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A Motley Crew: The New ADUs
“The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) implemented the Standard Plan Program to provide LADBS customers a simplified permitting process for the design and construction of ADUs that are built repeatedly. The use of standard plans reduces the time required for plan check resulting in faster permit issuance. Under the Standard Plan Program, plans…
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The Streets Were Spotless
On Sunday I went to Burbank to take photos of a 25-year-old actor. We met at Chili John’s, a “World Famous” landmark, now out-of-business, a spot of streamline slickness with a neon sign, all of its recent Covid signs still intact. Somewhere I had read that preservationists were fighting developers on this site but could…
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“We’re Building an ADU!”
as told by John M. Thompson to Here in Van Nuys “Just wanted to share the great news. We’ve finally taken the plunge! We’re building an ADU, a second house in our backyard. I’m 61, and you know freelance graphic designer and the wife is on disability so we’ve been thinking how can we make money in…
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They Didn’t Believe Me.
In my first new short story in three years, “They Didn’t Believe Me,” a progressive politician is unwittingly poisoned with the help of her ambitious assistant in a bizarre plot to upend an election. A noir satire with sci-fi touches, the tale dramatizes the modern ills of urban America where public virtue signaling is often…
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Around the Neighborhood.
Since the pandemic began, in earnest, last March, one of our routines is the morning walk around our neighborhood. The fact that most of us live and work at home, self-incarcerated by choice or duty, has produced a strange life. Beside the societal disasters that befell our nation in 2020, the ordinary existence of the…
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We Have to Wait for What we Want.
Like most everything these days, we have to wait for what we want. So it is with the rains. They are only now showing up, in late January, three separate storms, arriving as they do in Los Angeles from the north, with a slow, steady buildup of gray clouds in the sky, perhaps the only…
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Here in Van Nuys 