Tag: San Fernando Valley

The Perfect House

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  • Kay, Me and Larry, Woodland Hills, CA/ Feb 1993.

In early 1993, I was visiting Larry and Kay, who lived in a beautiful home in Woodland Hills, south of Ventura, of course. They were around the corner from the last large orange grove in the San Fernando Valley.

They were Hollywood people, who had moved out to the SFV, in the late 1960s, from Michigan. 

The husband was a TV producer who had success on ABC in the 1970s. The wife played tennis with “Happy Days” star Marion Ross. They had three children. I was friends with their middle daughter Beth, who I had gone to college with.

Their house was up on a hill, atop a long driveway, in a bed of ivy and surrounded by mature trees. There was a large, life-sized cow in front, so you were assured this was a place of wit and irony.

The expansive, beamed, rustically casual interior with a wall of patio facing French doors was paved with polished bricks. A two-story tall front hall, with plants growing up to the ceiling along an open riser staircase, extended back into an amorphous pool that was surrounded by terraced, green hillside and more vintage signs from old roadside advertising.

That year I was considering moving from New York City to Los Angeles. And then, the next year, I did. 

The husband was a gregarious, self-confident, big Midwesterner who liked practical jokes, loved making television, and loved Los Angeles. He would have made a good poster child for the LA Chamber of Commerce: family man, in a spectacular house, having fun earning a living in entertainment.

During one conversation Larry said he liked LA because when you drove to the airport “you never had to go through a bad neighborhood.”

Kay said she loved LA because she loved her house, “It’s paradise here in my home and garden,” she said.

I thought then, 26 years ago, how odd and how normal these remarks were, how characteristic of Los Angeles, and a certain kind of person these impressions of life here were. For who would argue, especially in 1993, that a nice home was not the entire object of life and the culmination of Los Angeles dream? 

Who cared if there was nowhere to walk, if “Main Street” was a 15-mile-long wreckage of parking lots, junk food, car washes, shopping centers and ugliness; and your downtown was a vacated, forgotten and despised urban renewal zone, strangled by bad air and wide freeways, where lost people wandered aimlessly?

And you never knew your neighbors’ names, and you only saw them from behind your tinted, electric windows.

If you bought a nice ranch house south of Ventura Blvd. you were really set. The city and its attributes or lack thereof were of no importance. The sun always shined on your pool and your garden.

I have lived in this city more years than other city, and still I wonder what I am doing here.

Like Larry and Kay I have a nice house, perhaps not on the scale of their house, but it’s a good, clean, comfortable house, and I like it.

But beyond this house, a few houses down, here in Van Nuys, one encounters a city where 58,000 people live on the streets, and traffic, billboards, mini-malls, illegal dumping, air pollution, and crime are profuse. 

A great house would be a great if it were in a great city that took great care of its environment. 

But our city lets people camp out along the freeway, and defecate in the take-out line next to Wendy’s. It cannot stop it when drivers cut off in traffic kill each other and it cannot predict if a madman with a gun will shoot to death some random man at the Orange Line bus in Lake Balboa.

The Perfect House could never exist in a city where 90% of the people who can, drive their children to schools in other school districts, because the local schools are inferior, because the nearby, walkable schools are populated by less advantaged kids. What fine city sends its’ kids far away to go to schools in other places?

In our city, desperate for housing, people with homes protest housing for homeless seniors. It reminds me of a man with epilepsy, and an autistic boy, who protested a memory care facility for Alzheimer’s patients near his home in NJ. 

The Perfect House would not exist in a city with scattered, garbage-filled carts on sidewalks. And a bus bench shelter was not for bus riders, but a bed for a man without a bedroom.

Los Angeles promotes self-destruction of self and city as public policy. It allows vagrancy, dumping and human defecation into local rivers that empty into the ocean.  And its leaders ask you to understand and accept the degradation of a city as the natural order of business.

Straws are banned, smoking is banned, but tens of thousands of trash campers can set up their tents anywhere in Los Angeles.

How are we not calling this an emergency?

  • 14030 Valley Vista, Sherman Oaks, CA. by Gal Harpaz.

In the photo above is a version of The Perfect House at 14030 Valley Vista, Sherman Oaks, CA by Gal Harpaz, photographer.

The architect was born in Ferrara, Italy, a Jew who escaped when Mussolini came to power. Edgardo Contini, (1914-90) who was a founder of Gruen Associates and a planner in many projects in this city including the Pacific Design Center, the Fox Hills Mall as well as President of the Urban Innovations Group, the practicing arm of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He worked with Architect Charles Moore and participated in the Grand Avenue proposal for California Plaza on Bunker Hill.[2]

And during his lifetime in Los Angeles, Mr. Contini seemed to think that this city was in need of urban preservation, reuse of older buildings rather than outward sprawl. He wanted to end our wasteful, continual destruction of historical structures and our voracious consumption of wild lands and agricultural fields beyond the city.

He saw Los Angeles as more than the ideal house. He imagined a city where the health and well being of all was the optimal.  

What would he think of Studio City today where $3 million dollar houses are constructed steps away from people sleeping on mattresses along the LA River? Or of Van Nuys Boulevard with its’ boarded up businesses, homeless encampments, and dismal condition?

In 1972, he wrote, “We should place the emphasis on recycling, no further withdrawl from our resources of open land would be required/ and we will not leave urban litter behind.”

Are we better off today than we were in 1972? Or are we still, like Mayor Garcetti, just talking a virtue game and living in a cesspool? 

Where are all the big plans for humane and just architecture to heal all the atrocities of modern Los Angeles? Can we just survive and continue to build a city of flat-topped McMansions, backyard garage add-ons and $3500 a month apartments?

Is any large city in America as dirty as Los Angeles? Is any booming and billionaire saturated city in Europe? One looks to India to imagine our dystopian future.

The Perfect House is beyond most of our reach, but the better city should not be.

[2]Obituaries: Edgardo Contini, Architect, Urban Planner; by Leon Whiteson; LA Times, May 1, 1990.

Valley Feed and Fuel

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14551 Bessemer St. (Photo by Andrew B. Hurvitz)
Map 14551 Bessemer

On the NE corner of Bessemer and Vesper, here in Van Nuys, there is a steel walled storage warehouse with three pitched roofs.

Unmarked with any signs, it seems to have been there many years, and is characteristic of structures that once stood alongside rail lines to receive and to send out produce, grains, and manufactured products to faraway markets.

I dug up information from the city and found that “14551 Bessemer St.” was built in 1922, at a cost of $4,000, for the Fernando Feed and Fuel Co. It stood alongside the freight lines and was serviced by a dedicated Southern Pacific rail spur that went right into the property.

6/22/1922: 14551 Bessemer St. Van Nuys, CA Dept of Buildings Application

  • 6/18/1922: LA Times, Warehouse at Van Nuys Being Erected
  • Van Nuys Feed and Fuel Co. 1925, View SW

By 1925, chicken ranches were a big business in the San Fernando Valley, with an estimated 1,000,000 laying hens in the valley producing some 12 million eggs at a gross return of $5 million dollars. (In 2019 dollars, about $72 million.)

A 1925 LA Times article said that the Fernando Feed and Fuel Company started in 1916 as a feed store, but grew, in nine years, to 1,500 customers, large and small. Several other facilities for warehouse storage were located in Owensmouth and Van Nuys with a crew of 45 men and 15 trucks delivering feed and other orders to customers.

  • 8/20/1925: Million Laying Hens in Valley
  • Fernando Valley Feed and Fuel Co.
  • 1/16/1925: Fernando Valley Feed and Fuel Ad
  • 1/16/25: Fernando Valley Feed and Fuel

Chicken ranches, on one, two or five acres were a type of housing development that sprung up all around Southern California. They allowed families to feed themselves and also make a living selling chickens and eggs. At that time, other orchards grew oranges, walnuts, lemons, avocados, asparagus, and strawberries. 

A 1916 LA Times article praised “rose lined Sherman Way” (later renamed VNB) and the white feathered leghorns that dotted recently established (1911) Van Nuys.

“White Feathered Leghorn” Chicken. (source unknown)

Scientific work to bolster the agriculture industry and  promote poultry farming was often shown. 

In 1920, a four-day poultry institute was given at Van Nuys High School, by Prof. Dougherty, head of the poultry division, college of agriculture at U of CA, under the auspices of the LA County Farm Bureau and the Van Nuys Poultry Association.  A vaccination to fight chicken-pox was demonstrated there. 

  • San Fernando Valley Chicken Ranch, early 1900s, (LAPL)
  • 6/20/1920: Vaccination for Chicken-pox is Demonstrated (LAT)
  • Early SFV Chicken Ranch (KCET)
  • Van Nuys Feed and Fuel 1925, view NW

Entrepreneurs and peripatetic innovators flocked to Van Nuys to raise chickens in advanced ways.

At a five-acre ranch on Woodman Avenue, in 1925, a recently transplanted Englishman, JCF Knapp, who had run plantations in Sumatra and India, had finally realized his lifelong dream to become a poultry farmer in Van Nuys. His operation had the capacity for 4000 chicks, and Mr. Knapp confidently asserted that he had not only a successful business model but a new kind of assembly line efficiency [for producing Grade A chickens on the scale of Model A’s.]

Also in 1925, WW Todd Realty Co. reported that a new set of chicken farms, totaling five acres, were to be built on Ranchito Av. near Tulare St. in Van Nuys. Some 100,000 laying Leghorn hens were expected to arrive in the valley within six months. 

[Ranchito Av., for the geographically ignorant, runs parallel to Woodman and Hazeltine, halfway between both. I found no modern maps with a Tulare St. however]

  • 7/5/1925: Comes From India to Raise Chickens in the SFV
  • 3/1/1925: Plan Group of Chicken Farms in Valley Town

A 1920s aerial photograph of downtown Van Nuys shows the Fernando Feed and Fuel storage warehouse and the combination of commercial buildings along “Sherman Way” (renamed in 1926 Van Nuys Bl.) and orchards that were planted right inside the middle of town. VNHS is in the upper center/right of the photo. (below)

Van Nuys Feed and Fuel 1925, view NW

The chicken farms of the 1920s, which boosters never stopped boosting, gradually died out when the Great Depression hit after 1930 and sank agricultural prices.  By the late 1930s, suburban development came to the San Fernando Valley, and during the war (1941-45), industrial and defense plants, soldiers, military hospitals and the urgencies of war supplanted the rural way of life raising chickens. 

After 1945, the San Fernando Valley was the fastest growing place in the world, and every acre of land was transformed by housing developments, shopping centers, and car centered designs. 

The chicken farm, with its odors and mosquitos was now a menace, and housewives in Reseda were scared to let their children play outside.

  • 10/4/1958: Valley Growers, Ranchers in Last Ditch Battle Against Urbanization
  • 3/23/1951: Chicken Farm Blamed For Reseda Fly Swarms.

Lost in the stories about the chicken farms is an old America that valued challenges and thought itself capable of surmounting them.  Poor, barely educated and hard-working people came here and somehow transformed Los Angeles into an advanced city that also grew its own food and sold off the surplus to an amazed and grateful nation.

Van Nuys, once a proud and admired center of advanced agricultural innovations, committed civic suicide. It destroyed its downtown by ripping up diagonal parking, widening the road to freeway widths, removing the streetcar, tearing down old buildings and replacing them with empty plazas and zombie moonscapes of trash and concrete. It embarked upon decades of laying down asphalt and laying out the red carpet for criminals, malcontents and derelicts.

Porn, marijuana, prostitution, bail bonds and slumlords were the largest industries by year 2000. Hopelessness replaced optimism and dystopia seized this district like an incurable disease. 

And politicians were thought worthy, not for their works, but only if their last names ended in the letters S or Z.

At least we have the Internet to thank for a glimmer of what it once was.

Our Lost Vitality

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Sepulveda and Erwin, Van Nuys, CA.

Housing, it seems, is everything these days, the foremost topic on the minds of Angelenos. 

Those who can afford it fear those who cannot.

Fearsome, it seems, is our ragtag army of many thousands of un-housed vagrants who have established anti-communities out of shopping carts and tents, and made bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms out of bus benches, trains, bridge underpasses and alongside our freeways. Covered in dirt and tortured by circumstance, pulling three bikes with two legs, they remind our fortunate ones that life often goes bad even for the good.

3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.

SB50, the state proposed override of single family zoning, struck terror into the hearts of many in Los Angeles who feared that the single family home, housing twelve unrelated people, might soon be replaced by twelve unrelated people in four houses on one lot.   

“Leave it to Beaver” (circa 1959) the imaginary ideal of Los Angeles.

“Leave it to Beaver”, “Dennis the Menace”, “Hazel” and the rest of the 1950s and 60s back lots of Columbia and Warner Brothers are how many, now aging, but still ruling this city, think of Los Angeles, and how it should look. 

When Dennis the Menance came home he didn’t enter into a lobby with an elevator. When Dr. Bellows drove up Major Nelson’s street, it was clean, tidy and sunny. 

Home of Major Anthony Nelson, “I Dream of Jeannie” (1965-70)
The cast and crew of the remodeled “Brady Bunch” home in Studio City, CA. (HGTV)

HGTV is now remodeling the real life home in Studio City that was used as the location for Mike and Carol Brady and their bunch, recreating in reality a 1970s home, inside and out, following an architectural blueprint from the set pieces of an inane, 50-year-old television show that seemed saccharine the night it premiered in 1969.

It is heartwarmingly creepy to see the now white-haired kids throw a football in an astroturf backyard, retirees feigning juvenile excitement as a synthetic reality show impersonates their old sit-com and pumps new advertising blood out of Geritolized veins.

____________________________________________________________________________

Woodley Park, 2018.

But life is not a syndicated sitcom. What’s on TV is not what’s beyond our windshield.

We live in Los Angeles, and die a bit here, day by day. The city is getting worse in every imaginable way: housing, health, transportation, taxes and education.

Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016

On the roads, in real life, in 2019, cars are now parked and packed alongside every obscure street because it takes four working, driving adults to afford one $3,200 a month apartment.

Building more apartments doesn’t mean more cars, it simply means less apartments. And less apartments means more rent, so Los Angeles keeps eating itself up in contradictions of cowardice and myopia.

__________________________________

Japan

As I travel around Los Angeles and see all the enormous parking lots and one-story buildings alongside eight lane wide roads, I wonder why we are so unable to build enough houses to house everyone.

California is not nearly as crowded as Japan, yet that country ingeniously designs small dwellings that artistically and creatively provide homes for every type of person.

On the website Architizer, I found the work of a firm called Atelier TEKUTO.

Homes shown on Architizer by Atelier Tekuto are really tiny, but they are built solid, with each dwelling quite individual in style and form, an irony in a country where every black haired man coming from work is dressed in a white shirt and dark suit.

But Japan somehow pulls together the artistic and the structural to provide enviable and well-designed homes in well-protected, spotless communities. Violence is rare, except yesterday, but nobody goes out at night fearing random mass shootings, it is safe to say.

We can’t, or should not, want to remake the depravity of our dirty, violent LA into clean, peaceful, obedient Japan, with its fast trains and scrubbed sidewalks, but we might borrow some of their ideas. After all, we conquered them in 1945, can’t we take home some intellectual souvenirs?

Imagine if Van Nuys took the courageous and innovative step to redo the large, unused parking lots behind all the abandoned shops on Van Nuys Boulevard with a mix of little houses like these and perhaps some larger structures several stories high?

What we have now is this:

  • Near Cedros and Delano.
  • P
  • Bessemer St.
  • Van Nuys, CA 90401 Built: 1929 Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
  • Van Nuys, CA

Don’t we have a Christopher Hawthorne now, Chief Design Officer, working under Mayor Gar[BAGE]cetti? Former architecture critic at the LA Times, he may know one or two architects from his old job. Perhaps Mr. Hawthorne can take action?

What have we got to lose? 

We are so far down in quality of life that we must engage our energies to pursue a remade Los Angeles.

A city that does not harm us but lifts us up.

As Japan shows, you can have enlightened ideas without living alongside mounds of trash and outdoor vagrancy.

There is no logical connection between toleration of outdoor garbage dumps and political tolerance in general. In fact the worse our surroundings get, the more people will turn right and maybe even hard right.

A Twelve-Acre Parking Lot

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Erwin at Sepulveda, Metro Orange Line Parking Lot.

When the Metro Orange Line opened in October 2005, it was a stunningly different type of transport system which combined a bus only road with a landscaped bike path that ran alongside. It cost about $325 million.

It connected North Hollywood with Woodland Hills, and eventually carried over 30,000 riders a day. Since 2015, due to Uber and Lyft, ridership has fallen to about 22,000 a day.

Hundreds of homeless encampments have sprung up on the bike trail.

But Metro forges ahead!

There are plans to create gated crossings at intersections to speed up bus travel. There are long-term ideas to convert the entire system to light rail and also build elevated bridges over Van Nuys Boulevard and Sepulveda.

In Van Nuys, at Sepulveda and Erwin (north of Oxnard), there is a car parking lot for the Orange Line Metro riders. It is over 526,000 square feet, paved in asphalt, planted with trees and shrubs, and comprises over 12 acres.

Today, over 2/3 of it is used as an outdoor storage lot for Keyes Auto.

Red area is the parking lot of the Orange Line. It is now used predominately to store autos from Keyes Audi. (Source: ZIMAS)

The Sepuvleda/Erwin site is “Exhibit A” in the DNA of Los Angeles, because the right thing to do would be constructing 10-20 story apartments along the public transit route and creating incentives for residents to ride buses, take trains and use bikes for daily commuting.

Singapore Housing Estate with parks and nearby public transportation.

If LA were Singapore, Tokyo or Toronto we would do that.

Instead our city languishes and fights and wishes to preserve a 1950s idea of everyone going somewhere by car. 

And thousands of new cars are lovingly housed on land paid for by public taxes which should be used as housing and parks for the greater good of this city.

Nothing beneficial for Los Angeles ever happens overnight. It takes years of planning and legal battles, for example, to build assisted or low cost housing, or parks. 

One can imagine the fury and fear that might arise if a 12- acre park and housing development were planned on this parking lot ranch.

Imaginery view from Sepulveda and Erwin looking west. In reality, Singapore.

What, by miracle of God, might be possible here in terms of a park or high-rise group of apartments, placed near the bus line, with a buffer of trees, water features, and gardens between the new residential city and the single-family houses to the north of the site?

Yet here, alongside a public transit route, taxpayer funded Metro Los Angeles chooses to rent its land for an auto dealership. How does that benefit the surrounding residents?

For people who are obsessed with traffic, imagine that thousands of vehicles are parked here ready to be turned on and put onto the roads. How does that feel Van Nuys?

If the new planned housing estate were policed, regulated, secure, and it also provided a new park wouldn’t that be an improvement?

Orange Line Metro Parking Lot at Sepulveda/Erwin

Not Van Nuys Blvd at Oxnard

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Why not Van Nuys Bl. at Oxnard?

On Architizer, an architectural website, I found a photo and description of a residential/commercial development built in Mountain Brook, AL in 2014.

Pleasant, as all ideal architectural plans and photos are.

But it also fired up an idea…

Why couldn’t buildings like this go on the NW corner of Van Nuys Bl. and Oxnard St.?

Where currently there is a large, unoccupied glass building that once housed a car dealer (what else?) it is now a yawningly empty welcome to the alleged business and government district of old Van Nuys.

The Mountain Brook, AL buildings (architects: Wakefield Beasley & Associates) anchor the street with ground floor shops, landscaping, sidewalks, trees and diagonal parking. They invite people to walk and to park in front.

276 apartments are built above the stores, with one, two and three-bedroom plans, and are spread between the structures. Various modern amenities, including fitness centers, parks, yoga and meditation areas, wifi, are added to entice renters.

What is it that makes this type of building a dream and not a reality on the main street of Van Nuys? Why, in a city starved for housing, is there not a furious effort by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and the City of Los Angeles to rev up the pace and quality of apartment construction?

Stylistically, the traditional look of this building would probably elicit snickers from the Christopher Hawthorne/Frances Anderson crowd. It is much too literal and polite and pseudo-historic for a cult which takes its abstract, contorted meals at Frank Gehry’s feet.

Frank Gehryism

But Van Nuys is starved for anything that can bring us up from the homeless, trashy, neglected place we are today. An above-average, but suitable design such as the one from Mountain Brook, AL is better than shopping carts full of garbage and people sleeping in cars.

It would work because it cares about the urban context around it.

New Housing at Old Bank.

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Last week, the LA Planning Commission approved 179 townhomes and 8 low-income apartments built partially out of the old North Hollywood Savings and Loan (later Chase) Bank at 4445 Lankershim Bl. at Riverside Dr. according a recent story in the Daily News.

The 1961 building will be readapted for residential use, and include over 5,000 SF of ground floor commercial space along with 263 car spots and 237 bike spaces. The architect is Winston Chang, principal of Next.

For years I have driven past this building as I traveled on the 134 or along Riverside Drive. 

Curious about its history, I dug up some old LA Times articles.

Roscoe W. Blanchard, Sr. (1882-1977) owner of the Blanchard Lumber Company, founded the North Hollywood Savings and Loan in 1923 when the San Fernando Valley was in its earliest boom days. 

Here is his 1977 obituary:

After WWII (1945), the boom in residential building made the bank prosperous, and in 1960, with over $40 million in assets, they announced a new $2 million dollar, six-story tall skyscraper with 73,810 SF of space. Earthquake resistant and fireproof, it was also the tallest structure in the San Fernando Valley. 

In a 1963 ad, the bank stated they would pay depositors 4.80% interest, a tidy amount for the time. In 1969, they promised 5% interest for new deposits.  Those were the days when a person could save money by opening a savings and loan account, and count on a guaranteed level of annual growth.

But the go-go 1960s ended with a decline in the Los Angeles realty boom. And the days of a secure savings and loan specializing in residential housing loans was numbered.

A Feb 9, 1969 LA Times article entitled, “Realty Boom is Fading as Prices Stay Stable” lamented high interest rates of 7-8%, and the inability of many families to afford the average $25,000-$35,000 SFV home, with more than 2/3 of SFV families earning less than $10,000 a year.

Overbuilding in 1965-66 had resulted in rental vacancies of 22% and almost 2,000 new homes unsold. One-third of the new, un-bought homes in Los Angeles were in the San Fernando Valley.

In 1969, both rents and residential prices fell as supplies increased, a widely accepted fact of economics which seems to have been forgotten by modern Angelenos who believe that building more housing is only for “greedy developers.” 

But back when the developers were allowed to develop, this was the result:

1970: In Woodland Hills, the average rent was $172, the highest in the Valley. 

Encino had the most expensive homes, averaging $50,000 in value.[1]

Today we have this:

According to CoStar, the price of an average apartment in the Woodland Hills sub-market—which includes Warner Center—stood at $2,200 per month. 

In 2018, Redfin said the average Encino home was $980,000.

In 1979, Proposition 13 froze property tax rates at the original level a home was sold at, not currently assessed at. Lucky owners of homes bought in 1974 for $40,000, which became $300,000 properties in 1980 (or $3,000,000 in 2019) were still taxed at 1974’s $40,000 purchase price. 

The tax rebellion was partially a white reaction against the increase in illegal migration and resentment in paying taxes for darker complexioned students. Today, most people who can, drive their children out of “bad” school districts to “good” ones thus exacerbating our air pollution and traffic problems. 

People who once rode the bus now take Uber or Lyft, thus exacerbating our air pollution and traffic problems.

We don’t build enough housing. Our housing is in short supply because many of the occupants here don’t legally have a right to be here. But that is stating what should not be said.

Part of our hypocrisy is being liberal and being racist and wanting good education for our children. And none of these traits can co-exist in modern Los Angeles without being hypocritcal. This is not an indictment, just merely a statement of fact from speaking to white parents who live on my street in Van Nuys and drive their kids out of the area to attend school.

The great shortage of homes in Los Angeles began its 40-year ascent and has now culminated in the lovely sight of human beings, unable to afford shelter, sleeping under bridges and along sidewalks. 

Mental illness is blamed for some of this but I wonder how mentally healthy I would be after eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in an alley for a year.

That some of the fortunate inheritors of parental properties, and low property taxes, are also some of the biggest opponents of new residential construction, especially in wealthy sections of Los Angeles, is a cruel irony. 

In the 1980s, the Savings and Loan crisis, brought on by government policies that bankrupted local S&Ls, resulted in the consolidation of many small banks into the large regional ones such as Chase or Bank of America.

In 1976, North Hollywood Savings and Loan was incorporated and merged into San Diego’s Central Federal Savings and Loan Association. 

So in the next few years, a building that once housed a savings and loan which played an instrumental role in lending money to young families buying homes in the San Fernando Valley, will become itself a home for some 179 families, (and 8 units or 4% of the total units will be low income).

Los Angeles, here in Van Nuys, and here in North Hollywood, and all around the city, will move along and build expensively and sluggishly until its leaders accept that it must become denser, higher, and less car dependent. An enormous push for more affordable and multi-modal transport accessible housing is paramount for our survival as a viable metropolis. 

Because we don’t build enough housing, we cannot afford to live in areas we might want to, which leads to more segregation and more bitterness and more helplessness in a city where homelessness is never far off and being housed is conundrum of insanity and indebtedness.

That we need to build more was something Roscoe W. Blanchard, Sr. would have understood with his expertise and success in building materials and financing homes 100 years ago.

We are trapped between the reality of our city and our dreams of its potential. We know what it is. We see this place with our own eyes.

But we really don’t want to accept its degraded condition, or the responsibility for how grotesque, unequal, cruel, barbaric and sadistic it often is. To look at the ugliness in this city we would have to accept that ugliness in ourselves. And why we make illogical and self-destructive choices and choose prerogatives that hasten the decline of Los Angeles.


[1]Valley Population Near Million; Growth Slows

–LA Times, April 29, 1971