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.”
Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
Old Post Office
Homeless, Bus Bench
Homeless Trash
Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
Van Nuys Boulevard, 2018, at the height of prosperity, before the pandemic.
The possible, rumored appointment of Mayor Eric Garcetti to a post in the Biden Administration has provoked protests at the mayor’s house in Hancock Park, daily, for the last week.
Black Lives Matter and other leftwing groups are angry at him for everything that ails this city. He hasn’t disbanded the police, he hasn’t legalized illegal trash camping on streets, he seems to sympathize with those powers who wear uniforms and carry guns and enforce laws against lawbreakers. Appalling.
And those who are not protesting, but living here in this city, under the Garcetti years, are also angry.
We are disgusted with encampments that burn up the parks, that litter the freeways with tents, shopping carts and garbage, that destroy the environment as if it is their right, befouling beaches, streets, sidewalks, bus benches and the urban region.
We are aghast that a state, whose economy is the seventh largest in the world, cannot manufacture housing to house the unhoused. We are appalled by the sight of squalor everywhere and the abandonment of the most ill, helpless and lost people who are permitted to turn the entire city into a mental institution.
We are bitterly laughing that a new lamppost contest was initiated by Mayor Garcetti in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis. Who would devote city resources to the redesign of streetlights when there are people living on mattresses under all styles of outdoor illumination?
We know 2020 has been a year unlike any other. But we also know that all the other years that lead up to 2020, when Los Angeles was allegedly prosperous, humming along happily, these were the years when this city fell apart, way before a virus arrived.
So we cheer the protesters at his house, and hope the new administration does not promote him to a position undeserved.
Somehow Eric Garcetti has brought the people of this city together, all the people who disagree, for they all agree that he has destroyed the quality of life in Los Angeles and should not be called to Washington for any high title or undeserved honor.
Earlier in the year, the Salvation Army store at 6300 Sepulveda went out of business. The lot it occupied, building and parking lot, is some 45,000 square feet.
It sits along a row of Sepulveda that is seemingly zoned for only commercial use, even though it runs along a heavily traveled bus route and is but minutes from the Orange Line.
Salvation Army, former location, now closed.
Here is an example of a critical issue that somehow escapes the gaze of Councilwoman Nury Martinez, Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne, and Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Why are there unused or underused vast parcels of land in a place which is starved for housing, where homeless people roam without help, and people cannot find affordable housing?
The Mayor recently wrote an open letter to President Trump asking for more help on a variety of issues, including veterans who are without shelter:
“If you and your Administration would like to help Los Angeles and other American cities confront our homelessness crisis, I urge you to take the following actions immediately and work with America’s communities to bring all Americans home:
Support the bipartisan Fighting Homelessness Through Services & Housing Act, S. 923 and the End Homelessness Act, H.R. 1856 which further expand the housing safety net with new grants and mental health programs to help cities combat homelessness over the next five years;
Uphold the Veteran Administration’s vision to build at least 1,200 units of housing for homeless veterans on the West LA VA Campus by providing capital funding for new housing development and addressing the severe infrastructure needs of this federal land;
In your FY2021 Budget Request, build up the nation’s housing safety net and support higher appropriations for the programs that have been proven to solve homelessness and create economic opportunities for hard-working Americans. Some of those critical programs are: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Homeless Assistance Grants, HUD’s block grant programs (HOME, CDBG, HOPWA, and ESG), HUD’s project-based and tenant-based rental assistance programs (including HUD-VASH), capital and operating funds for the nation’s dwindling supply of public housing, the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and the VA’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program;
Rescind HUD’s proposed rules to evict mixed-status immigrant families from assisted housing and prevent transgender homeless people from accessing federally funded shelters; and
Protect critical fair housing laws by upholding the previous administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” and “Disparate Impact” rules.”
Yet nobody in this city or nation imagines that anything will come from President Trump to “end homelessness.” Asking President Trump to accept funding “mixed-status immigrant” families with Federal money? Is it possible Mayor Garcetti actually believes that undocumented immigrants will also find federal housing money from the Trump administration? And transgender persons?
The second largest city in the United States has an extreme shortage of housing and the the Mayor puts the needs of “undocumented” residents and transgenders at the top of his list of federal funding requests?
The tragedy of Los Angeles is that it has no leadership and no courage, and it only pays lip service to trendy, lefty, wacky pleas rather than mounting the Herculean task of building massive amounts of housing through free market methods. We don’t need to house every person from other countries who end up in Los Angeles by using federal money. Is that wrong to say? Does it make sense that American taxpayers are asked to fund the disastrous policies and ideologies of this city and state?
We need, as a city and a state, to get moving to build on land which is badly underused, which sits along public transit lines, which could be remade as many thousand units of housing. It’s called re-zoning, and we need to open up and liberate land so that more development can come in and we can build denser, taller, higher apartments to flood the market in California with cheaper housing.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how my home in Van Nuys was cited by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) for “Loose, peeling or flaking paint along the fascia boards at gables and eaves.” Proactive Code Enforcement inspectors were sent out to walk around the neighborhood and cite properties in need of maintenance. Mine was cited, a notice hung on my front door, and an official demerit is now a government record.
It was sort of bitterly funny, a kind of karmic boomerang, for this writer.
I have this blog, you see, and all I do is walk around, write and photograph such egregious violations of sanitation, cleanliness and order that it boggles the mind.
Since 2006, Here in Van Nuys has been shouting in the ears of Former Councilman, now Congressman Tony Cardenas; and now Ms. Nury Martinez, his successor, whose record of housekeeping leaves something to be desired as well.
How does an elected figure work in the center of downtown Van Nuys and see all the garbage, all the dumping, all the homeless encampments around and not make it her number one priority? Is there not an element of shame in allowing Van Nuys to look as it does when you are in charge of it?
2009: Eastside of Kester near Victory. Nothing has changed in ten years.
Since 2006, Woodley Park has become a grotesque outdoor garbage filled encampment of such utter despondency that one can forget that it is actually a beautiful park, a bird and wildlife sanctuary, a recreational asset, a place for biking, running, hiking, field sports. It is not, and never was supposed to be, skid row.
“The latest storms have left a path of destruction for homeless who had been living in the Sepulveda Flood basin. During heavy rains the dam is closed to control downstream flows causing the area to flood, sometimes in minutes. The hundreds of homeless who live in the secluded area known as “the Bamboos” flee leaving everything behind.” (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
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On the walk to and from MacLeod Ale on Calvert last evening, again I saw how utterly sad the upkeep and the maintenance of some areas of Van Nuys are. These are streets within a five-minute walk of Councilwoman Nury Martinez’s office.
If I were her, I would take a weekly walk around the neighborhood with my staff and photograph and document this. Send it up the food chain to Mayor Eric Garcetti, and to Governor Gavin Newsom and demand that the city and the state step in and end this!
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.
It would be wonderful, as some readers advocate, to report on more happy local events, such as smiling families, freshly painted houses, award winning rose gardens and the best pho in Van Nuys. I could spread joy talking about the opening of a new Hawaiian BBQ on Sepulveda across from LA Fitness. Maybe there is a new car wash to praise.
But the urgent business of blight calls me to blog.
We live in a unique time in Los Angeles, one that features a continuing garbage festival of debris that comes, like an incurable virus, upon our neighborhoods, and stays for weeks and months, maybe even years, a homeless caravan of disorder which our city council, our mayor and other elected officials are powerless to stop.
Reader Wendy Hernandez-Zepeda lives near the Big Lots store on Wynadotte St. and Sepulveda Blvd. and she sent me some photos of the shopping carts, the garbage, and the illegal dumping that blights her neighborhood.
“Hi there! Can you help? We have been dealing with this for more than a year,” she wrote.
She sent me these ugly photographs, ugly not because she is a bad photographer, but ugly for what they contain, and the degree to which they depict how our city has fallen under Mayor Garcetti (“Garbageciti”), a smiling hologram of political correctness, who seems to be visitinganother city and another countryevery month of the year, and regularly trots out his 23 and Me diversity by claiming to be made of the same genetic ingredients as the five top ethnic voting blocks in Los Angeles.
I told Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda to report this to that app, My LA 311, and she explained that she has, but nothing has been done to correct the garbage festival on her community sidewalk.
My take on the homeless issue is that tolerance of it creates more of it.
When you allow, by law, using public sidewalks and public parks and public ways for the unlawful and unsanitary life of vagrancy, you send a message, broadcast around the world, to come to Los Angeles and camp out.
How is it that the lawless make the laws and the law abiding must accept that? There is not one valid or moral or medical excuse for human beings sleeping in alleys, on bus benches, and wandering the streets pushing shopping baskets.
Yes, it’s painfully true that housing is expensive, but it does not explain why the city of Los Angeles and the State of California have not jumped into emergency mode and created sanitary, safe, abundant housing for people who are temporarily displaced.
What we have, instead, is weak and pathetic leadership which panders to disorder, decay and barbarism, and refuses to use all power to end this continuing monstrosity of un-civilization going on all around Los Angeles.
There is nothing I can tell Ms. Hernandez-Zepeda other than voting for someone who is not Eric Garcetti in the next election.
Here in Van Nuys 
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