CSUN On Point

Every City Council District in Los Angeles is supposed to find a place for bridge housing, and every district has, except for ONE, and that’s the Northwest Valley. Bridge housing is paid for by $1.2 billion in funding from Proposition HHH, approved by Los Angeles voters in November 2016.  Since then, homelessness in the Northwest Valley has increased. Housing in the city has become very expensive, which most experts agree is a main cause of the increase in homelessness. According to Los Angeles Mission, 53,195 people in the Los Angeles County are experiencing homelessness. Three out of four are unsheltered. Over the last year, 9,322 people experienced homelessness for the first time. 

“It’s an issue that affects families, senior citizens, anybody from the spectrum of our society,”  San Fernando Valley homeless advocate Thomas Booth said. Booth said homeless people are often thought to be dangerous and alarming, but in fact, any one in any community can end up living on the streets.

“There is often a misconception,” said Ken Craft, CEO of Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission. “Everyone assumes that the homeless are either drug addicts, mentally ill, or that they are lazy, and they don’t want to work.”

Craft said his experience has allowed him to understand more fully why so many people end up homeless. Craft said the homeless are often people who are going through a hard time in their life, because of financial setbacks, health difficulties, or problems in their domestic situation, and those difficulties cause them to lose a stable home. But, Craft said, living on the streets, even for just a few days, can lead to exhaustion, despair and fear, then to mental illness, and sometimes to drug addiction. That makes it difficult to be open to receiving the care necessary to get back to a stable situation. It’s a good thing that there are drug addiction clinics that can help us during our journey.

It’s not always drug addiction and mental illness that lead to homelessness, Craft said. “We have discovered that some people fall into homelessness, and being homeless can be an onset to mental illness.”

Craft and Booth said they believe that housing is a necessary first step to help get people out of the streets, and into a safe and stable environment. “If we can get people into housing,” Craft said, “it will help with barriers leading to mental illness.” 

Different kinds of housing programs exist to help: affordable housing and supportive housing. Affordable housing is for people who need assistance with more than just housing. Supportive housing helps only with housing, by giving subsidies to those who need assistance.

But when a proposal to put affordable housing in the Northwest Valley reached the community, some parents said they were upset about “homeless” people living in residential neighborhoods, and they said they feared for their children. “There is no known statistics that signify in increase in crime rate [in areas with supportive housing],” Booth said.

Now developers of the proposal to build bridge housing in the Northwest Valley must continue to try to convince residents and voters to accept their plan.

Moderator: Rudy Aguado

Producer: Emmanuelle Yang

Anchor: Matt Roth

Social Media Editor: Leslie Estrada

Reporters: Rudy Aguado, Leslie Estrada, Mario Ahmir Lawson, Matt Roth and Emmanuelle Yang

The Aliso Canyon gas blowout in 2015 is the largest natural gas leak in American history. Hundreds of Porter Ranch residents living a few miles away were affected by the blowout — mentally, physically, financially and politically.

“I am still worried about this situation,” CSUN Sustainability Institute’s Professor Loraine Lundquist said. “It’s still affecting residents in my neighborhood. It’s still leaking; it’s still causing all kinds of problems, and it’s still a risk when it comes to earthquakes, and it’s a fire hazard. We are still working to get the facility shut down.”

The chemicals released by the blowout have caused many health problems for the residents, and research on the long-term impact is still being conducted. “The biggest problems in terms of the people’s health is not the methane,” said Lundquist. “It’s all the other stuff that was released with the methane, because the methane is stored in depleted oil wells, and it has other chemicals that are included in it.”

SoCal Gas didn’t tell Porter Ranch residents exactly what chemicals were being leaked, Lundquist said. “SoCal Gas is actually not required to release information to the community, so we don’t actually know what all chemicals are stored in there, but we do know there are toxic, volatile, organic chemicals that occur in oil.”

Nearly four years after the gas blowout the residents of Porter Ranch remain concerned. Certain chemicals in oils can cause cancer.

“There are five teachers at Castle Bay Elementary School that we know had no cancer history in their families,” Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council member Cheri Derohanian said, “and five out of 34 teachers got cancer. One of them passed away.”

Derohanian said she recently moved to Granada Hills to get away from the gas leak, and because her children wanted to attend Granada Hills High School. She said her former neighbors have health issues anytime there is a gas leak.

When the gas leak first happened, in October 2015, many Porter Ranch residents left the area temporarily.

“We did not know what was going on,” Derohanian said,  “and my children were running the mile [track and field event] that same week in school. The school didn’t know [what was going on], and nobody else knew either. It was ridiculous that the gas company did not have a way to tell the residents.”

Some residents decided to relocate permanently, because they felt too sick to live near the gas field. Hundreds filed lawsuits, including some Los Angeles County firefighters who helped the residents evacuate their homes. “Out of 30,000 Porter Ranch residents, at least 10,000 have filed a lawsuit,” Derohanian said.

Many environmental activists are following the lawsuits. The Sunrise Movement’s Becca Lieb and Save Porter Ranch Co-Founder Matt Pakucko both said shutting down SoCal Gas facilities is the way to prevent another blowout from happening.

“The facility wasn’t really needed in the timespan of when the blowout happened,” said Lieb. “Some solutions would be to shut it down and to fully embrace the transition to clean and renewable energy… I hope that after the facility is shut down, people who are living in that community feel the difference in their air, and are able to enjoy the beautiful environment of the Valley.”

Pakucko said many other SoCal Gas facilities around Los Angeles “are in worse shape [than Aliso Canyon. The green energy solution is not just going to be for [the benefit of] the North Valley. It’s for everybody.”

“Shut down all these facilities,” Pakucko said, ” because the same chemicals are coming out of all SoCal Gas facilities…the chemicals are making people sick.”

Anchor: Leslie Estrada

Moderator: Matt Roth

Producer: Emmanuelle Yang

Social Media Editor: Leslie Estrada

Reporters: Rudy Aguado, Leslie Estrada, Mareo Ahmir Lawson, Matt Roth and Emmanuelle Yang