Tag: “Councilwoman Nury Martinez”

Small Minds

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For 22 years I’ve had front row seats to the shit show that is Van Nuys.

I moved here in 2000 and started this blog in 2006. My purpose: to apply creative writing and photography to the realities around me. 

I walked around and photographed Van Nuys, from the alleys to the houses to the buildings. Vanowen, Victory, Kester, Sepulveda.

At times my blog gave some visibility and notoriety, and I was brought in to observe the workings of the Van Nuys Neighborhood Council. 

But I never cared to swim in sewers of public life. I saw how small minds functioned, the old fools who fought against housing, and always pushed for more parking lots and wider streets.

“Hey Andrew, what do you think about naming the Van Nuys Post Office the Marilyn Monroe Van Nuys Post Office?”

“Hey Andrew, can you help us fight to preserve that parking lot behind the going out of business furniture store? We want to make sure they don’t build apartments there!”

“Hey Andrew, they want to build a five-story apartment on Vanowen and Hazeltine. That’s too much!”

The VNNC was strangely absent with the modern representatives of Van Nuys, it seemed to be the preserve of old white people who fought to preserve in their imaginations a city that no longer existed.

“My parents bought my house for $11,000 in 1956 and I used to ride my bike to Tommy’s for a chili dog. Gosh, those days are gone forever. I still live there. Yeah I pay $312 a year in property taxes. Thank God I have a pension from the post office.”

There was Councilman Tony Cardenas. He wanted to tear down the Art Deco era fire station on Sylvan. Under his watch Van Nuys further disintegrated, a decade before this pandemic started, and from what I’ve read Van Nuys has been in decline since about 1975.

Nury Martinez replaced Cardenas in 2014, and I often communicated with her office, and met with her people, and got her help cleaning up the streets, picking up dumped sofas, pushing to get traffic lights installed, pedestrian crossings painted, or illegal cars towed.

She was a great ally in defending dozens of small businesses from the 2017 threat of demolition when Metro proposed a 33-acre bulldozing of hundreds of industrial buildings between Kester and Van Nuys Bl. North of Oxnard. This blog acted as an advocate for small business owners who employed locals serving as an economic incubator for new immigrants to prosper in Van Nuys. 

Officer Erika Kirk, 2015

We had a wonderful Senior Lead Officer, Erika Kirk, the kind of woman you would want to work as a police officer. She drove around here and involved herself in matters large and small, but you felt safer with her presence.

The councilwoman, the cop, the council people: everything impersonated order, law, safety, and well-being.

But the reality of Van Nuys, (and greater Los Angeles) is that nothing nice stays nice without the constant threat of law enforcement. 

You must fight every single day to keep homeless encampments out, marijuana farms from the houses down the street. You have to fear for your life from criminals robbing your house, from mentally ill people in the shopping mall parking lot, from the car speeding 80 miles an hour through the red light as you begin to make your left turn. 

Nothing unlocked is left untouched: bicycles, decorative lights, cactuses, cars, mail, pumpkins, packages are stolen around the clock, from every lawn and every stoop, by every type of criminal. Most every crime is recorded on camera and hardly anybody is arrested.

Is this the fault of Nury Martinez?

I don’t think so. 

She spoke her mind in private, in a cigar filled room with other hacks and dealmakers, and she is no worse than anybody else who criticizes her for blatant bigotry. 

Is she worse than Mike Bonin who allows hundreds of violent, destructive, drug abusing and criminal people to camp out in West Los Angeles while flying the flag of compassion, and egregiously ignoring his constituents because he is on a morally higher plane of governance? When the pandemic emptied the streets of legitimate commerce he made sure that vagrants took over the sidewalks.

But in all fairness to him nobody recorded him making bigoted remarks in a room.

Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
Old Post Office

The truth is that Los Angeles is a primitive, ugly, violent, disorderly, hateful, self-centered, grotesque city of billboards, blight, traffic, fires, bad air, bad food and bad actors. It is a city that promotes promoters, celebrities, and fake makers of merriment in Hollywood. 

It’s a city where the Hollywood Walk of Fame is populated by people shitting on the sidewalk, fighting with knives and guns, or walking around stoned and drunk and looking for a reason to kill.

If you are rich or famous or the child of someone rich or famous both are considered markers of high achievement.

LA takes comfort in its privileged folk in the cozy and winding streets of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Westwood, Bel Air and Beverly Hills.  People here must have been shocked that to the small minded leaders of Los Angeles the city is still divided into pieces of pie: South Central, Pacoima, Westside, White, Latino, Black, Armenian, Oaxacan, Korean, Jewish. 

“Why that little bitch got LAX?”

As they say on Yelp, in every single sentence, “How amazing!”

The loudest liberals who cry the loudest about injustice drive their kids ten miles away to the whitest schools.

All the broken hearts on Twitter who heard what Nury and the bad men said about the little boy, how sad they are to know that hatreds and provincialism and ethnic warfare are the foundation of the great leaders of Los Angeles. 

And why is it that we still are shocked when a Latina refers to Oaxacans as ugly and short and can call a little Black boy a monkey? Have we not heard, ad nauseum, that Nury was to be praised because she was our first Latina city council president?

“She grew up poor and her family is from Zacatecas!”

Don’t judge her.

She’s what the American Dream is all about.

And a woman too.

And a mom.

And a LATINA!

LATIN-X!

If you think it’s worthy of praise to cite someone’s accidental ethnicity as an accomplishment don’t be surprised if that same person speaks and acts as only a representative of that identity!

All the identities who regularly label themselves by their identities, divide this nation, this state and this city into even more identities, and victimized identities. All the ones who think it’s modern, progressive and praiseworthy to admire ethnicity (instead of character), they too share blame for tearing apart our city and our country.

“The first transgender fireperson! The first movie with an all-Asian cast! The first Pacific Islander marathon winner!”

“I go to that coffee stand, even though I hate their coffee, because it’s Black owned!” 

Hooray!

Is there anyone who looks at this city and wonders how it might be built to benefit all its inhabitants humanely and environmentally? 

If you were in power, like Nury, wouldn’t you burn with passion to rebuild, to clean, to beautify the ugliness of the San Fernando Valley? Would you arrive at work every day like Nury and walk down Van Nuys Boulevard and think that you had accomplished something?

The conversations we heard in that room were vile. 

But what we have seen with our own eyes on the streets of Los Angeles is worse. 

The Folks Who Moved in Next Door.

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For about five years, an encampment of vagrants, with cars and trucks full of bikes, shopping carts, electronics, blankets, and various junk, spread their filthy circus along the corner of the Vanowen and Kester.

There were men and women in parked cars, and drugs, and women in the back seats of the vehicles. The sidewalk was taken over by them. They had complete autonomy and seemingly the blessing of the city to live outside.

Our senior lead officer, whose name I don’t care to name, cleared them away. He appears monthly on a Facebook chat room to brag about the latest clearance. “Happy to say they are gone,” he will say on Zoom.

But the camp of tramps always comes back.

They next set up their junk show on Lemay, in a quiet residential area, where they lived along the parking lot that borders the Casa Loma College.

Day and night they sat out on lawn chairs or slept on mattresses behind trees. One man danced with his dick out for an 8-year-old girl who rode her bike past. Complaints flooded LA311. Ms. Nury Martinez, Latin-X Councilwoman, got letters, emails, phone calls. LAPD Van Nuys was called numerous times. Yet the trash camp endured.

Outdoor urination, pot smoking, liquor, prostitution, dumping, disorder, noise, none of it mattered. It stayed in place, just like the homeless circus that has played on for 3,000 days and nights at the NW corner of Gault and Sepulveda. 

Gault and Sepulveda. Another long running blight on the neighborhood ignored by government officials.

After six months, their crap was cleared. 

Two weeks later the tarps and the shopping carts went up along Lemay near Norwich. That took dozens of calls to remove. Then it was gone.

Then they came back to Saloma and LeMay. That lasted a few months.

Now they have reappeared along Columbus Avenue across from the grammar school. While it’s doubtful anyone is actually learning grammar in that one-starred rated school, what’s certain is that the garbage camp is illegally set up in full view. 

When people wonder what drives Angelenos mad, it is this: there is no control on the disorder and criminality of this city and state. 

San Francisco, true jewel of the west, has gone to hell.

Los Angeles, costume jewel of the west, has followed suit.

And when mayoral candidates go on podcasts and talk ad nauseum about their humane and expensive solutions for the poor people who are homeless, you want to scream!

Why should the suffering of private persons, their addictions and mental illness, be allowed such a prominent and destructive place in the lives of all law-abiding citizens in the State of California?

“One of my proposals is to create a $1 billion revolving private equity fund with which to build permanent supportive housing. That’s housing that’s been costing $600,000-800,000 a unit. That can be cut to a third of that cost using a private equity model that has worked on the streets of Los Angeles,” says Mayoral Candidate Mike Feuer.

Is anyone knocked-up on drugs and alcohol going to sober up in a new, unsupervised housing unit?  

Here’s an idea: use the billions in homeless funds to send $100 Visa gift cards to legally housed residents, home owners and renters, who report trash camping in their neighborhoods. Top off the yearly payments to those who report the vagrants at $2,000. Thousands of Angelenos, short on money for gas and groceries, would be impelled to report vagrancy and clean up dumps that have destroyed our city.

Do the people burning down parks and sleeping under tarps on bus benches care to move into a new studio apartment? 

Trash camping?

Don’t permit it. Don’t allow it. Don’t normalize it.

Burning parks, setting fires along freeways, camping out on public sidewalks and streets. This is the state of California, the most technologically advanced region on the planet.

So much money, so much talk, so little results.

The Toolbox House, Osaka, Japan.

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From Dwell Magazine, an example of a tight, urban house in a densely populated area of Osaka.

As I have asked many, many times: why can’t this type of housing be constructed in the commercially zoned areas of Van Nuys? Near the Orange Line? Near the Civic Center?

Imagine this fitted behind an alley in Van Nuys? As a modern, clean, civilized upgrade for the slum housing one sees along Bessemer, Calvert, Delano, Cedros, Erwin, Friar.

Photo by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin.
Imagine a grouping of twelve of these around a garden on a former parking lot? On a lot that was once a gas station.
Slum Housing on Cedros.

“At first glance, it can be hard to spot the Toolbox House. Tucked away on a long, narrow lot in the downtown area of Osaka, Japan, the silvery home sits much lower than its high-rise neighbors. Yoshihiro Yamamoto of the local firm YYAA designed the dwelling for a couple and one of their mothers, who sought a single-story house that is “compact and easy to use, like a toolbox.”-Dwell Magazine.

Lemay, west of Kester

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On Lemay St. just west of Kester, a trash camp has been removed, then put back, then removed, then allowed back.

Residents of this tidy and pleasant section of Van Nuys know their area is not unique in the suffering brought on by government negligence.

Countless calls, emails, Zoom meetings and tweets have not changed a thing. The trash camps are a steady reminder of how far California has fallen, how pathetic the situation of law and order is.

Three months ago, the LAPD Van Nuys division held their monthly talk and all the Senior Lead Officers spoke. Our man proudly stated he had removed this trash camp, which previously was unhoused on the SE corner of Vanowen and Kester.  The camp then moved itself, shopping baskets and cars, to Lemay.

I don’t blame him or law enforcement for “allowing” the trash camps. This one, like many, has been cited for prostitution, drug dealing, and indecent exposure. The police are handcuffed by law.

No Stopping Any Time.

A neighbor on NextDoor wrote that her granddaughter was playing outside when one male vagrant came up to the little girl and pulled his pants down.

He allegedly still lives in a tent along Lemay. Why?

There are many reasons to be depressed about life in Los Angeles today. In fact, progressive, thoughtful, sensitive Councilman Mike Bonin, who famously allowed murders, trash fires and thousands of vagrants to camp out and cause mayhem during the pandemic, has said he will not run for reelection, citing his personal battles with depression.

Bless him. But let him be gone to serve his emotions first so millions in our city can awaken happier tomorrow. 

Lest people who read this essay think I am advocating against the Democrats or liberalism, I instead am posturing for a middle ground of care for the addicted, and housing for the lost and beaten down. 

You can arrest them, jail them, deport them, or kill them, but only if you live in China or Russia. For those of us who still believe in American ideals, the law constrains us from revenge, even as we seethe in anger and contempt for the disorder and crime around us. 

But we also need local laws that apply to the entire city. We cannot stop enforcing with exceptions. Like near a school or hospital or homeless services building.  

It categorically must be completely illegal to camp out and live in a public park, on a public sidewalk, to urinate and defecate outdoors. Anywhere.

We cannot parse our laws to such inanities as prohibited “within 500 feet of a school.”

Imagine if we said you could drive blindfolded, stone drunk at 100 miles an hour, if you never drove past a school?

One of the bitter ironies of Los Angeles is the amount of wasted space that exists where civilized, regulated and sanitary communities could be erected to house the unhoused.

Next to the encampment on Lemay is the sprawling parking lot of the Casa Loma College which used to be a building that was the home to the American Automobile Association.

99% of the time the parking is empty. The entire lot, building and parking, is 112,994 square feet, 18 times larger than a 6,000 square foot “single family lot.”

Home Depot sells a backyard studio building that is 10’x 12’. It costs about $45,000.

Even if that is overpriced, imagine if within the bounds of the Casa Loma parking lot an agency or non-profit built 25 of these and there was a full-time security officer overseeing this community? What if this model town became a blueprint for other humane towns throughout Los Angeles?

There are, to be sure, many objections to this, but they are often imaginary, created in the minds of fearful residents who object to new types of supportive communities which are actually superior to the “free market” ones that currently exist.

The Skid Row Housing Trust is an exemplary non-profit which “provides permanent supportive housing so that people who have experienced homelessness, prolonged extreme poverty, poor health, disabilities, mental illness and/or addiction can lead safe, stable lives in wellness.”

They built 13604 Sherman Way, designed by architect Michael Maltzan, in 2014. It is houses 64 people but was bitterly opposed by the community before it went up. Yet it is perhaps the most attractive building built in the entire San Fernando Valley in the last 50 years.

But there is not enough of the good stuff. The trash camps are more numerous than these white paneled residences.

For now, the trash camps along Lemay, and everywhere else in the city, are a daily dose of depression for millions who live in Los Angeles and a barbaric and cruel way to treat people who must, through choice or circumstances, live under plastic tarps along the road. 

Looks Like Yet Another Redevelopment Plan for Van Nuys.

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In Urbanize LA “Revamp in the works for Van Nuys Civic Center.“

“In a motion entitled “Building a Livable City,” Martinez instructs the Planning Department and LADOT to take stock of the number of parking spaces needed to serve Van Nuys City Hall and other government functions in the Van Nuys Civic Center, and lay out a plan for consolidating parking onto a smaller footprint. This would clear the path for redevelopment of the complex’s remaining parking lots with a mixture of affordable housing, open space, retail, and other community serving uses. Likewise, Martinez proposes that any scheme also incorporate amenities for pedestrians and cyclists.”

Must we endure these promises again? Here is what they were writing 31 years ago this month:

January 27, 1991
Van Nuys Blvd. at Friar (circa 1950). Notice diagonal parking and streetcar wiring.

Downtown Van Nuys, due to 70 years of misguided “redevelopment”, has obliterated itself and now crawls along at the lowest condition in its history.  Homelessness, abandoned storefronts, and an eight lane wide highway are what it looks like.  

Ms. Martinez has occupied her office, figuratively and literally, for over 7 years and during that time she has spoken up about all the ills of Van Nuys and the NE SFV: human trafficking, crime, housing, drugs, homelessness.  

Yet, still the tent cities remain. The shopfronts are no more. The entire area looks like hell.

Building the LAPD Van Nuys 1962.
LAPL: 1958 plans for Valley Administrative Center in Van Nuys

And at the center is the 1958 planned Van Nuys Civic Center, a ghost land of courthouses, library and police station all populated by vagrants, trash, emptiness and hopelessness. Surrounding the area are many tens of thousands of parking lots, enormous concrete fiascos erected 50 years ago to provide dignified places for vehicles to live. They are mostly empty now, and should be destroyed and replaced with housing, housing, housing!

But this requires a plan, an architectural plan, and there is never, ever any architectural thought put into any structures that go up in Van Nuys. Instead, a crooked and semi-literate group of grifters with dough show up at planning board meetings and offer up the shit boxes that are shoved into the poor streets nearby. And VNB remains the center of dysfunctional governance in the SFV. 

In past “great plans”, the Orange Line bus and and bike path was supposed to revive Van Nuys. But next to the path, are parking lots, rented out by nearby car dealers to store their unsold vehicles. This land, paid for with public tax dollars, is instead being exploited by for profit auto dealerships.

Orange Line Metro Parking Lot at Sepulveda/Erwin

So I’m cynical.

Our present condition as a city, due to the horrendous tenure of Mayor Garcetti, normalized everything wrong, illegal, dirty and dangerous.

But let’s try again. Keep trying. We have nothing to lose. But our minds.

Letter From a Neighbor to Councilwoman Nury Martinez

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My neighbor, who has lived in Van Nuys since 1979, is aghast at its condition and appalled at the utter lack of leadership in correcting its continuing decline.

She wrote a letter, intended for Nury Martinez our Councilwoman and now the President of the City Council.

I agree with everything in it. Our community is dying with rampant lawlessness and political leaders who mouth platitudes but have no guts to fight for the forgotten taxpayers and residents of Van Nuys.

Here it is:

“As a long time resident of Van Nuys, 42 years, I have watched its steady decline with dismay.

Among my many concerns is the appalling lack of investment in upgrading and maintaining the city center. All the city buildings are here: the courthouse, the police station, the library, train/bus stops etc. This should be a center of pride for the city, but instead it is a fenced off desert with no landscaping, few trees, garbage and litter everywhere.

Old Post Office

I understand that the homeless problem has impacted all, but other than DTLA or Venice, we are the worst.

3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.
Van Nuys, CA 90401 Built: 1929 Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam

At one point, a few years ago, Van Nuys Blvd. received a grant titled something like “Beautiful Streets.” There were plans afoot to utilize that money to help VNB from Oxnard to Victory but nothing ever was accomplished. What happened to that money?

In the past I have been to several Van Nuys City Council meetings and found them to be a joke. Most of the Council members seemed preoccupied with eating pizza, nothing was accomplished and many did not even live in Van Nuys.

Once upon a time Van Nuys was a charming little town with thriving shops, and restaurants and a pretty City Center. Now it is a filthy, sad and neglected relic. Come take a drive Along Van Nuys Blvd from Oxnard to Roscoe and tell me if you would feel any pride in living here?

Van Nuys, 1938


At least clean up the median on Sepulveda Blvd between Haynes and Le May. Clean it, plant trees and maintain it. Clean up the constant trash along the streets.

This list could go on and on but it would show that you care if you would just do this much, it is the least you could do and it’s a start.

And is it not illegal to litter? What about a litter free campaign and enforcement of the law? LA used to be one of the cleanest cities in the country now it is the filthiest.

My heart is breaking. Please help us!

And if you cannot, let us know whom to vote for who can.”