San Fernando Valley
The San Fernando Valley is an urbanized valley in southern California, lying mostly within the city limits of Los Angeles.
History
The Tataviam, also known as the Fernandeño, tribe of Indians had inhabited the valley for almost 2,000 years before the Spanish built the San Fernando Mission in 1797.
The treaty ending the Mexican-American War in California was signed in the Cahuenga Pass (at the southeast corner of San Fernando Valley) at the Campo de Cahuenga in 1847.
After the construction of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Aqueduct, the mostly rural area was annexed by the city of Los Angeles in 1915 more than doubling the size of the city. Los Angeles continued to consolidate its territories in the San Fernando Valley by annexing Laurel Canyon (1923), Lankershim (1923), Sunland (1926), Tuna Canyon (1926), the incorporated city of Tujunga (1932), and Porter Ranch (1965). The additions expanded the Los Angeles portion of San Fernando Valley from the original 169 square miles to 224 square miles today. Five cities incorporated independent from Los Angeles: Glendale (1906), Burbank (1911), San Fernando (1911) Hidden Hills (1961), Calabasas (1991). Universal City is an unincorporated enclave that is home to Universal Studios theme park and Universal City Walk.
Geography
The San Fernando Valley is bounded by the Santa Susana Mountains to the northwest, the Simi Hills to the west, the Santa Monica Mountains to the south, the Verdugo Mountains to the east, and the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast. The Los Angeles River is thought to originate in Chatsworth and flowing east along the southern areas of the Valley. One of the river's only unpaved section can be found at the Sepulveda Basin. Another waterway, the Tujunga Wash, comes down from the San Gabriel Mountains and winds south in the eastern communities of the Valley before merging with the Los Angeles River.
Most of the San Fernando Valley is within the City of Los Angeles, California, although several smaller cities are within the Valley as well; Burbank and Glendale are in the southeast corner of the Valley, Hidden Hills and Calabasas are in the southwest corner, and San Fernando, which is completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, is in the north Valley. Mulholland Drive, which runs along the ridgeline of the Santa Monica Mountains, marks the boundary between the Valley and the communities of Hollywood and Los Angeles' westside.
Los Angeles' administrative center for the Valley is in Van Nuys. Northridge is home to California State University Northridge. The 1994 Northridge Earthquake, one of the few major earthquakes to have struck directly under a major city, was epicentered in neighboring Reseda just east of the intersection of Elkwood Street and Baird Avenue. An earlier major temblor (in 1971), The Sylmar Quake, was also a killer, having destroyed the Olive View and Veterns Administration Hospitals, and rendered the east west Interstate 210 useless for a number of years due to severe damage. Prior to development,before the arrival of the Los Angeles Owens Valley Aquaduct water, the valley was a bleak semi-desert, too dry water for extensive agriculture over more than a small part of the valley. The water brought farming, followed quickly by residental and commercial development.
Demographics
The San Fernando Valley had a population 1,696,347 in 2000. A recent estimate by the Los Angeles County Urban Research Unit and Population Division puts the 2004 population at 1,808,599. The largest communities and cities in the valley are Glendale, North Hollywood, Van Nuys and Burbank. All have more than 100,000 residents. Despite the sprawling low-density reputation, the Valley communities of Panorama City, North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park, and Northridge have numerous apartment complexes and contain some of the densest census tracts in Los Angeles.
Latinos and White Anglos are nearly even in numbers comprising more than four out of five Valley residents. In general, communities in the northeastern, central, and northwestern parts of the Valley contain the highest concentration of Latinos. Whites live mainly along the communities along the region's mountain rim. Glendale has an influential and very large Armenian community. San Fernando, Calabasas, and Hidden Hills are quite homogeneous in racial makeup. Asian Americans make up 10.7% of the population and are scattered throughout the Valley floor, but some clusters can be found in Chatsworth, Panorama City, Glendale and Granada Hills. Lake View Terrace is 16 percent African American, significantly above the 4.1% average for the Valley. Another large ethnic element is the Iranian community with 200,000 people living mainly in western San Fernando Valley. About one-third of the Iranians are of the Jewish faith and two-thirds are Moslems.
Although poverty rates in the San Fernando Valley are lower than the rest of the county (15.3% compared to 17.9%), eight San Fernando Valley communities have at least one of out five residents living in poverty. While heavily-Latino Pacoima is widely known in the region as a hub of suburban blight, other mostly Latino places like Mission Hills, Arleta, and Sylmar have poverty rates well below the regional average, even lower than in some "whiter" neighborhoods.
A large percentage of wealthy families reside in the hills south of the Ventura Boulevard turning the phrase "South of the Boulevard" a commonly-used buzzword in local real-estate.
Neighborhoods and districts
Valley cities and communities within the City of Los Angeles include
- Arleta
- Balboa Park
- Burbank
- Cahuenga Pass
- Canoga Park
- Chatsworth
- Encino
- Granada Hills
- Knollwood
- Lake View Terrace
- Lake Balboa
- La Tuna Canyon
- Mission Hills
- NoHo Arts District
- North Hills
- North Hollywood
- Northridge
- Olive View
- Pacoima
- Panorama City
- Porter Ranch
- Reseda
- Sepulveda
- Shadow Hills
- Sherman Oaks
- Studio City
- Sun Valley
- Sunland
- Sylmar
- Tarzana
- Toluca Lake
- Toluca Woods
- Tujunga
- Universal City
- Valley Glen
- Valley Village
- Van Nuys
- Ventura Business District
- Warner Center
- West Hills
- West Toluca
- Winnetka
- Woodland Hills
Economy
The Valley is home to numerous companies, the most well-known of which are involved in motion pictures, recording, and television production (including CBS Studio Center, NBC-Universal, The Walt Disney Company (and its ABC television network), and Warner Bros.). The Valley was previously known for stellar advances in aerospace technology by companies such as Lockheed, Rocketdyne, and Marquardt which helped put man on the moon and armed the modern military. Most of these enterprises have since disappeared or moved on to regions with friendlier political climates.
The Valley is also home to a multi-billion dollar pornography industry earning the moniker "San Pornando Valley" or "Pornography Capital of the World". The leading trade paper for that field (AVN Magazine) is based in the Northwest Valley, as are a majority of the nation's adult video and magazine distributors. It is a legal business as the vast majority of the producers strictly comply with minimum age statutes.
Climate
The Valley shares the Los Angeles Basin's dry, sunny weather. Although the southwestern edge of the Valley is less than 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean, the Valley can be considerably hotter than the Los Angeles Basin during the summer months and cooler during the winter months. The West Valley community of Canoga Park has set not only the highest recorded temperature in the City of Los Angeles of 116° F (47° C) in 1985 but also the coldest recorded temperature at 18° F (-8° C) in 1989. Also, rainfall accumulations tend to be somewhat higher in the Valley during the rainy season in comparison to the Los Angeles Basin and the coast. The Valley suffers from heavy concentrations of smog, particularly in the summer, because of the mountain ranges surrounding it and because vertical motion in the atmosphere is often blocked by temperature inversions.
Transportation
Although the Valley is part of Los Angeles, its development pattern is almost exclusively suburban, and the automobile is the dominant mode of transportation. Several freeways criss-cross the Valley. Most of the major thoroughfares run on a cartographic grid; notable streets include Ventura Boulevard, Laurel Canyon Boulevard, San Fernando Road, and Mulholland Drive.
Despite the dominance of the automobile, the Valley has two Metro subway stations, in Universal City and North Hollywood, which opened in 2000 as an extension of the Metro Red Line Subway connecting the Valley to Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles. The Orange Line, an east-west Bus Rapid Transitbus-way was opened in October 2005, connecting the North Hollywood Metro station to Warner Center in the west Valley. The new line features "train-like" articulated buses and very high frequency of service. Two Metrolink commuter rail lines connect the Valley to downtown Los Angeles, merging into one at Burbank. These operate on a limited schedule serving commuters only during regular work hours. Three bus rapid transit lines service (the 761, the 780, and the 750) the area with more planned.
Parks and recreation
The San Fernando Valley is home to several large and many small parks. Griffith Park, the largest of Los Angeles' municipal parks, lies at the southeastern end of the valley, straddling the eastern end of the Hollywood Hills. Two large recreation areas occupy the flood control basins behind Sepulveda Dam and Hansen Dam. O'Melveny Park above Granada Hills protects the upper reaches of Bee Canyon, at the eastern end of the Santa Susana Mountains.
In the past decade, many large tracts of undeveloped or ranch lands in the mountains surrounding the Valley have been acquired for parkland. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its affiliated agencies have purchased or otherwise acquired many of these lands, which are maintained as parkland by the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, California state parks, or local parks districts. In 2003 the Ahmanson Ranch, a 2,983 acre (12 km²) property in Ventura County at the west end of the Valley, was purchased by the State of California, and dedicated as the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon Open Space Preserve on April 10, 2004.
Secession movement
In 2002, Los Angeles residents defeated a proposal under which the San Fernando Valley portion of Los Angeles would have seceded from the city and would have become an incorporated city of its own. Had the proposal passed, it would have created a new municipality of 211 square miles with about 1.35 million residents. Los Angeles would have slipped to third in the U.S. in population, behind Chicago. The new Valley city would have ranked sixth, just ahead of Phoenix. In proposals, the city would have begun operations on July 1, 2003.
The Valley attempted to secede in the 1970s, but the state passed a law barring city formation without the approval of the City Council. In 1997, Assemblymen Bob Hertzberg and Tom McClintock helped passed a bill that would make it easier for the Valley to secede by removing the City Council veto. AB 62 was signed into law by Governor Pete Wilson. Meanwhile, a grassroots movement to split the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and create new San Fernando Valley-based school districts became the focal point of the desire to leave the city. Though the state rejected the idea of Valley-based districts, it remained an important rallying point for Hertzberg's mayoral campaign, which proved unsuccessful.
Before secession could come out for a vote, the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) must study the fiscal viability of the new city and that the new city must mitigate any fiscal loss incurred by Los Angeles. LAFCO concluded that a new San Fernando Valley city would be financially viable, but would need to mitigate the $60.8 million that Los Angeles would lose in revenues. Secessionists took this figure as evidence that the Valley gives more money to the city than it gets back in services. This triggered a petition drive led by Valley VOTE to put secession on the ballot. Measures F and H would not only decide whether the Valley becomes a city but voters also get to pick a new name for it. The proposed names on the ballot were as follows: San Fernando Valley, Rancho San Fernando, Mission Valley, Valley City and Camelot. Along with Measures F and H, elections were held for fourteen council members and a mayor.
Opponents claimed that secession was motivated by racist and class-based factors. Valley politicians such as State Senator Richard Alarcon and City Council President Alex Padilla opposed the initiatives. The leader of the LAUSD breakup and former congresswoman and busing opponent Bobbie Fiedler also campaigned against secession. Supporters point out that the Valley suffers from the many of the same problems of poverty, crime, drug and gang activity as the rest of the city. The proposal passed with a slight majority in the Valley, but defeated by the rest of city voters due to a heavily-funded campaign against it led by Los Angeles mayor James Hahn. Republican Assemblyman Keith Richman of Northridge was voted in as mayor of the stillborn city.
The effort highlights the secessionist tendencies of Valley residents. Many neighborhoods of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley have 'seceded' from one another in the form of renaming and reforming known community boundaries. Groups are motivated by the desire to disassociate themselves from undesirable connotations that some communities have inherited and, in the process, increase property values. Lake Balboa recently broke away from Van Nuys. Valley Village and Valley Glen separated from North Hollywood. West Hills and Winnetka from Canoga Park. Arleta succesfully broke off from Pacoima but thwarted in its attempts to carve out a separate ZIP code. The separate districts are in name only as none of the communities have actual governmental authority.
House prices skyrocket
Prices for houses in the Valley are some of the highest in the U.S. In August of 2005, the median price of an average one family, two bedroom, one bath, home in the San Fernando Valley reached over $600,000. In 1997, it was only $155,000. In the summer of 2003, it reached $400,000 and by July 2005, it reached $578,500. From July to August (one month) 2005, it rose by $100,000. At this rate, the average home is expected to reach $1 million sometime soon.
The extreme price rise is due to a housing shortage in the high-demand area, and real estate speculation. California's population is expected to continue to grow rapidly. California's Building and Safety codes are some of the toughest in the nation, pushing out small construction businesses. Building contractors and speculators are getting wealthy, while many low income families must rent apartments rather than own a home, because they cannot afford the high down payment. The entertainment industry is drawing hopefuls from all over the U.S. Large Latino families and new legal and illegal immigrants are also contributing to the population increase, as well as the large number of jobs available.
Movies about the Valley
Several motion pictures about life in the San Fernando Valley were produced by many companies also in the San Fernando Valley, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Valley Girl (1983), Encino Man (1992), Safe (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Two Days In The Valley (1996), Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), The Karate Kid (1984), and its sequels were all filmed and set in the Valley. (See also: List of movies set in Los Angeles). The alleged lifestyles of Valley teens in the 1980s, and their slang (Valspeak), were satirized in the Moon Unit Zappa (daughter of Frank Zappa) song "Valley Girl" (Example: "Like, grody to the max!") Bing Crosby had a #1 hit in 1944 called "The San Fernando Valley" written by Gordon Jenkins.
