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What's in a name? Well, for residents and leaders who have won the battle to keep the San Fernando Valley designated as "America's Suburb," it means everything.
The Census Bureau released today their official ruling that the iconic SFV--home to shopping malls, car dealerships, and Valley Girls--can keep the designation first assigned in 2005 that allows for data compiled to be limited to the immediate area, which will help its 1.8 million residents see their interests protected and localized.
The Daily News reports that "Valley leaders fought for years to create a census tract encompassing San Fernando, Burbank, Glendale, Calabasas and parts of Los Angeles city and county. They argued that specific Valley data would help business leaders and policymakers make sound decisions for the region." The Census Bureau, however, wasn't convinced the designation was helpful and made noise about eliminating it last year, until a letter-writing campaigned yielded a strong Valley-centered chorus of voices claiming otherwise.
The word "suburb" may connote PTA meetings, post-WWII housing tracts, paunchy men pushing lawn mowers, and a general lack of imagination, which puts the validity of the moniker itself in question. Is the SFV a suburb? When the Orange Line was opened in 2005, some questioned if the busway made the area more cityfied than suburbanite. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks), however, has long felt that the Census distinction was one "that could give it the detailed information needed to achieve the economic and political clout it has sought for decades." When the SFV got its designation in '05, local leaders were excited to eschew the idea that the Valley was an all-white bedroom community, instead declaring it was "as economically vibrant and ethnically diverse as the heart of Los Angeles."
So it's the same...but different? Maybe 2008 will bring a revival of the Valley secession movement.
Photo by Sproston Green via Flickr
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The fact of the matter is that the SFV is the city of Los Angeles.. most of it, actually. Technically it isn't suburban at all (save for the few other municipalities such as Burbank, Glendale, etc.
The amnesia of place in Los Angeles mystifies me. No one who live here seems to really know where they are. When I'm told with great dignity by someone "I don't live in Los Angeles, I live in Van Nuys." I have to think... does this person not realize their mayor is Mayor Tony? They are represented in the Los Angeles City Council? It just doesn't make any sense.
The city parts of SFV make up 48.7% of Los Angeles' size.
Combined with LA and the smaller cities, SFV would be the 5th largest city in the United States.
Los Angeles is the only major city in America with a mountain range bisecting it.
SFV may have more suburban tendencies in design when compared to other parts of LA and some areas are flat out suburban -- Porter Ranch -- but it's really not and is beginning to get much more dense with projects like MetroStudio and the NoHo Landmark project.
Michael, the Van Nuys/LA confusion is understandable given LA's long institutional history of trying to pretend "The Valley" isn't really part of LA.
If you live in Mar Vista, and your mail is addressed to "Los Angeles", the USPS has no problem - indeed, in large parts of the city south of the Santa Monicas, "Los Angeles" is the preferred postal adddress.
But if you live in Van Nuys, no dice. You're not in Los Angeles, according to the USPS.
And when you dial 411 and ask for "Los Angeles", they'll usually include both 310 (the westside) and 213 (downtown) in their search, but not 818. When friends from out of town call 411 looking for my number, the PhoneCos will tell them there's no such person in Los Angeles.
So it's not surprising that some people are confused.
And, as both Zach and Michael point out, parts of the Valley are suburban, (just like parts of "over the hill" are suburban), but many parts, especially the southern edge of the Valley along the "linear downtown" of Ventura Blvd, are as urban as most of over-the-hill LA.
The idea that the Valley is "an all-white bedroom community" is simply absurd, a 50-year-old stereotype that hasn't been true for 30 years.
It hasn't been "all-white" for a long time - large parts aren't even "majority-white."
(Indeed, in many parts, the ethnicities are so intermingled that no one group is a majority. We're all minorities on this bus.)
And there's lots of industry and employment - the southeast corner of the SFV is where about half of working "Hollywood" is located.
Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, Dreamworks, ABC's corp HQ, NBC's West Coast operations, the CBS Radford lot, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic records, BBC America, Nickelodeon, The Disney Channel and hundreds of others make up the largest concentration of film-, TV-, and music-related businesses in the world.
"Bedroom community"? Hardly.
LA's urban form isn't the centrally-packed high-rise towers surrounded by rings of growing suburbia that characterized early 20th-century metropolises on the east coast.
LA grew up with high-speed mechanized transport - first the Red Cars, and later the automobiles and freeways that supplanted them.
That has given the LA area a distributed urban form, with low, linear downtowns sprawling across the plains - Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica Blvd, Ventura Blvd, Lankershim Blvd, Sherman Way, Van Nuys Blvd, and so on - punctuated by occasional high-rise clusters - Hollywood, Century City, Warner Center, Encino, the Burbank Media District - and soon, Universal City and NoHo.
The "cityfied" parts of the SFV were cityfied long before the Orange Line arrived - transit is only beginning to catch up with the urban form here.
The SFV isn't a single "place" - that's a confusion caused by the constant lazy use of "the Valley" instead of more specific place names - Studio City isn't Chatsworth, and Chatsworth isn't Pacoima, and Pacoima isn't Warner Center.
The SFV is urban AND commercial AND industrial AND suburban AND rural.
The SFV is LA. Nearly half of it.
It hasn't been an "all-white bedroom community" for quite a while.
It's time to discard those outdated stereotypes.