Does Simi Have a Sense of Place? Opinions Differ

Ask Simi Valley planner Wolf Ascher to highlight some of his city’s outstanding features and he will enthuse over carefully preserved vistas, intensely coordinated architecture and meticulously landscaped subdivisions.

Put the same question to Bill Fulton and the independent, Ventura-based planner ticks off a litany of faults, boiling them all down to bland, bland, bland.

Depending on whom you talk to, Simi Valley is either a welcome refuge of green lawns, rolling hills and a deep-rooted community or 39 square miles of soulless strip malls and sprawling subdivisions.

For Fulton, the problem is simple to identify, but difficult to remedy.

“If I have a criticism of Simi Valley it is that you don’t get the impression that it is really a place,” Fulton said.

“If you think about the places you like to be, more than anywhere else, those places are distinctive,” he continued. “In Simi Valley, you may be able to get a sense of place in your back yard looking at the hills, but you don’t get a sense of place in one of those endless strip malls.”

Ascher, who has worked as a planner for the city for 21 years, insists that the city does provide a sense of place. In fact, he says, it is full of meaningful places, which he calls focal points.

“We don’t have an obvious center like the European cities with the castle on the hill,” Ascher said. “But if you open your eyes you can see these focal points, these centers of community activity.”

Among the centers Ascher lists are the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Wood Ranch housing development and the city’s government center, which is home to City Hall, a library, senior center, county courthouse and an office of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Just as important, Ascher said, is the city’s attention to aesthetics throughout the valley.

The bad rap some critics give the city has more to do with the way it looked 25 years ago, when billboards abounded, planning was scorned and malls and tract housing appeared seemingly overnight.

Ascher points with pride to billboard-free Los Angeles Avenue, a result of decades of careful planning. Although strip malls still dominate much of the city’s main drag, thousands of trees now line the sidewalks, rooftop signs and unsightly swamp coolers are prohibited and most of the power poles are out of sight, buried deep underground.

Development aside, for a real sense of Simi Valley, Ascher said, look beyond the city limits to the mountains that surround it.

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To the west is cross-topped Mt. McCoy; to the north, the stark, looming walls of Whiteface Mountain; in the east the craggy outcroppings of the Santa Susana Mountains, and to the south, the softly rolling Simi Valley Hills.

With the valley floor almost entirely built out and pressure strong to allow development in the highly desirable hillsides, the city strives for selectivity, restricting construction to slopes of less than 20%.

Overall, the city has held fast to that credo, granting exceptions for carefully selected housing developments, an industrial park at the west end of town, a long-sought regional mall and occasional water tanks, plopped like beige birthday cakes atop hills east of the city.

Water tanks and housing tracts aside, “it’s the hills that give Simi Valley its distinctive flavor,” Ascher said. “It’s quite a spectacular setting.”

But critics say Simi Valley suffers from sameness syndrome, designed intentionally to blend in rather than stimulate or inspire.

“Simi Valley is such a young city, it’s really in the larval or nymphal stage of city-dom,” said Joel Garreau , author of “Edge City,” a book chronicling the evolution of suburbs into thriving urban centers.

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“The thing about Simi Valley is that at one time it was pristine and quite beautiful and people moved out there seeking Eden,” Garreau said. “Now that the rural element is diminishing, people have to develop a new aesthetic, and that takes time.”

Though he holds fast to the conviction that Simi Valley is a model of suburban success, Ascher acknowledged that in both personality and appearance, his city is still in the early stages of its evolution.

“What we have here is an ongoing process,” Ascher said. “We work on it and improve on it bit by bit.”