May 2009 Archives

I just checked in on this blog for the first time in a long while, and I'm glad to see the comments that have been written in the interim about the Part of Sherman Oaks movement.

In the past month of so, the Part of Sherman Oaks yard signs have remained on lawns, but haven't heard much of anything about how the drive to turn a big portion of "southern" Van Nuys into a northern outpost of Sherman Oaks.

Of course those in favor of Part of Sherman Oaks who have commented in this blog tell me that it's not about real-estate prices, racism (yeah, I'll throw that one down) and movin'-on-upward mobility.

Again, I'm quite comfortable living in Van Nuys. My life will go on either way. ("Near ... far ... whereEEEEEVER you are" ... OK that's out of my system.)

I do acknowledge the "separation from much of Van Nuys represented by the so-called "industrial belt" of Oxnard Street and the Orange Line busway, but I instead chose to embrace those two portions of Van Nuys. I buy tires, house paint and electronic doodads on Oxnard Street, and I've been known to both ride the Orange Line bus as well as cycle down the lengthy busway bike path (which in one form or another goes all the way to Burbank. Yeah, it looks way better once you cross the Burbank border, but who doesn't expect that?)

The inclusion of the southerly portion of Van Nuys in a "Sherman Oaks" councilperson's district, the propensity of its residence to "shop in Sherman Oaks," and the Los Angeles Unified School District's drawing of its borders to include many students from this portion of Van Nuys in the enrollment boundaries of schools that happen to be in Sherman Oaks is all well and good.

But at the end of the day, Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys are just ephemeral community names. They don't mean much of anything beyond their value in affecting real-estate prices and whatever help they give people traveling through the San Fernando Valley in terms of figuring out where they're going.

We still all live in the city of Los Angeles. All of our schools are in the LAUSD. We're all in the San Fernando Valley, a vast and populated area that almost-but-didn't succeed in seceding from Los Angeles proper in recent years.

Just because portions of Van Nuys don't look like our battered, shattered idea of what "Van Nuys" means does not mean those areas pass a certain threshold and are "good enough" for Sherman Oaks and therefore must bear that moniker.

I'm more than OK with Van Nuys. I'd entertain a totally new community name (Shangri-La-La, Centralia, Middle-Earth?), and I really don't care if the Part of Sherman Oaks movement succeeds in adding a few thousand more homes and businesses to the means-little "borders" of Sherman Oaks.

Just don't expect me to get excited about it, defend it, rationalize it, or give it my blessing as an obscure blogger/journalist.