’t mean to insult us all by this post but I find it very insensitive.”
There is another kind of announcement on NextDoor for urgent events, such as car chases, or robberies in progress, or child abductions. When you post these, people’s phones beep and flash. One of my neighbors used it to post something like this:
“URGENT ALERT! Somebody took a small ceramic planter off my lawn last night!”
When I pointed out that this was not an URGENT ALERT, he would not stand to be corrected. He used the theft of his planter to expound on the URGENT un-safety of our street:
“Yes Andrew it is URGENT! A few months ago my elderly mother was accosted by a drunken man on our driveway and terrified by the experience. So this theft of our planter goes along with other events that are URGENT!”
When this blog recently wrote about the garbage filled streets of Van Nuys, a reader told me he had posted a link to the article on NextDoor and it was taken down for “violating community standards.” Why are the sanitary conditions of our area considered obscene or offensive speech?
NextDoor can be helpful, mostly by informing people about events that have already happened: a woman attacked, a house broken into, a criminal apprehended.
But mostly it is an organ of stupidity, insensitivity, and misunderstanding.
I’m quitting NextDoor (again) and think I can live quite happily without its helpful, neighborly, kind posts.
It is probable and likely and arguable that Los Angeles is perhaps the dirtiest large city in the United States.
New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Miami: they do not have the amount of illegal dumping, trash, shopping carts of garbage, furniture, mountains of debris and litter in every park, street, and parking lot.
A morning walk to the gym, encompassing half a mile along Columbus, Victory and Sepulveda in Van Nuys brings one past neglect on a large and small scale, from the homeless taking over bus benches, to the non-homeless indifference to sanitation which is a hallmark of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles does not present a picture of a civilized city to anyone. Besides our nightly news of shootings and car chases, we have transformed our environment into a city where it is embarrassing to show visitors around, where the infrastructure, from pollution to transportation to parks, is sub-standard.
Put aside the yellow air, and the starter homes for $1.2 million next to a freeway. Put aside the sprawl of mini-malls and billboards and car washes and marijuana clinics and muffler shops and junk food. Put aside the speeding cars running red lights, the people, one to a car, driving to work at 5 MPH. And, of course, little spoken of…. the morning rush hour of white parents taking their kids to a school 25 miles away from home because the local school is too darkly complexioned for many liberals to bear.
Yes, dismiss all that and just focus on the trash, the trash everywhere, the trash that is all around us.
Are you listening Mayor Garbageciti? Or are you on a flight to somewhere to lay the groundwork for your presidential run?
Some months back, a very creative couple, Lynn and Mark, and their two boys, moved into a house on my street that had been empty for five years.
The new family set about renovting the circa 1950 ranch until it is now a creamy white with a writing studio carved out of a two-car garage.
Regularly, Lynn Ferguson, who was born in Scotland, and seems to have carried that nation’s affinity for poetic prose to America, pens very witty, alluring, real tales of life. She crafts stories that are funny, sad and pull you in.
Yesterday, she sent another one by email, which she has given permission for me to reprint here:
I so want him to have beautiful bright future, but whenever I hear the news, I’m scared. His heart is too big. Sometimes he’s too kind. This world right now, could eat him alive.
I know Mark feels it too. I know him well enough to see it.
After the kids went off to school, (and I had completely changed out of pajamas into clothes) Mark and I went to have some breakfast with some close friends.
We’d arranged to meet at a cafe one block away from our old house, and as we were a little early, we decided to have a look at our old house to see if the developers had started work on it yet.
We drove round the block – narrowly avoiding some middle aged entitled lady, resplendent in a red satin dressing gown and carpet slippers, who was strolling nonchalantly in the middle of the road – and turned into our street.
The side of the house looked a little strange as we approached, but I didn’t know why. It was only as we drove closer I saw that half of the house was already demolished.
Gone was the living room. Gone was the family room. Gone was Fergus’s bedroom with the bookcase door.
And although I live in a new house – a house that I love – and we have new bedrooms and a living room and a studio, I felt some sort of terrible loss for the old house. One day, nobody will ever know that that house once stood there. What if I forget all the good things that happened there? What about when even the memories are gone?
On so many levels, Mark and I were so glad to meet our friends for breakfast.
1. Because they’re just frankly adorable humans.
2. Because we hadn’t seen them in forever.
and 3. Because they let us (particularly me) talk and talk and talk and I could forget about feeling so strange.
We chatted for so long that the lady of indiscriminate age, sitting three tables down, sporting a pink satin dressing gown, over mauve striped pajamas and sheepskin slippers finished her croissant and later reappeared power-walking by in her yoga clothes.
After breakfast, we got in the car and drove around the block. The house was gone. Flattened. Just like that. In the space of an hour. What had once been our home was pile of rubble.
I made Mark take photographs. I have no idea why, but I wanted pictures of the rubble.
As we headed back home, I asked Mark to drop me off to the gym.
I used to go to the gym a lot in my 30s. I’d run for an hour. I loved how free it made me feel.
I stopped not longer after I had Fergus. Running for an hour doesn’t feel quite as freeing when you’ve been up on diaper duty a couple of times during the night.
Then recently, my oncologist told me that if I do 20 minutes of cardio three times a week, the chance of the big C revisiting decreases dramatically, so off to the gym I go.
Heading home after my workout, I thought about how fit I used to be. How I would have laughed off the workout I’d just done as not even exercise. .
I was thinking about how I wish I’d known then, what I know now, when I came to a crossing on the road.
It’s a big mean old crossing. Six lanes of traffic on an intersection. Bad in any city, but in LA where there drivers could be mental, entitled, pajama-wearers, possibly lethal.
Standing beside me there was a very smart looking Latino gentleman, with a walker. As the light signaled for us to cross, he struggled off the sidewalk onto the road. For him this crossing was an act of daring.
“Do you want me to walk with you?” I asked.
“Please,” he said. “The drivers here, they are crazy. They don’t care.”
“I know.” I said, “Some of them are even wearing pajamas.”
He smiled, out of politeness. I’m not sure he had any idea what I meant.
“Where do you need to get to?” I asked.
“Just over there to the bus stop.”
Struggling to get his legs to move faster, an not hold up the traffic, he was breathless, and his face was getting red.
“No rush.” I said, “Take your time. I’m here as well. They’ll get in real trouble if they run both of us over. We will take as long as it takes.”
And he laughed.
And there, right in the middle of the crosswalk, it was all suddenly clear. I am simply just in between. Not quite one place or the other.
I can’t go back. I can only go forward.
And the most vulnerable place of all is right in the middle.
We got to the other side and he smiled. He reached into his jacket and pulled out some dollars.
“Take money,” he said.
“No,” I said, “You keep it.”
“The world is hard and you are kind. Let me give you my money.”
“No,” I said. “Honestly. I was feeling a bit unsettled today, and you’ve helped me out.”
“I did?”
I nodded.
“People used to help each other all the time. But now, I don’t know. There’s cruelty. Mean. Things like I thought I’d never see again. I worry for the future.”
I saw his bus approaching.
“I think we’ll be OK. I think we’ve just been in the middle of something. My eldest son turned 16 today.” I said.
His face lit up.
“Oh my,” he said, “You are blessed.”
“I know,” I said, “I really am.”
“Tell your son, a man is truly strong when he is kind.”
And with that, he clambered very slowly onto the bus.
So, why do I work with story? Because people are fucking amazing. Because the answer to a question you don’t even know you have, is sometimes to be found on the lips of a complete stranger. Because an honest word of wisdom, can be more precious and more lasting that any jewel. That’s why.
So, if you want to partake in a bit of storytelling, please join us for Fish and Bear on November 8th or 18th.
Peace and love,
Lynn
xoxo”
Peace and Love
Lynn
xoxox
4/29/1960: Harry Brandt, 53 (with cigar) stands in the ruins of his gutted Living Room in Van Nuys where his wife Charline, 46, died after a cigarette ignited a house fire. (Photo courtesy of Valley Times Collection at LAPL)
Here in Van Nuys 
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