Unimpressed at Chandler Estates Plight

I am responding to the Oct. 10 article about subdividing the Chandler Estates area of Van Nuys.

I find the whole issue repugnant. Sure, we all know that developers are greedy. What other motivation can there be for land speculation?

All around us, in our neck of the Van Nuys woods, massive, sun-blocking, traffic-causing, privacy-invading apartment buildings are going up constantly. When our walnut tree loses its leaves in the winter, the picture windows of eight apartments leer down on my children playing in my back yard. Tenants of those new apartments yell for my young children to be quiet when they play outside on weekends. They toss trash into your yard. They take up parking spaces on the street. Developers are cramming people into residential space all over the Valley.

However, when I read that some residents of the Chandler Estates are miffed because cul-de-sacs and single-family homes may be built on quarter-acre parcels and that the residents adjacent to this building are really miffed because their “bucolic” and very, very special estate life will be diminished, I can’t help but feel disgusted.

In this era of near-impossibility of home-buying for most of us, these very, very special people claim that no one has the right to have a regular-sized home and yard near them! Candy Stanman may have a million-dollar estate and a man-made brook for her pleasure, but we, just a few blocks away, have a 40-unit monstrosity just beyond our back fence. Could we in our little old regular-sized houses have blocked the building of that or any other apartment building? I think not.

Recently, homeowners associations have become prominent, wielding political power, vis-a-vis light-rail lines and other issues. Do people who rent, and who stay in their rented homes for long periods of time, have the same power? Do our voices ever get heard by politicians, and are we ever asked? Having major capital to invest in “estates” must mean an awful lot. Such is democracy, I guess. Or plain greed.

KATHERINE WILLS

Van Nuys