A traditional oddity of living in the San Fernando Valley is that while it's almost all part of the city of Los Angeles, one's mailing address does not include the words "Los Angeles." Unlike in Chicago, where every single resident's city address is "Chicago" and the famous neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Bridgeport, and Uptown are merely unofficial monikers, in the Valley part of LA, your official address includes your local unofficial neighborhood name, such as Sherman Oaks, Encino, or Tarzana (yes, Tarzana is named after Tarzan -- author Edgar Rice Burroughs used to live there).
This gives local homeowners' associations an incentive to split off nominally from the big, heavily Latino and thus unfashionable neighborhoods such as North Hollywood, Van Nuys, and Canoga Park. Home prices go up when the nicer parts break off and give themselves less tacky-sounding vibrant names like Lake Balboa and Valley Village. New names have no official legal significance -- everybody is still under the thumb of the city of Los Angeles -- so real estate interests have a fairly free hand.
Not every new name is felicitously chosen. For example, in the dead flat middle of the 345 dead flat square miles of the San Fernando Valley, near Valley Community College, is the newish "community" of Valley Glen, whose homeowner's associated started calling itself that in 1998. "Glen" is a Scottish word meaning "narrow secluded valley in the mountains" (which Valley Glen definitely is not). In other words, "Valley Glen" means "Valley Valley."
That reminds me of the impassioned speech by Wesley Snipes's wife in Ron Shelton's "White Men Can't Jump," where she begs him to stop wasting his time on the basketball court so they can afford to move out of the Vista View Apartments: "All I care about is getting out of the Vista View apartments, because there ain't no 'vista', there ain't no "view", and there certainly ain't no vista of no view."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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