How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Valley

I MOVED TO WOODLAND HILLS, California, only because my fiancée got a new job there. My new home was Warner Center, a collection of office buildings and apartment complexes in one of the many interconnected towns of the San Fernando Valley, about fifteen miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. “The Valley,” as it’s known to Angelenos, takes up over half the area of Los Angeles proper and is home to almost 2 million people—making it equivalent in size to the fifth largest city in the country.

To me, a D.C. native, the Valley’s reputation rested on three things, all of them weird: (1) Valley Girls, infamous for twirling their hair and repeating, “like, ya know, whatever”; (2) the pornography industry; and (3) Fast Times at Ridgemont High and other movies that epitomized postwar American suburbia and its discontents. 

Sure enough, after settling into my massive 4,000-person gated apartment complex, I hated it. The car dominated life. Americans from Phoenix to Fort Lauderdale might find that unsurprising, but for urbanites from D.C., New York, or San Francisco, auto-fixated life in the new American “city”—that is, a suburb, unified by shopping plazas and housing developments—can come as a shock.

Ventura Boulevard, the main drag through the Valley and a key restaurant and retail strip in Warner Center, made me queasy. Its never-ending stream of schlock revolves around car culture and the apparent Valley lifestyle. Tacky billboards, oversized neon signs advertising everything from liquor to plastic surgeons, car dealerships, car washes, strip malls, and fast food joints all pay homage to local customs.

Ventura Boulevard was positively quaint, however, compared to U.S. 101, just a few hundred yards from my apartment. At night, the smell of auto exhaust blanketed me and thousands of neighbors, while the roaring traffic sounded a little like the ocean—except those “cool beach breezes” were piling soot on my balcony. Beyond the off-ramps, surface streets were excessively wide and dominated by more whizzing cars. The buildings reflected automobile dependence in the form of massive office parks and shopping centers. Social life revolved around the Starbucks, Rite-Aid, or 16-screen movie theater in the nearest big box mini-malls. Even nature itself seemed to conspire against pedestrians: once, when my fiancée and I tried to walk to a jazz concert at the nearby Hilton, swarms of flying cockroaches inexplicably blocked our path.

But one day, while driving to the mall, I passed a little sign that forever changed my perception of the neighborhood. At an intersection near the two mid-rises in the middle of Woodland Hills, the sign read, “Warner Center Transit Hub.” As far as I knew, Warner Center was only a hub for reckless drivers and bored teenagers. I soon learned, however, that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority was nearing completion of its new dedicated bus route. The Orange Line, which debuted in October 2005, travels from Warner Center to North Hollywood, mostly along an old streetcar route, depositing commuters at one end of the city’s Red Line subway—and thus linking Woodland Hills to downtown and beyond via (ideally) efficient, speedy, public transportation.

Suddenly, I saw Warner Center in a whole new light. It was one of those fancy “transit-oriented developments” I had heard so much about—it had just been missing the transit. Thousands of apartments were now within a short bus ride of thousands of jobs. The two major malls within walking distance of our apartment meant that we had most everything we needed to buy just minutes away. And to top it all off, the park right next to our apartment complex had summer “Concerts In the Park” (featuring surviving members of classic rock bands like Three Dog Night!).

Turns out, this was all planned—it just took a really long time to implement. In September 1967, the L.A. Department of City Planning drafted a paper called “Concepts for Los Angeles” in which it outlined different options for organizing development in the city so as to accommodate population growth over time. The “Centers Plan” option, which was eventually adopted, called for “highly concentrated employment ... accompanied by nearby high density residence together with a high-volume, fast-moving transportation system which will bring in large numbers of workers from outlying areas.” In each of the thirty or so planned centers, “employment and residence would approach a balance, giving most workers the opportunity to work near home… [also] a comprehensive choice of retail goods, services and entertainment would be available within the limits of each center.”

Eventually, some development did concentrate in major centers, like Century City and Westwood, in addition to Warner Center. In fact, recent Census figures have shown that the L.A. metropolitan area is actually one of the densest in the country—but it had always lacked the mass transit system to connect everyone. While the Orange Line isn’t the silver bullet, it’s certainly a step in the right direction, another piece to fit into the sprawling puzzle of L.A.’s landscape. As much as I didn’t want to admit it at first, with the addition of mass transit, Warner Center fit the ideal “center” description perfectly.

Apartment complexes began converting to condos, and so a few months ago, my fiancée and I were forced to move farther east in the Valley. I realized that the people who pushed us out were buying their vision of the American Dream—not necessarily sprawl, but another, slightly better version of suburbia. The cars still sped and good restaurants were still hard to find, but taking an evening stroll around the park before heading to the movie theater, I thought that I might actually miss the place.

In my new neighborhood, I can walk to work, and my fiancée sometimes takes the Orange Line to her job back in Woodland Hills. It took two years of living in the Valley, and the realization of a decades-long effort by city government to create mass transit there, but I can now entertain a notion most city dwellers across the country can’t: maybe not all of suburbia is characterless sprawl. In these situations, for all the inevitable strip malls and drive thrus of life in the ’burbs, with concentrated development linked by mass transit, the end product just might be worth emulating.