A Short History

A Short History of North Hollywood

San Fernando Valley covers approximately 345 square miles to the northwest of downtown Los Angeles and contains over a dozen different communities, most within the city limits of Los Angeles. The Valley was annexed in 1915 to allow for construction of the Owens Valley aqueduct, and over the course of the twentieth century it went from a land of farming and ranching to "America's Suburb" (Roderick, 2001). The subdivision of Lankershim was first established in the 1880s as a community of farmers cultivating a variety of fruit and nut trees (Link et al., 1991, p. 45). With the growing presence of movie studios, in 1927 Lankershim was renamed North Hollywood to emphasize its connection to the rapidly growing industry (Link et al., 1991, p. 54).

After World War II, housing developments replaced farmland as the Valley became a significant location for the defense industry, and the completion of the Cahuenga freeway in 1940 linking North Hollywood to the rest of Los Angeles further spurred postwar growth (Link et al., 1991, p. 63). By the early 1950s, the central shopping district of North Hollywood, Lankershim Boulevard, had become the downtown of the Valley (Link et al., 1991, p. 72). However, when the Laurel Plaza shopping center opened two miles to the northwest in 1955, and more malls were built in the west Valley in the 1960s, business on Lankershim began to decline.

White flight further contributed to the decline of North Hollywood. Restrictive covenants prohibiting home sales to non-whites covered most of Los Angeles in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although these were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948, racial discrimination in housing continued to be the norm. Indeed, when California passed a fair housing law in 1963, a coalition of realtors quickly mobilized to place a proposition on the ballot to have it revoked, and it passed with overwhelming support (Meyer, 2000, p. 179). A Fair Housing Act was enacted at the national level in 1968, but because of strong opposition, its enforcement powers were weak (Massey & Denton, 1993).

In the Valley, African Americans were restricted to the neighborhood of Pacoima, and Mexican Americans, although facing somewhat less discrimination, lived primarily in Pacoima and San Fernando (Roderick, 2001; Uranga, 2006). This began to change in the 1970s with school desegregation. While blacks and Latinos might not be able to live in white neighborhoods, the courts successfully required San Fernando Valley to integrate its schools with children from more diverse neighborhoods in central Los Angeles. The plan was eventually repealed, but it inspired many whites to move to outer suburbs such as Simi Valley and Santa Clarita (Davis, 1992, p. 185).

The movement of middle class whites to the urban periphery corresponded to a similar shift in manufacturing jobs. While older industry left the east Valley, new high-tech industry expanded in the west, first to the Chatsworth/ Canoga Park area and then to Ventura County (Scott, 1996). The recession of the 1970s and the reduction in defense spending after the Vietnam war further contributed to the east Valley's decline (Mulholland Institute and Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley, 2004, p. 10).

Declaring the area "blighted" in 1979, the city established North Hollywood as a redevelopment project area. This gave the CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) various tools, including tax increment financing and eminent domain, for use to revitalize the area. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s the agency assisted in the construction of various office, retail and housing projects, the most prominent of which was the Academy of Arts and Sciences Complex completed in 1991 (More, 1999, p. 64). With a giant replica of the Emmy Award centered in a plaza surrounded by office and retail space, the developers hoped it would become a major tourist attraction and the center of a transformed neighborhood, but the building failed to attract retail and the plaza remained largely deserted.
The failings of the Academy Complex epitomized what many viewed as the redevelopment agency's inadequate effort to revive the area. Some critics noted the CRA dedicated fewer resources to Valley projects than to projects in other parts of the city (Garza & Sheppard, 2002). Others saw the agency's approach to redevelopment itself deeply flawed and claimed that it increased rather than reduced urban blight (McGreevy, 2000).

The extension of the red line subway to North Hollywood in 2000 brought renewed enthusiasm for the project area's potential. A seventeen acre mixed use development adjacent to the new subway station called Noho Commons was approved in 2001. After many delays the first phase of multifamily housing was finished in 2006 and the second phase, containing a mix of apartments and retail, in 2007 (Vincent, 2008). While the CRA's plans for North Hollywood had long faced controversy, construction surrounding the red line station brought a new dimension to the conflict. It was in the discussion surrounding plans for several new developments adjacent this transit hub that the meaning of urbanization took on a central role in the debate.