The Valley Unmasked

To many observers, and perhaps to some of its advocates, the drive to separate the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles represents a suburbanite revolt against the tyranny of the big city. Yet, if the Valley were ever to become its own jurisdiction, it would end up having more in common with Los Angeles and other urban centers than many of its residents might like to believe.

Annexed to Los Angeles in 1915, the Valley developed from an agricultural community into a vast bedroom and shopping-mall haven for the city’s expanding middle class. But over the past two decades, it has become, demographically, economically and culturally, more like the mature urban parts of the Basin. If the Valley does secede, it will not be as a residential satellite of Los Angeles but as a “midopolis”: an increasingly urban community built upon an aging suburban infrastructure.

The Valley grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s as city dwellers fled to what was then its rural environment. Between the end of World War II and 1960, its population quintupled. New housing tracks, shopping centers and industrial parks sprang up like mushrooms after a rain.

Yet, some 40 years later, the Valley is no longer fresh, young or growing rapidly. Over the past decade, this midopolitan community has experienced little population growth; its economy largely tracks that of others in the region. Its fiercest competitors, increasingly, are glitzier communities located on the outer ring.

The Valley’s shift from peripheral to middle status has been associated with a dramatic demographic transformation. From its beginning, its suburbs were dominated almost exclusively by whites, many of whom fled growing minority populations in the older core city. Between 1950 and 1970, 95% of Valley suburbanites were white. Yet, as the first generation of home-buyers left or died off, nonwhites--Latinos, Asians and African Americans--replaced them. Today, nearly 51% of Asians, 43% of Latinos and 32% of African Americans live in U.S. suburbs. This development especially marks such regions as Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston and Miami, where immigration has been heaviest.

In contrast to early 20th-century immigrants, many of today’s newcomers stop only briefly, if at all, in the inner cities; their immediate destination after arrival is as likely to be Encino or Reseda as Fairfax or East Los Angeles. “Immigrants often don’t bother with the inner city anymore,” notes Cal State Northridge demographer James P. Allen. “Most Iranians don’t ever go to the center city, and few Chinese ever touch Chinatown at all. Many of them want to get away from poor people as soon as possible.”

This attitude reflects both the aspirations and family orientation of many immigrants. Today, core cities are more appealing to yuppies, empty-nesters, sophisticates and gays than to people with children. Between 1970-90, U.S. central cities lost 1.3 million two-parent families to the suburbs. Thirty years ago, the suburbs had 25% more families than the city; today, they have 75% more.

In some places, the changes are astounding. Twenty years ago, Queens County was New York’s largest middle- and working-class white bastion. Today, it is not Manhattan, the legendary immigrant center, but Queens that is easily the most diverse borough in New York. More than 40% of the borough’s businesses are minority-owned, almost twice as much as Manhattan’s.

Much the same can be said about the Santa Clara Valley, south of San Francisco. In the 1960s, the home of Silicon Valley was as white as its CEO elite. In the 1990s, nearly 40% of the valley’s population is minority, mostly Latino and Asian, including sizable Vietnamese, Chinese and Asian Indian communities.

The San Fernando Valley has undergone a similar demographic shift. In the 1960s, the Valley was roughly 90% white; three decades later, it was already 44% minority, with Latinos representing nearly one-third of its total population. By 1997, according to L.A. County estimates, Latinos accounted for roughly 41% of the Valley population, while Asians account for another 9%. The Valley now tracks most city and county demographics, including percentage of foreign-born, affluent and college-educated, with the exception of having a somewhat larger white minority and smaller African American community.

Sprawling development farther out on the periphery, coupled with the relative decline of inner cities, helped reshape the economic and commercial roles of midopolitan areas like the Valley. These areas, as the University of Miami’s Peter O. Muller has pointed out, are no longer economic subcities; corporate headquarters, factories, office and large shopping complexes are often more developed in many of these communities, particularly in the West and South, than in the aging city core.

This applies to even the most sophisticated industries. Former bedroom communities in the San Gabriel Valley, outside Houston’s 610 loop and in Fort Lee, N.J., have become regional centers of global trade, finance and telecommunications. Midopolitan Santa Clara, northeastern New Jersey and northern Orange County boast denser clusters of technology than anywhere in their surrounding regions.

The commercial environment in these areas is also becoming more sophisticated. Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, shops and banks are flourishing in midopolitan areas such as Flushing, N.Y., Mountain View or Monterey Park. High-end shopping is no longer restricted to Fifth Avenue, Union Square and Broadway; Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and tony boutiques cluster at places like Long Island’s Roosevelt Field, the Stanford Shopping Center near Palo Alto and South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

The San Fernando Valley follows this midopolitan pattern. According to an analysis by Cal State Northridge economist Shirley Svorny, the Valley boasts a sizable concentration of manufacturing, ranging from high-tech electronics and garments to some of the most important entertainment-related clusters of activity, employing over 60,000 people. Like Los Angeles as a whole, what makes the Valley economy run are small, often highly specialized firms servicing the region’s cultural-industrial complex.

Economic diversity is also evident in a collection of retail outlets that rivals that of most communities south of Mulholland. Notions of the Valley as a haven for hamburger joints, white-bread malls and generic supermarkets are woefully outdated. Within a 10-minute drive of Sherman Oaks, for example, one can find Chinese, Indian, Israeli, Armenian and Latino markets, as well as scores of authentic ethnic restaurants, clothing stores and bakeries.

These economic, demographic and cultural changes represent both the challenge and the promise of the midopolitan regions. On the one hand, their increasingly sophisticated economies and cosmopolitan populations make them attractive alternatives to the more homogeneous, distant suburbs. With their lawns, backyards, private homes and ample parking, they remain attractive places, particularly for families.

But the midopolis is not naturally appealing to the young creatives flocking to San Francisco, New York and older L.A. neighborhoods. Rather, it attracts the worker bees of the entertainment industry but lacks the fashionability of a Manhattan and Santa Monica for wannabe moguls, stars and their hangers-on.

Maturation has brought to midopolis many urban plagues, too: dysfunctional schools, crime and gangs. This is not only true in the San Fernando Valley, but in almost all aging suburbs. Although rarely noted amid the hype over Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley suffers from many of the undesirable symptoms of traditional urban areas, from increasing smog and traffic to declining rates of high- school graduation and soaring home prices. This has led to a significant out-migration of middle-income families to Stockton, Sacramento or out of state.

If unchecked, such conditions could ignite an exodus of middle-class people to more affordable and less crime-ridden areas. Ghettoization is as a distinct possibility, particularly in older areas where smaller houses and apartments dominate. This is already the case in parts of San Jose, Queens and the northeastern corner of the Valley.

“It’s a different place now. We can go either way,” says secessionist leader Bob Scott, who grew up in the middle-class Van Nuys of the 1950s. “The Valley can become a storehouse of poverty and disenchantment or it can become a series of neighborhoods, each with a sense of uniqueness and investment in its future.”

Ultimately, meeting these challenges will be critical for leaders of midopolis. Whether under their own governance or as part of a larger city or county government, these communities now lack the kind of evolved political culture necessary to address ever more complex social and economic problems. Addressing this sense of civic “amorphousness,” as Scott puts it, represents a priority for the Valley, especially if it continues to harbor ambitions of cityhood. Right now, civic politics in the Valley tends to be dominated by self-appointed homeowner groups, which, by their nature, represent a relatively narrow set of interests.

Although the halcyon days of traditional suburbia are gone forever, places like the Valley can still emerge as laboratories for the creation of a new and potentially important archetype of the U.S. future city. The great irony of secession is that it would be leaving the city that it has become.