Van Nuys May Get Last Laugh

Born in a barley field, Van Nuys was packaged 91 years ago as “the largest opportunity on the entire Pacific Coast” and sold to eager buyers for $350 per sunbaked lot.

The booming suburb became the heart of the San Fernando Valley, an all-American town of bungalows nesting on crisp green lawns. It was a cultural hub for teenagers cruising in flashy cars and a government center complete with a scaled-down version of Los Angeles City Hall.

But like the Valley itself, Van Nuys has tumbled in much of the public imagination from an idyllic home to a lame punch line.

“The very armpit of the Earth,” Sandra Tsing Loh, author of “A Year in Van Nuys,” joked about her hometown at one book-signing. “Van Nuys is walking down a red carpet, being a friend of a friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend, and the paparazzi take one breathless look at you and ... turn away to reload.”

Now, however, the aging suburb has a chance to reclaim a bit of the old glory. As secessionists press their case for Valley independence, they have thrust Van Nuys back into the spotlight--this time as the potential headquarters of a new city.

It remains a vivid example of the impulses that drive secession--the sense of neglect and disrepair that some Valley residents feel has been inflicted on them by a distant and indifferent City Hall, and the notion that potential is being overlooked.

“We’ve been dissed,” said Armand Arabian, a retired state Supreme Court justice who keeps a law office in Van Nuys. “We’re ready to control our own lives, and you watch and see if we don’t step up to the plate. We’ve got everything we need here in Van Nuys.”

A Golden Beginning

It wasn’t always so grim.

Van Nuys was once the place to be, the epitome of the good life in sunny Southern California. It literally boomed into being in a single day: Feb. 22, 1911.

That’s when developer William Paul Whitsett threw a giant barbecue to promote 47,500 acres of dusty earth. He divided the land into lots, hired a swarm of workers to build streets and called every person in Los Angeles who had a telephone to invite them out for the day.

Thousands of curious customers trekked to Van Nuys (named after the previous landowner, wheat farmer Isaac Newton Van Nuys).

“The Golden Harvest You Will Reap,” trumpeted a 1911 advertisement in The Times. “Scores are building homes and planting their land to fruit and vegetables. Fortunes will be made!” (Whitsett, for one, raked in $250,000 on opening day.)

For its first 50 years, Van Nuys fairly burbled with optimism. By 1961--the year a group of West Valley businessmen began clamoring for secession--Van Nuys had become a major commercial center. It was home to 115,000 people, many of them professionals from the aerospace and electronics industries.

But over the next two decades, a dramatic shift in shopping and housing patterns altered the landscape. Indoor shopping malls popped up across the Valley, draining Van Nuys of profitable department stores and specialty shops.

At the same time, city planners rezoned many neighborhoods to allow high-density apartment buildings, which drew many more low-income families to Van Nuys.

Those changes transformed parts of Van Nuys, converting it from an affluent suburban community to one with swaths of poverty.

Forty years later, faded Craftsman houses are wedged between cinder-block apartment buildings. Schools are plunked down beside industrial strips of auto shops.

Once largely white, Van Nuys has diversified along with the rest of Los Angeles. More than half its 167,000 residents--51%--are Latino, and 37% are white. Blacks and Asians each represent about 6% of the population, according to the 2000 census.

The stable base of homeowners here has eroded over the years as people sold their land to apartment builders. Two-thirds of the area’s housing units are now rentals, according to census data.

“It’s like ‘Blade Runner’ with all these cell block apartments,” said Tony Austin, 44, a graphic designer who grew up in Van Nuys and supports Valley cityhood. “It all boils down to density. When you put a bunch of young males in such a small space, you’re going to get the problems that L.A. has, which are crime and gang violence.”

Violent crime has increased 64% in the Van Nuys Division during the past year, compared to an 8% jump citywide, according to LAPD data.

Just half a block away from the LAPD’s Van Nuys complex, 13-year-old Arneisha Davis passes a gutted Trans Am, windows smashed and trunk open. The initials of a local gang, Barrio Van Nuys, are splashed across sidewalks and fence posts.

“Everybody around here is in gangs,” said Arneisha, who is going into the eighth grade. “Out here, you got to worry about somebody looking at you the wrong way.”

The area’s once-proud main street, Van Nuys Boulevard, has become a dense thicket of pawnshops and swap meets. Mini-secession movements have erupted as thousands of residents--claiming that the Van Nuys name was dragging down property values--won city permission to rename their neighborhoods Valley Glen and Lake Balboa.

The community commands so little respect that it’s been chopped into five council districts, making local improvements difficult to coordinate.

With its City Hall replica, state and federal buildings, courthouses and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Valley headquarters, Van Nuys already functions as the Valley’s government center. But it looks more ragged than regal.

The grass around the Valley Municipal Building has gone brown for want of water. The Art Deco-style building was badly damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The city put off repairs for years. Employees began wearing hard hats to ward off falling debris.

Doing It Themselves

Dave Wilke has learned not to count on city services to keep the area safe and clean.

Wilke, who manages the Valley Book and Bible store on Van Nuys Boulevard, hired a crew to power-wash the sidewalks in front of his store. He had his own workers trim the palm trees. And when a drunk wandered in and tried to grab a salesgirl, it was up to Wilke to get him out. (He called the police, he said, but they didn’t show up for half an hour.)

“If people don’t have the perception that it’s safe and clean,” Wilke said of Van Nuys, “they don’t come here to shop.”

It’s not that city officials haven’t tried to spruce up Van Nuys--they’ve been trying for 30 years.

Programs have come and gone, from “Vitalize Van Nuys” in the 1970s to today’s “Targeted Neighborhood Initiative” along two blighted stretches of Van Nuys Boulevard.

Millions have been spent, most recently to paint the facades of worn businesses, install new awnings and jazz up the crosswalks with a little faux brick. Even one of the adult video stores (currently an eye-popping yellow) has signed up for a paint job.

The city has approved an ordinance to keep more swap meets and pawnshops from moving in. Police have cracked down on the prostitutes roaming Sepulveda Boulevard, and residents and merchants have formed a neighborhood council.

And after two decades of talking about it, the city is finally building a $34-million government center here to serve Valley dwellers.

The changes are subtle. People who have lived in Van Nuys for years say it’s looking slightly better. Off the main corridors, there are still some leafy streets lined with ranch homes, survivors of the community’s ups and downs.

But Bruce Ackerman gets gloomy each time he drives through Van Nuys.

“I spent 11 years pouring my heart into this area,” said Ackerman, who worked for the local Chamber of Commerce from 1976 to 1987. “Now I go back there and I say, my God, what did we accomplish?

“I can look at downtown L.A., at Staples Center, the hotels, the Convention Center and anything and everything that has been ushered in and promoted by the city of L.A. And then I look out here and I say, what in the hell has been done out here like that?”

Seceding in Name

Such are the slights--real and imagined--that fuel the talk of secession in and around Van Nuys.

Taken together, the steady drip of indignities over many years has persuaded thousands of residents that they’d be better off in a Valley city.

By the 1990s, people were clamoring to get out of Van Nuys--at least in name. Breakaway movements led by disgruntled homeowners persuaded City Hall to re-christen large swaths of the area.

Although the splits didn’t involve new governments--the whole querulous area remained part of L.A.--proponents argued that disassociating from Van Nuys’ tainted image would boost home prices. Van Nuys was a “cesspool” they said, a “ghetto” and “something you have to say under your breath.”

First an old Jewish enclave near Valley College defected, calling itself Valley Glen. In April, a two-square-mile section of west Van Nuys jumped ship.

Hundreds of residents cheered as Councilman Dennis Zine unveiled the new blue signs welcoming people to Lake Balboa. It’s named after a small lake nearby--in Encino.

“They didn’t waste a minute getting their signs up,” grumbled Prudy Schultz, a community activist and fierce defender of all things Van Nuys. When she sought similar signs for Van Nuys, she said, it took two years to get city approval.

For years, Schultz and her husband, Don, who heads the local homeowners group, supported secession as a way to improve the area. Local control, they figured, would bring in leaders familiar with the dirty sidewalks, graffiti, poor planning and neglect they saw clouding their community.

Just as important, they viewed secession as a chance to end Van Nuys’ balkanization, its division into so many council districts that each had little attachment to the community.

But when they saw how the proposed Valley city mapped out its council seats, they changed their minds.

Instead of five districts, Van Nuys would get ... six.

Don Schultz was so angry that he promptly signed on with the anti-secessionists. Under the city of Los Angeles’ new redistricting plan, most of Van Nuys--shrunken as it has become--is now in one council district.

“I can see light at the end of the tunnel,” Schultz said. “But the tunnel’s too long.”