About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
On March 26, 2015, I was invited to address the opening of a new Van Nuys Planning Summit held at the Marvin Braude Center. The event was created and sponsored by Quirino De La Cuesta and the Van Nuys Community Council.
Here I am in the beginning of the tape, delivering remarks.
On October 8, 2014, the County of Los Angeles officially agreed to give $551,250 to the Village Family Serices “for acquisition of a real property to serve as an emergency shelter to house homeless transitional age youth”.
That property is 14926 Kittridge Street, Van Nuys. It is a single family home on a single-family street, surrounded by other well-kept and solid ranch houses. It will now house young men who will rotate in and out of the house, for six months at a time.
In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many thousands of homeless young people, on the streets, living under bridges, sleeping in cars, suffering from starvation, sickness and indifference.
Last week, I toured Village Family Services, a large health facility in North Hollywood, where Charles Robbins, CFRE – Vice President, Communications & Development, showed me how young people could drop in, get mental health counseling, meet with guidance advisors, receive job placement help, wash their clothes, clean up in shower rooms, and find help on everything from domestic violence to treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
Literature provided by Mr. Robbins to me explained programs offering foster care, adoption services for neglected youth, and a “wraparound program” providing counseling services directly to families in their homes.
20% of youth in Los Angeles live in poverty, and there are an estimated 10,000 young people without a place to live. Many of these are gay children thrown out of less tolerant homes in small towns. Other children are victims of drug and alcohol addicted parents, and the whole situation of drugs, poverty and hopelessness has been multiplied since 2008.
The dire state of life for many people, especially young people in Los Angeles, is indisputable.
The Village Family Services, with its $13,000,000 budget, has received donations of $100,000 each from Supervisor Zev Yarislovsky and the WM Keck Foundation.[1]
Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Johnny W. Carson Foundation, Wells Fargo, and the Hollywood Charity Horse Show have all donated between $10,000-$99,000.
More than 2,500 children and families have been helped by VFS.
With all these good things, why would anyone care to stop this well-funded march of kindness from opening up a house next door?
For an organization that administers to the most vulnerable members of society, the Village Family Services came into the Kester Ridge neighborhood remarkably callously, without informing the community about the insertion and establishment of a new group home.
Secretively, subversively, the funds to buy the home, more than half a million, were meted out and provided to VFS, and then a short escrow, of 18 days, was allocated, to transfer the house quickly, before any community opposition intensified.
Maria Scherzer, community activist, heard of the home and was shocked that notifications were never provided to other residents of the forthcoming facility. She wrote to the County of Los Angeles, inquiring about the funding agreement, and was sent a copy of the agreement providing $551,250 for the Village Family Services to buy a house.
Monica Alexnko, who lives near the (not open yet) new emergency shelter, set into motion a petition to stop the home from opening. She contacted Councilwoman Nury Martinez’s office, the Van Nuys Community Council, and she attended the LA City Council hearings on 12/5/14 to present her petition opposing the 14926 Kittridge emergency shelter.
While the Van Nuys Community Council might be expected to have sympathy to the concerns of its residents, it also found a place to make a new seat on its board for VFS’ Charles Robbins, who will now oversee issues of homelessness on the exact board who should be overseeing his project! A conflict of interest seems apparent.
Mr. Robbins, is, above all, a rainmaker of money for the Village Family Services.
His biography of professional fundraising explains it:
“Prior to arriving at The Village, Mr. Robbins was the CEO of The Trevor Project, a national organization focused on suicide prevention among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth. He was at the helm from 2007 to 2011 and during his four-year tenure, the full-time staff grew from five to 24, the annual budget quadrupled to nearly $4 million, and the organization received acclaimed national visibility. His professional experience also includes serving as development director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, various senior fundraising roles at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and founding Project Angel Heart, a Denver-based HIV/AIDS nonprofit organization. A Colorado native, Mr. Robbins holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Management from Western Governors University, a certificate in nonprofit administration from the University of Colorado, Denver, and he is a longtime member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) where he achieved accreditation as a Certified Fund Raising Professional (CFRE).”
Here is a hypothetical to ponder:
Is it possible that Mr. Robbins may raise $4 or even $7 Million Dollars for the Village Family Services allowing them to purchase 14 homes in Van Nuys for at risk youth? Why not? If he is successful in his job, he may not only find new properties to purchase, but he will increase the real estate portfolio of Village Family Services, completely paid for by Los Angeles taxpayers, which would be one of the most lucrative and desirable outcomes for the “non-profit”.
The City of Los Angeles Zoning Manual describes exactly the type of home opening up here in a few months:
“Small family home” means any residential facility, in the licensee’s family residence, that provides 24-hour care for six or fewer foster children who have mental disorders or developmental or physical disabilities and who require special care and supervision as a result of their disabilities. A small family home may accept children with special health care needs, pursuant to subdivision (a) of Section 17710 of the Welfare and Institutions Code. In addition to placing children with special health care needs, the department may approve placement of children without special health care needs, up to the maximum capacity.”
The definition is defined by code. But with the blessing of the city, there may be no limit to how many new places of this type might open in one neighborhood. Especially one with depressed property values.
If a lone house can go shelter, so can dozens, even hundreds.
So far nobody has come up with a way to answer the fears that this project has engendered.
One of the quandaries of modern Los Angeles is that we live amidst great extremes of wealth and poverty. People with hearts and empathy want to help the down and out.
Non-profits exist partially to ameliorate these tragedies of people without homes, health care and hope.
And churches and synagogues, schools and hospitals, individuals and corporations have stepped up and funded programs providing services for the suffering.
The Village Family Services is one of these.
Because VFS is administering aid to the most fragile, they also have a mandate of behaving with integrity, openness and candor about what they do, how they do it, and how they might come into a neighborhood to transform a formerly private home into a quasi-public shelter.
They have failed in communicating honestly with the residents who will live next door to the shelter. They went about their project in a way that was surreptitious and underhanded and when they were caught they said they were doing something that nobody should object to.
People who live, here in Van Nuys, have a right and even a duty to object to those elements of change that will undermine our neighborhood, and which may adversely affect property values.
Homeowners depend upon their homes for not only shelter, but retirement income. And the addition of yet another public service house into the area degrades and depresses the surroundings, even if the grass is mowed, even if the residents are “monitored”, even if flowers are planted along the curb.
A rotating group of strangers next door, living on the margins, faces and names who will come and stay and then leave forever, imagine this kind of neighborhood, multiplied and duplicated throughout Van Nuys, turning single family streets into quasi motels where all the pathologies that roam Sepulveda Boulevard are just over the wall from your kitchen window.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Village Family Services Annual Report 2013-14
Once upon a time there was a broken down place where people slept on streets, garbage filled the gutters, the air was foul, streets were unsafe and violent, schools abysmal, prostitutes walked brazenly in daylight, and uneducated, fat, tattooed people smoked marijuana openly purchased from some sixty local dispensaries.
In this land, oil storage tanks were built next to people’s homes, and large land masses were devoted to the needs of cars: parking them, driving them, selling them, refueling them.
All the garbage dumps of the city were located here. All the halfway houses and rehab houses and drug and alcohol houses were located here and the people were told it was for their own good that they lived amongst it all.
Though shabby and ugly, in disrepair and full of small illegalities, people stayed here, by choice or by necessity, and they eked out low paying jobs hauling trash, or pushing shopping carts full of cans down the road, or they worked at minimum wage stores selling liquor, candy or cigarettes.
And last night, in Van Nuys, two Latinas in their early 40s, products of this real place called the Northeast San Fernando Valley, spoke about problems and how they would solve them, and promised higher wage jobs, fighting for you whoever you are, and selling themselves as the saviors who would push back the demonic forces destroying life, liberty and property.
Set up in a room at the Marvin Braude Center, the ever growing 19 (!) member Van Nuys Community Council arranged a debate between City Council District 6 incumbent Nury Martinez and her challenger, Cindy Montanez.
The room was packed but badly arranged. The seating favored the 19 council members who had box seats. But the candidates were pushed off to the side, forcing the audience to rotate their necks at a 45-degree angle to hear the heavily accented ESL women debate how they would fight to better the district.
If the VNCC cannot design a room for debate how can they design Van Nuys at large?
Cindy Montañez, who once held high paying positions for the DWP, proffered herself as a poor girl from a family with values, six children sharing one bathroom and eating healthy food prepared by a church going mom.
She promised to fight against “overdevelopment” meaning any apartments opposed by anybody. She railed against the high-speed rail. She promised to upgrade Van Nuys Boulevard but to do so by opposing “mixed-use” development which creates walk able areas of retail, housing and commercial uses.
Councilwoman Nury Martinez, elected only 18 months ago, by defeating the woman at her side, defended her record of hard work, the mattresses and couches retrieved by El Trabajador en La Camioneta.
She wore a passion fruit colored dress.
Ms. Martinez has evolved into a fierce housecleaner who wants to clean the streets of discarded refuse and disdained prostitutes.
But Ms. Montañez had murder on her mind last night, with a strange remark that she would rather have a couch on her curb than a dead body. She accused Ms. Martinez, who lords over 100,000 illegal aliens, of neglecting public safety.
Candidates discussed Obesity, which garbs modern Van Nuys as white gloves and hats did in the 1940s, by offering bananas, water and apples at 7-Eleven checkouts. Later on, the council would adjourn to devour cake, 2 liter sized drinks and 12-inch long, mayonnaise-laden sandwiches.
The two hour debate, moderated by a gavel pounding council, was then handed over to the smock garbed loud lady with the white hair and big gulp drink who got up and danced in front of the room screaming loudly about video conferencing in an insane demonstration of free speech and performance art.
The evening had closed.
The future of the Northeast San Fernando Valley would be planted from these seeds. Here was dystopia in action, inertia and myopia, small minds and large people living in a teeming slum, which once grew oranges and dreams.
Van Nuys is sometimes and often justifiably known as a cruddy place.
It presents its public face, along Kester, Victory and Vanowen, as one of disorder: discarded mattresses and couches, tagged walls, empty storefronts, littered parking lots; and gelatinous, black spandex covered illegals pushing shopping carts and dragging water bottles to the corner market. Prostitutes walk day and night along Sepulveda. Gang graffiti is sprayed on white walls and then erased by angry property owners.
And then there are sections that seem out of another time, neighborhoods where commercials are filmed in front of picket fence houses, storybook cottages, lovely and well-tended.
At night the sirens and the helicopters come out often, waking up the sleeping residents.
And when day breaks, the streets are again quiet, but often sprinkled with discarded condoms, broken bottles and last night’s McDonalds wrappers.
West of Kester, north of Victory, we inhabit one of those “pockets” where there are mostly single family homes. Some of these houses are empty. Their owners have died, but their children do not choose to sell. Other houses are rentals. And many are owned by a variety of people: rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, Mexican, Guatemalan, Armenian, Black; renters and homeowners, disabled and elderly, infants and young families.
The overriding theme of the area in which I have lived for 16 years is fear of blight and crime. We want our houses to stay well-tended, to keep up property values, to put up a wall against the overwhelming power of social forces beyond our control.
When news spread that The Village Family Services had purchased a single-family home at 14926 Kittridge, to house 6-10 “at risk” young people aged 18-24, something got the community galvanized.
How could this be allowed? Where was the great Van Nuys Neighborhood Council? Where was Councilwoman Nury Martinez?
Who would supervise, residents asked, half a dozen or more kids when everyone knows supervising even ONE teenager is often impossible. Answers from Village Family Services were after the fact, as if purchasing and setting up a bad business in a nice neighborhood, even a non-profit one, is OK as long as you have the bucks to put it in. No questions asked.
What business is it of yours, VFS seemed to say, asking how a non-profit drug and alcohol halfway house might not be a good addition next door.
Public records show that 4 bedroom, 3 bath 14926 Kittridge was in foreclosure in June 2014. It was owned by Jose A and Maria G. Mojica.
It sold to The Village Family Services for $540,000.00 in October 2014.
A raucous and badly run Wednesday, November 19th meeting of the Van Nuys City Council, where members ate pizza as others in the audience yelled and screamed, and disorder predominated, was what some of our neighbors encountered when they attended . Officials pronounced that the deed of purchasing the home, and the plan to move in the kids, was a done deal. The only variance would be allowing even more to move in, possibly 10.
A friend of mine, who knows how these facilities are run, says it’s about profit. You can charge perhaps $900 a month to house each tenant, which multiplied by 7 or 9 might bring in as much as $8,000 a month, more than enough to pay a mortgage on a $540,000.00 house.The house itself is nice looking. I drove past it the other day and shot these photos.
A community meeting and petition drive will be held at this house this Saturday, November 22, 2014 from 8:30-11:30AM. All concerned community members should attend.
The board members, at least eight of them, gathered last night at the Marvin Braude Center in Van Nuys, as they do every month.
I sat in the audience wearing my J Crew crew neck sweater, corduroy trousers and Nike shoes. I had washed my face and brushed my teeth. Groomed, I felt oddly out of place.
There were about 30 people attending. They were dressed in what passes for public attire. They wore enormous stained sweatpants, big potato sack dresses, oversized t-shirts, and shorts. The suited men wore jackets and trousers woven from fibers last seen on government workers in 1986 Chernobyl: radioactive and polyestered, cheap, throwaway, bent, deformed and ugly.
The sartorial costumes emulated the discourse.
The mood was ugly. Fingers were pointed, insults traded, accusations leveled.
People were angry, people were upset, people were owed money.
On the left side of the board, a pint sized new treasurer. She is attempting to balance books which have not been attended to in a year. She inherited reports that are an unholy mess of hidden and unscrupulous monies. And she tried to speak. She told of her own hours spent making sense of it. She spoke of trips to the storage facility to retrieve documents, trips denounced by other board members as unlawful since she was alone.
Public comment included an elderly woman, double-chinned and triple-infuriated, who pointed her fat fingers at one of the board members who had treated her unfairly. The situation had something to do with the LAPD. Her male companion yelled out and was told to raise his hand.
And a young representative from former Councilman Tony Cardenas came to say good-bye. His big assed boss, who left Van Nuys as he found it, dirty, decrepit and disrespected, was on his way to Congress. That’s where the gifts are bigger and the salaries larger. The rep was told by one board member (in so many words) that Mr. Cardenas sucked and that he treated Van Nuys like garbage.
Another board member, black and female, had spoken at the dais and told of the unholy alliances, secret wars, and other mischief going on in the Van Nuys Community Council. Like a prophet from the Bible, she spoke of the wrath of government and consequences to be paid for misdeeds.
And when the treasurer spoke again, politely, contritely, apologetically and sincerely , she was jumped on by other board members who told her that she was neglecting her duties, duties she has only held for a month or two. This included forgetting to a pay a vendor who drove 100 miles from Hemet to collect $300 dollars.
On the right side of the board, one older gentleman was welcomed back, to resume his duties which he has done before. And will, presumably, do all over again, because his first venture was so transforming for Van Nuys.
Another public commenter spoke angrily, decrying the board for not putting printed copies of that night’s agenda out on the table . A few minutes later, he spoke again and called the VNCC President a failure.
There were many residents gathered for a presentation by a developer who is turning the Pinecrest School property at Hazeltine and Sherman Way into a massively ugly residential housing project. 180 three-story high townhouse units will be wall-to-wall stacked, assembled and packed into place. There will be no parks, no public gathering place; just many units with garages underneath, shoved into buildable lots. It was another example of Los Angeles as its worst: exploitative, cheap, insensitive, lacking community input.
The hapless construction presenter was set upon by angry neighbors who objected to their quiet residential area besieged by yet more grossness, that seemingly never ending housing product that disfigures modern Los Angeles from the Pacific to Palm Springs.
Back to the board which again decried the lack of funding for Christmas gifts for tots, which is only about a month away. There will be no Christmas in Van Nuys, or as it is called “The Holiday Season”.
Liquor was big on the agenda last night, as it is one of the growth industries in Van Nuys, along with bail bonds, pot clinics and more bail bonds.
One lady, who runs a liquor store on Victory, said her store is under new management. She didn’t say what it was called, or where it was located, but she seemed legitimate and fully in possession of her facilities.
Finally, another cheaply dressed balding attorney,who represents CVS and had formerly represented BP Oil and Exxon (yes, seriously, why would you tell anyone that?) came in front of the board to tell of an exciting new addition to commercial Van Nuys: the addition of a liquor store to the CVS on the corner of Sherman Way and Sepulveda.
The CVS liquor licensing excited one board member who said she had worked for ARCO for fifteen years. She had managed gas stations and knew a thing or two about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the LA Sheriff, and the LAPD. She knew how CVS should train its employees in liquor selling. She said if anyone was found to sell alcohol without proper ID, then that employee, manager, or even the store could lose their license and/or their job.
She spoke with authority.
But her authority derived from nothing, since she possesses, as a Van Nuys Community Council member, no power to penalize violators.
The CVS representative said half a million had been spent on the upgrading and appearance of the Sherman Way store. She said CVS placed a priority on their stores’ appearance. I thought of the urine-soaked, trash-heaped, paint-peeled CVS on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura in swank Studio City, and had a laugh.
At least Van Nuys has nicer CVS stores than Studio City.
Here in Van Nuys 
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