Good for Van Nuys
Drive down Victory Boulevard or Vanowen Street in Van Nuys and you would never guess that between streets cluttered with strip malls and apartment buildings sits a neighborhood of 1920s bungalows and Tudor- and Spanish Colonial Revival-style homes. Smack in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, this hidden pocket has--mostly--survived, character and charm intact. Residents are rightly working to keep it that way by pushing to make their neighborhood the first historic preservation zone in the Valley.
No laughter, please. “Valley” and “historic” can be used in the same sentence, as was proven last year when the Los Angeles Conservancy led preservation buffs on a tour of the Valley’s mid-century buildings. Angelenos who seldom venture north of Mulholland Drive came to ooh and ah at the car-catching Googie style of Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake and the sleek lines of Sherman Oaks’ Casa de Cadillac. And Valley residents themselves learned to see buildings they pass every day with new appreciation.
The Van Nuys neighborhood predates the post-World War II building boom that gave rise to so much of the Valley--and to its reputation as tract-housing central. All the more reason for the neighborhood to seek historic designation.
The first hurdle is to get a majority of residents in the blocks bounded by Hazeltine Avenue on the east and Kester Avenue on the west to sign a petition. Then a consultant studies the neighborhood and makes a recommendation to the City Council.
Some residents are probably going to resist out of fear that historic designation would restrict their property rights. Restricting what can be done to these old homes is, after all, the point; the neighborhood is already checkered with apartments and newer homes, and fans of the old houses want to prevent more of them from being torn down or completely made over.
If approved, the preservation zone would require owners of the neighborhood’s original homes to petition a specially appointed neighborhood board to review any new construction, demolition or exterior alteration to make sure the change would not hurt the historic character. (Interior changes do not require approval.) Owners of houses or apartments with no historic value would also have to petition the review board to make changes, but the rules would be less stringent.
Residents who are uneasy about the regulations--less strict than many governing condominiums or gated communities, preservationists point out--can look to the experiences of the 13 other Los Angeles neighborhoods that have received historic designation. From Angelino Heights near Echo Park, named a preservation zone in 1981, to the five West Adams neighborhoods that adopted the designation last year, response has been positive.
Owners of historic homes in preservation zones are eligible for property tax breaks. And studies in cities throughout the country show a positive impact on property values and on the ratio of homeowners to renters, considered a measure of neighborhood stability.
Lest this give rise to fears of working-class neighborhoods such as the one in Van Nuys being taken over and gentrified, Los Angeles Conservancy director Ken Bernstein takes care to point out that recent preservation efforts in Los Angeles’ ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods have been grass-roots movements. He is as quick to dismiss the notion that an appreciation of historic houses is elitist as he is to debunk the myth that the Valley is an architectural wasteland.
Even more than the measurable benefits, residents of historical neighborhoods talk about the intangible ones, such as the community pride that comes with the preservation effort.
Neighbors get to know each other. Enthusiasm over the old houses often leads to newsletters and home tours and shared advice on the best and most cost-efficient ways to make a fixer-upper bloom. Carolyn Ferritto, a 35-year-resident promoting preservation of the mid-Valley neighborhood, says it all in the button she wears that reads, “I Love Van Nuys.”
It’s hard to argue with that.
