What Remains of Sepulveda Will Also Become North Hills : Name change: Residents didn’t want to be deserted by their former neighbors. Councilman Wachs says the decision takes effect immediately.

Sepulveda has died of shame and loneliness.

Six months after residents of part of Sepulveda changed their region’s name to North Hills--to escape the stigma of crime and seediness they said had become attached to the name--the community they fled rejoined them Thursday.

What remained of Sepulveda will now be named North Hills too, Councilman Joel Wachs told a meeting Thursday night at Sepulveda Junior High School. The gathering attracted about 500 residents who campaigned for the name change, saying they did not want to be deserted by their former neighbors.

The name-change decision was up to Wachs as the area’s council member. When the campaign to make the change began in May, he had said he would order the change if most of the area’s 22,000 residents signed petitions calling for it.

“I let them know that I would go along with whatever the community decided,” Wachs said Thursday night. “The overwhelming majority also wanted to change the name to North Hills.

“They’ve really been working hard to develop their community pride. It was an overflow crowd,” Wachs said. “It was really fabulous.”

The name change takes effect immediately, Wachs said Thursday night, although it is expected that it will take until the end of the year to expunge the name from city forms and documents.

The sudden remarriage with the neighborhood they thought had been left behind was “a hollow victory,” said Michael Ribons, a real estate agent who helped organize the original secession.

“The whole point was to establish a separate identity for people west of the freeway. That intent has been subverted by discarding the Sepulveda name.”

He said the original North Hills residents may sue the city to block the reunion with their former neighbors--or if necessary begin a petition campaign to secede yet again. “This could turn into a cat-and-mouse game for the next 30 years,” Ribons said.

The new North Hills would have almost the same boundaries as the old Sepulveda--Balboa Boulevard on the west, Lassen Street on the north, Pacoima Wash on the east and Roscoe Boulevard on the south.

It was the sixth name change by a San Fernando Valley community this year, the latest in a series that began when residents of a portion of Canoga Park, concerned with the effect the area’s name had on real estate values, succeeded in changing its name to West Hills in 1986.

The extinction of Sepulveda began in May when residents of the portion west of the San Diego Freeway succeeded in having it renamed. They chose the name North Hills--although the entire area is on the flatlands of the central Valley floor.

About 86% of the residents approved the change, driven by the notoriety the neighborhood east of the freeway acquired for street crime, especially when the Los Angeles Police Department erected barriers across several streets in that area in an attempt to halt curbside drug dealing. According to police statistics, there were 1,027 major crimes--murder, rape, robbery, burglary, auto theft and assault--in western Sepulveda in 1990 compared to 1,780 in the eastern part.

The drive to secede caused hurt feelings among residents on the east side. “We felt we were being deserted,” one 33-year resident complained at the time.

“They felt that the community should not be divided,” Wachs said. East Sepulveda residents at first complained that the higher-priced part of the community should remain and fight its problems together. When the secession went through, many of them began campaigning to rejoin the two halves--to the annoyance of some North Hills residents who wanted the divorce to be final.

According to the book “California Place Names,” Sepulveda probably was named after Fernando Sepulveda, an early settler of the Valley.