Recently, our neighborhood found out that the owner of a vacant parcel of land wants to construct a single-family home in our area of single-family homes.
Frightened, angered, upset, scared were many longtime residents who saw the picture of the house with four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a two-car garage.
And rightfully so, for they have seen that single-family houses are a great blight. They produce divorces, affairs, bankruptcies, child abuse, and unemployment as owners struggle to pay mortgages.
LAPD is often called out, and has been for many years, to answer calls at single-family homes, many of which are occupied by people who are battling addiction, depression, and a lack of joy which comes from keeping up a single-family home.
Many of these single-family homes are contributors to traffic, with five, six or even seven vehicles registered at one house. They are environmental disasters with their wasteful use of water for landscaping, for pools, and for the many long showers people who live in these homes take.
On the news, fire season has seen the burning of these houses, and the many millions of dollars in resources it takes to protect houses. Firefighters and other first responders put their lives on the line defending single-family houses.
Unregulated procreation often occurs behind closed doors and draped windows which produces children who clog our schools and clutter our roads, impeding traffic. Single family homes, with their many rooms, encourage child production, and this has a negative effect on our ailing schools with their bloated budgets.
News stories often feature drive by shootings at single family homes, as well as hostage taking, and there are neighborhoods all over the Southland which constantly are battling violent incidents at single-family homes.
Some single-family homes have unrelated adults living together in sober living houses, and other single-family houses even have unrelated adults sleeping under one roof, a clear violation of moral and ethical traditions.
So we are organizing a demonstration next week to try and prevent yet another one of these despicable types of housing from blighting our neighborhood.
We will have a protest. And many people will come with signs and scream loudly so that we are not subjected to the unwanted intrusion of yet another home, for someone we don’t know and we imagine we will grow to hate.
A few weeks ago, around 7:30 at night, I received a phone call from an upset stranger.
“Paul Dunbar” said he was a neighbor. A woman had given him my number. And told him Andrew, at “Here in Van Nuys”, might be helpful.
Mr. Dunbar explained that he lived with his wife and two children in a home he has owned for the past 16 years. His 1950s ranch has three bedrooms, and a large den facing a backyard pool. It is a classic old Valley house. But it is now under assault.
Dunbar Family Pool.Just Beyond the Fence Behind the Dunbars.A backyard paradise which will have an audience in the next few months.A single famly house now developed as a multi-family rental property.A few months earlier, the house behind the Dunbar’s was sold and purchased by an LLC. That entity was now constructing two houses, intended for rental use, on an 8,099 sf lot, zoned R1 (single family).
The back house, entirely new, will rise up two stories and contain a two-car garage below, and living spaces upstairs. The renters will enjoy an outdoor balcony whose view will be the Dunbar pool below and the back of the Dunbar House where all activities, indoor and outdoor, will be under the scrutiny of strangers.
A backhoe had dug up all the vegetation, and had deforested the backyard. A naked slat wood fence was all that stood between the neighboring houses. Rising up, like Godzilla over Tokyo, was a new 22.5-foot high house with many windows.
The egregious backyard neighbor’s two houses will be rented out. The renters (whomever they are) will live, and look down, across the entire width and breadth of the formerly private property. At night, the Dunbar Family drama will be a stage show for prying eyes.
Exhaustively, and in detail, Paul Dunbar kept records of the various letters, emails and phone calls he made to many city agencies and offices: Councilwoman Nury Martinez, District 6; Assembly member Adrin Nazarian; LA’s Department of Building and Safety; City Inspectors,the City Attorney’s Office. Senior Lead Officer Erika Kirk, LAPD, even intervened, with no results.
The upshot of the situation is that a speculator can buy a home on a single-family lot and put two houses on one lot with a “variance”.
All the neighbors in the area are aghast. They know anybody can now come in and demolish. And then construct two new, rentable houses on old, one-family 8,000 SF lots. A bad precedent has been set.
Construction for the new multi-family development on a single-family lot.The New Homes of the LLC Family.“What is the point of investing your life savings and a large portion of your monthly paycheck into a single family neighborhood? The city decides they will change it with no explanation/warning. And NO representation to voice your feedback, unless you spend more money and time for an attorney to fight what is already a done deal?” Mr. Dunbar asked.
The first story of the eventual two-story house rises above the Dunbar fence.Privacy Under Assault.
Van Nuys, in the aftermath of the recession, has regained most of its pre-2007 property values. But the average house in our neighborhood might be worth $550,000. If a home sells for $500,000 and needs $150,000 worth of work to remodel it, there is little incentive to flip it if the ceiling is only $700,000.
Therefore, the only way to make property profitable in Van Nuys is to carve up the pieces and put some income producing business on it.
Some speculators are trying the LLC route. Others are engaged in various nefarious scams.
There are now businesses that are buying up houses around the area and using single-family houses as sober living halfway houses. The owners bill insurance companies thousands of dollars for each resident, and then cram six or seven un-related adults into a house. The operators can earn $20,000 or $30,000 a month paid for by health insurance, subsidized by Obama Care.
My cousin, who sometimes works in these “sobriety” houses, says they are a profitable business and he knows of people who bought up multiple $1,500,000 houses in Beverlywood and set them up as post-addiction estates. Van Nuys, with lower cost housing, is in the sights of unscrupulous people bilking medical insurance to finance these arrangements.
Other properties that are zoned for single-family houses are now being redeveloped as denser housing to encourage more intensive use of large parcels of land. Allegedly creating a more walkable city, the new “small-lot” zoning will pour additional cars onto the street day and night.
The LLC situation means that individuals are not the new homeowners. Companies owning many houses will buy up distressed properties and rent them out, and they will also find ways around the zoning laws to carve up lots and cram in homes.
Poor Van Nuys.
Even when properties are rehabilitated they are simultaneously degraded.
Who is in charge of zoning? And who is in charge of handing out permits? Why and how is it allowed that an LLC can throw up two houses on one lot in the midst of our single-family home neighborhood?
Why are we always fighting new forces intent on destroying Van Nuys?
Why are people in power deaf to their constituency?
Here in Van Nuys 
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