On these torrid July days, when the temperature is 105 degrees, and a walk down Van Nuys Boulevard near the Orange Line Metro stop brings you face-to-face with people sprawled out on the sidewalk, living in tents, sleeping on dirt, it is instructive and bracing to think of other civilizations, such as Japan, where human beings live under more benevolent and intelligent rulers.
Instead of parking lots furnished with the shopping baskets of homeless people, instead of garbage piles on the sidewalk, instead of empty streets filled with only the cries of mentally ill men and women, Japan offers low-rise, modern houses where children are cared for, and people work together to make contributions to society.
Every day we live amongst a remarkable level of filth, violence and rampant barbarity in Los Angeles; thinking it normal that a Trader Joes manager is shot dead walking to her store entrance to see what the commotion is; or that a camping father with his family is murdered, randomly, in Malibu State Park; or accepting as “normal” the idea that 100,000 people sleep on sidewalks, and RVs and cars, and live in tents in the city of the Kardashians, the Cruises, the Broads, the Carusos and the Spielbergs.
How can so much money, so much power, so much fame do so little for their city? How obscene it all is.
Near Cedros and Calvert, Van Nuys, CA.Empty Buildings on Delano near VNB.Slum Housing on Cedros. Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
There are places where guns don’t kill people every single day, and children live in clean, well-cared for apartments and houses next to spotless streets, where the trains run on time and people stand in line to wait for the next one to arrive.
We can’t completely transform what Los Angeles is, but we ought to engage our imagination to other places where they do a far better job of taking care of people and emulate those finer qualities of faraway lands.
Architects: HIBINOSEKKEI
Location: Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan Project Year: 2017
For almost twenty years I’ve made a home in Van Nuys, CA.
And since 2006, I have published this blog: walking, photographing and writing about a peculiarly blessed, and unjustly afflicted section of Los Angeles.
Here are some 11 ideas that I am proposing to better Van Nuys, especially Van Nuys Boulevard:
Kjellandersjoberg_salabacke_view-courtyard.
Create Walkable, Garden Court Housing
We need, desperately, little, affordable, small housing units that share common garden areas. These were built all over Los Angeles up until the 1960s when dingbats took over with their car-centric designs.
Such garden courts would be most effective within walking distance of major bus and light rail streets.
LAPD Koban (Japanese Style) booth at The Grove.
Relocate the Van Nuys LAPD to Van Nuys Boulevard
The Van Nuys LAPD is buried deep behind the Erwin Street Mall, way back from Van Nuys Boulevard. What this accomplishes is removing the police from active interaction with pedestrians, shops and the action, good and bad, on Van Nuys Boulevard. Putting the police station back on the boulevard where it belongs would send a message to the community that law enforcement is on active duty: watching and patrolling, enforcing the law.
Reduce the Size of Wide Streets and Plant Trees
When drivers see five lanes of road in front of them, but every single lane is packed with cars, or conversely, when there are wide-open lanes with few vehicles, both scenarios create frustration. The speeding, the road rage, the frustration of having so much space for cars and hardly any for bicycles or light rail, has caused the decay and decline of Van Nuys Boulevard, as well as Victory.
The heating up of our climate, the constant hot weather, is creating a meltdown of mood, with more anger, more violence and more irrationality. Trees would help cool down the street and provide shade. Narrower streets, lined with cafes, pedestrians, activity, would build a sense of community decency.
58277232 – singapore – march 18, 2016 : maxwell food center is the maxwell road hawker food centre is well known for its affordable, tasty and huge variety of local hawker food.
Hawker Centers Like Singapore
Singapore has “Hawker Centers” which are groups of different food merchants housed under one roof. A Singaporean can get off a train and within a few feet find delicious, cheap food in clean areas which are protected from the elements but still open air.
By contrast, Los Angeles has nothing like this other than Grand Central Market which is not next to a train stop. Van Nuys Boulevard would greatly benefit from one, large, enclosed, regulated building full of food sellers. This would bring the pushcart under control and provide a clean, reliable, fun, sociable place to eat and meet.
Billboard: Sepulveda at Victory
Give Commercial Buildings Without Billboards Tax Breaks
Billboards are so ubiquitous that we have wearily come to adjust our eyes to them. Yet their ugliness, their cheap, desecrating, looming presence brings down property values even while providing landlords with some income.
On every corner where there is a mini-mall with a billboard, the property owner who removes the signs should get a tax benefit because they are helping the community improve aesthetically.
A Monument When Entering Van Nuys
Why is there no marker, like an arch, an obelisk, or a gate when one enters Van Nuys Bl. at Oxnard Street?
Imagine a Washington Monument type obelisk in the center of Van Nuys Boulevard to make evident, proudly, commemoratively and architecturally, the fact that Van Nuys is a historic and proud area of Los Angeles deserving its own marker of identity and purpose.
Seen for miles, an obelisk perhaps 150 feet tall, should stand in the center of the boulevard, a booster of morale and an instigator of commerce and civic pride.
Santa Barbara, CA.
Pick a Unifying Style and Stick With it.
Paris, Santa Barbara, Charleston, Savannah: certain cities have an archetype of architecture which provides the base for how a city is constructed and designed.
In recent years, we have seen the onslaught of non-conforming, strange, computer-generated frivolities in architecture such as those which have marred and destroyed the beauty of London, England.
Yes, it is great to have one Disney Hall, but a street of melting blobs, narcissistic designs, starving-for-attention buildings, does not engender a district wide identity.
Strange Shaped Building: Vienna, Austria.
A classical Van Nuys would actually be revolutionary because it goes against so much architectural dogma these days and restores the primacy of community standards and group identity.
Tear Up the Parking Lots and Plant Orange Groves
One of the tragedies of Van Nuys since 1945, indeed of all of Southern California, has been the loss of agriculture.
Once we all lived near local fruit groves, and their soothing, healthful, beneficial trees provided not only big business for the state, but gave a mythical, blessed countenance to Los Angeles which was exported around the world.
There are hundreds of acres of unused asphalt sitting behind empty stores along Van Nuys Boulevard which could be torn up and planted with citrus trees.
Perhaps an innovative architect could design housing that is combined with citrus groves?
Kester and Aetna
Kesterville
This blog has actively supported the preservation of an area of 33 acres, containing light industries, near the corner of Kester and Oxnard.
“Option A” would have destroyed 58 buildings, 186 businesses and thousands of jobs in a walkable, affordable, diverse district and replaced it with an open air, light rail service yard.
It would have been disastrous for the revitalization of Van Nuys. If it had succeeded it might have been the final nail in Van Nuys’ coffin.
Instead, happily, the Metro Board, with the support of Councilwoman Nury Martinez and others, objected to the Option A proposal. “Option B” was chosen, near the already existing Metrolink train tracks, thus preserving the Kesterville area.
So now is the time to put Kesterville on the map and make it a harmonious, vibrant destination of little apartments, stores, restaurants, cafes, all along the public transit corridor next to the Orange Line.
Pashupatina: Ivan and Daniel Gomez in their shop which they completely renovated with their own hands and money in 2015.Create Gateway Signs to Welcome People to an Area. Kesterville could use one of these!
9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle BlancParis-Housing-by-Vous-Etes-Ici9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle Blanc9 Houses and 24 bioclimatic collective housing units by Fleury, Benjamin / Photo: Emmanuelle Blanc
Remove Onerous and Expensive Regulations on Housing
Builders are required, by law, to do so many expensive things that they are dissuaded from building.
One example is parking. The average building must spend 30-40% of its construction costs to provide space for vehicles.
Thus we have the paradox: not enough housing. And the housing we have becomes more expensive because there is not enough of it to bring prices down. And each rentable unit only becomes affordable if four working adults, with four vehicles, split the rent!
So now we have less housing, more cars, more cars parked on side-streets because we have, by law, made the construction of apartments so expensive.
Remove parking minimums and stop catering to the car as if it were the ONLY important thing in city planning.If a building were built with 200 apartments and only 100 parking spaces, would it really harm Van Nuys?
Is NYC harmed by scarcity of parking?
Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
Regulate Homelessness
California is often the destination for anyone living unhappily in any part of the world. Thus our state, because of its warm weather, attracts people coming here to escape.
Van Nuys, long considered the unofficial dumping ground of Los Angeles, is now under onslaught from homeless men and women sleeping everywhere, on bus benches, under boxes and tents, behind buildings and in RVs parked along the street.
We need to regulate where people can sleep by providing safe, clean, sanitary areas, to park RVs and where people can wash themselves, and get help so they do not have to sleep outside.
To talk about this is not to attack people who are in need. Rather, it is to assign us the proper legal and moral task of ending homelessness by not permitting it to exist in the first place.
For most of the day, especially in summer, the San Fernando Valley is baked in a stultifying, blinding, suffocating heat and intense sunlight. In those hours, peaking in the afternoon, it is an ugly place. Go to Sherman Way near the 170 at rush hour when its 105 degrees and see if you disagree.
But at dusk, near sundown, the Blue Hour appears.
And photographer Dima Otvertchenko, a New Jersey raised shooter living in North Hollywood, has a particular sensitivity and artistry in capturing our valley after the sun has gone below horizon.
Imagine how temperatures have cooled down after the heat of the day, how people have come home from work, eaten, and finally can go out for walk in a more temperate and gentle city.
His work is modern noir: graceful, atmospheric, cinematic, and magical. This is the San Fernando Valley at its most merciful hour, astutely photographed.
All photographs used with the permission of Dima Otvertchenko. Here is his Instagram.
The care, the compassion, the concern; the love, the affection, the authentic empathy for the automobile knows no bounds in Los Angeles. For here, the health and well-being of the car is of utmost concern to every red-blooded man, woman and child.
In our city, a neglected, dirty, abused, uncared for car is truly a moral crime, something that our citizens would not tolerate.
Since the car emigrated to Los Angeles, from France and Germany, early in the 20th Century, it has found a home here. The sincere regard for all wandering vehicles has produced an outpouring of health care for all cars unrivaled by any civilized nation. All races, creeds, religions, every poor and rich person, regards the vehicle as Their Supreme God.
And in every district of Los Angeles, outside of every school, restaurant, home, and hospital, the car is thought of first. Its needs are regarded before any triviality which might impede the happiness of the car. Even when there are empty factories, abandoned malls, the car retains its parking lots. Even roads falling down, streets pockmarked by potholes, they are allowed to carry the car, because the supremacy of the auto goes before any other infrastructure needs.
When crazy buildings to house people are proposed by cowardly developers, the first question at community meetings is always the holiest and most sacred one:
“Where will they park?”
No car ever goes without fuel, no car is ever without a parent looking after it, all precious water from our aqueducts is used to baptize and cleanse the car so that it can go on as the King of Los Angeles. Every drop of air we breathe, every sound we hear, every place we want to go, our car must come first.
Let the icebergs melt, let the polar bears and penguins die off, let 117 degrees become the new normal in Los Angeles, our car must continue to be our primary mode of life and liberty.
We know no other way. We will accept nothing less.
Following are some vintage car wash photos from the files of the LAPL:
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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