Sepulveda Basin – Up In The Valley

People By the Freeway Cook With Gas

Biking home from the gym yesterday, great plumes of black smoke near the 405 announced another homeless fire, or the launch of encampment fire season, as we now know it in the Valley.

Technically this isn’t true, the season got off to a running start on Friday with a one acre burn in the Sepulveda Basin that was doused by helicopter.

But the Basin is always burning. At any hour of the day, butane is igniting. Meth pipes are roasting like s’mores. Cigarettes and blunts are sucked down to the nubby entrails and tossed to the winds. Ramen noodles boil over campstoves. Disputes and debts are settled flammably. It’s only a question of how much brush gets involved.

In this case the unhoused have squeezed into the narrow no mans land between the sound abatement wall of the 405 and the back fences of the people who live on Orion Street. They don’t get away with that in Midvale Estates, but in the sweaty flatlands of working class Latino North Hills with its own portion of unpermitted backyard structures people are less inclined to go to the authorities.

When the only thing separating the feral from the domesticated is a kindling line of sun-scorched lacquered wood the tragedy of the commons is waiting. The flames licked their way across the fictional divide of public and private space to what LAFD delicately referred to in the incident report as “outbuildings”, destroying several before being extinguished. All credit to the Fire Dept. for saving the houses proper.

Not half a mile from here sits the former Panorama Motel, recently purchased by the City for conversion to interim housing for people sleeping within 500 feet of a freeway. It is one of ten motel purchases under Project Homekey. Cost: $105 million. Total served: 536. At $195,895 per head, it is more expensive than the $130K/unit Tiny Home Villages, but a bargain next to the perpetually-in-the-near-future $700K homeless condos downtown.

My question is this: in the fall, after the Panorama Motel is retrofitted transitional housing, will there be more people living by the 405, or less? Will I no longer see people clustered on the off-ramp? If the number remains unchanged or worse, wouldn’t that be a refutation of the “housing first” policy? This will be our acid test.

Maybe it will work. I hope it does.

Four years after passing Props. H and HHH, the homeless population has increased by a third. The fires however, are daily. That’s a new wrinkle.

For dollar value may I suggest the very un-flammable quonset hut? It was good enough for Gomer Pyle…

115° in The Nuys

Feral Cat 1, Sun 0. Basking in a survivors’ victory at 7 pm…
I have no idea how they do it with a fur coat on. Nature is a genius.

The ficus didn’t do so well yesterday. Watered it on Saturday. Less than 24 hours later, the top third of the hedge withered before my eyes as though God had sent down pestilence.

All things green shall by sundown be green no more, sayeth the Lord.

Inevitably, there was another homeless encampment brush fire in the Sepulveda Basin, the second of the past month. We have normalized this like summer weather.

Feral cats and meth heads are anti-fragile. Los Angeles may fall into perdition in the next six months and they will make a slight adjustment and continue as before. The rest of us, in our green and ordered life, anchored by our need for safety and sustainability, scan the horizon line and wonder what It Portends.

Gagandeep in Basura

Yesterday I found a series of flashcards in the Sepulveda Basin discarded by a person who refers to himself as Gagandeep. They endeavor to explain the fetishistic relation between People of the Favela and trash accumulation.

After this card, the print becomes too small to read.

Gagandeep is a fairly common Hindi name, but in this context perhaps more satisfying as onomatopoeia.

Web search unearths many Gagandeep Singh: a heroic Indian policeman who saved a Muslim from an angry mob, another who was a murder victim in Idaho, and a whole lot of doctors, including one on Van Nuys Blvd. It could be the case this spelunker of diamonds in the trash is one of his patients and has appropriated the name.

Amidst the crusader tents of Bull Creek, medieval disease has returned, ass to mouth, to Los Angeles.

Oh, would a pan piper offer to lead them away. Who would ask questions? For ten million dollars I will blow my flute and you will suffer them no more, sayeth the Piper. You may not know where I’m taking them.

GoFundMe would answer the call in a day. For the price of two lottery tickets per Angeleno, probably in an hour. Then what?

What if an asteroid hit Los Angeles at dawn while the Favela danced around a Maypole in the desert? Our comeuppance.

Or, in the Black Mirror version, we are forced to watch the Soylent Green-like fate to which we have delivered them, and are so guilt-stricken we offer ten times the ransom for their safe return.

Or, we never find out, never see them again, and peaceably adjust to a civic mystery. Untroubled, we begin to look at our ailing, inconvenient grandparents in a whole new light.

An Invasive Species

Mr. UpintheValley was weeding the yard this week … his exertions caused him to free-associate…and he was reminded of the strident opposition anti-gentrifiers have to art washing. In Van Nuys, weeds are weeds, but if you’re defending Boyle Heights, art is weeds. Art on the walls begets pop-up stores, which in turn beget poke bowls, which beget Lime scooters, leading, inevitably, to the dreaded/welcomed Bento box apartment block and people posting to IG while crossing the intersection on scooters on their way to have dreaded/welcomed poke, all but daring the locals to tap their brakes a moment too late. Abstract this, sidewall beardo guy…

It’s an invasive species, proclaim the nativists, this malediction/bloom of white hipsters. Murals are a semaphore for an invading force which should be resisted at all costs, by direct action if necessary… all are on a continuum…and a good example of how one can be correct on the facts but still get the politics wrong. Urban neighborhoods are nimble in their mutability, everchanging, and in Los Angeles more than anywhere else we circle back to the origin along a genogram that often reads: Smith->Jefferson->Lopez->Chen->Smith.

After weeding, I made my way to the Sepulveda Basin, where I frolicked in sheaves of wild mustard, shoulder high…such joy among the wild bunnies and predatory birds…only to read later at home I had been celebrating a pernicious weed siphoning resources away from native plants, encroaching on the habitat of local fauna. Officials have a list of such plants..they call it The Evil 25. And there I was…dancing like the demented villagers in The Wicker Man, exhausting synonyms for yellow, welcoming the invaders, abetting evil. Also, I like both gourmet coffee and pretentious ramen, making me trebly bad.

Invasive species can be defined as alien to the local ecosystem and whose introduction causes economic or environmental harm to human health. They compete with natives for limited resources. They alter the habitat they enter. They are difficult to eradicate. Encountering no natural predators or environmental restraints, they multiply rapidly and set up colonies.

We note the obvious in the privacy of our cars on the drive home but speak it aloud at our peril. If this is okay, why can’t I park on the freeway and take a nap on my way home when I get tired of driving? Why can’t I throw my trash in the Pacoima Wash? Why can’t I join the Free State of Jones when the whimsy strikes me? Why don’t we call things by their rightful name? How did we come to surrender so much common sense in the course of a decade? Why do we genuflect before obvious lies in the hope of dodging condemnation?

In short, shouldn’t we be viewing bad policy decisions as weeds?

Perhaps this fruit of local government should be added to the invasive species list.

Like usury, which makes a gain from money itself, not through the means of exchange it was intended for, but by replicating endlessly through interest, Los Angeles government is self-breeding. Its offspring is more government. Rather than being a conduit of public will, it manufactures consent for bad policy through patronage. It funds advocacy groups which petition the city “do something” about the issues from which those same groups stand to profit…in a feedback loop of gluttonous virtue.

2007 advocacy: Stop enforcing the law. Let them camp in the street.
2019 advocacy: Camping in the street is shameful. This crisis demands a permanent flow of money. For us.

For $500 million, we could purchase housing in less expensive regions of the country for every street person in LA. Here’s the deed. Here’s your bus ticket. Done. Prop HHH raises $355 million per year. How many are we housing with that, and why are we doing it here?

When everyone in the picture is applauding themselves, without irony, it’s time for Los Angeles to do what New York did in the ’90s: get back to first principles.

Sherman Oaks vs. Bridge Housing

Last night Notre Dame High School hosted a funhouse mirror version of the dialogue referred to in churches as call and response.

Councilman Ryu: I’m sure you want to hear what I have to say- Booooo! Recall!

I asked the following organizations for advice- They don’t speak for us!

The Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council- You don’t live here! Put it in your backyard!

Let me be clear, no actual decisions have been made- Liar! The Council has already given its recommendation!

If I know Sherman Oaks- No, you don’t! Liar! Go back to Koreatown! Liar!

After five minutes of abuse, the Councilman abandoned the microphone. LAPD Officer Pitcher took a turn. The mob was not satiated.

Officer Pitcher: Tonight we have to be respectful- Enforce the law! There are only six patrol cars in Sherman Oaks! How are you going to manage once the shelters are built?

As a prelude to Mayor Garcetti’s run for president, we all have to endure his solutions to the encampments of drug addicts, alcoholics and mentally ill who have flocked to Los Angeles to enjoy its services. The plan: more free stuff. In this case, trailers set up on public property as bridge housing.

Right here, on Sepulveda, between the fire station and the barracks. Those who showed up for the open house to hear the pitch were not having it. No one believes the trailers will be temporary, and cynics have history on their side. Also, Sherman Oaks doesn’t really have a homeless problem. Yet. Van Nuys has a homeless problem. The Sepulveda Basin has extensive encampments. The trailers would pull an undesirable population across the 405 freeway into the neighborhood proper. Over a bridge, literally. Relocating a problem where it doesn’t yet exist.

To his credit, Ryu stuck around for an hour and took the heat. How did a guy from K-town end up representing the Valley, you might wonder.

This is how. Behold the perfidy of the District 4 map. The quadrant in the upper left is Sherman Oaks. Guess where the Bridge trailers are not going? Hancock Park. Silver Lake. The Hollywood Hills. That’s why they draw maps this way. So City Hall can impose its schemes with the toss of a dart. Contiguous districts, fully within the Valley proper, would reflect community consensus.

Which explains, partially, the yelling.

When The Valley Was Cold

The Nike Family: Hercules, Ajax and Zeus

From 1954 to 1974 these rockets were parked in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, armed and ready to launch, as part of our deterrent capability against Soviet attack.

Ready to launch as soon as the bombers crossed into radar range. On 24/7 alert for two decades running.

Where was this, you say? Where exactly?

Right here, between the Japanese Tea Garden and the Orange Line bus stop. There? Really?

This nondescript concrete pad we’ve driven past so many times is the former LA-96 Battery. The opening volley of WWIII was slated to start a short bike ride from my house.

The vertical rectangles were once openings through which hydraulic elevators raised the missiles from their underground bunker. A single launcher site normally held twelve missiles. In case of a prolonged attack, they were transferred to the surface one at a time, pushed along rails. Launch crews lived in catacombs, Dr. Stangelove-style, in shifts, alongside stores of distilled water and canned food should things go badly and the Russian bombers evade our defenses.

The other half of the Battery was up on San Vicente Peak, off Mulholland. Radar beacons here swept the horizon perpetually, seeking the first blips on the monitor, moving at supersonic speed.

I imagine the people who worked the radar site had a different memory of the Cold War than the guys down in the launch bunker. My father in his youth spent two years as a Russian translator posted to a radar station in a ski village near the East German border. The time of his life, he always claimed, despite being a lifelong anti-war leftist. I doubt he would say the same had he been given submarine duty.