Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman has lived in the same house in the North Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles for practically his entire life. In this slice of the San Fernando Valley, deGuzman relished the abundance of striking hiking trails interspersed throughout craggy mountain ranges nearby, and the cultural offerings found at dozens of shopping malls and movie theaters around the area. World-class dining, ranging from family-run Mexican establishments to the highest concentration of sushi restaurants in the U.S., was within reach.
But when deGuzman began his undergraduate studies at California State University Northridge, he started meeting more people who’d grown up on the other sides of the mountains. DeGuzman — who’d always felt that the Valley, capital V, had its own distinctive identity as a part of greater Los Angeles County — was suddenly confronted with Angeleno classmates antagonizing where he’d grown up. They told deGuzman that the Valley was “a cultural wasteland,” a place merely peripheral to Los Angeles, despite actually being within the city’s massive borders.
For Molly Lambert, a writer and podcaster who grew up in the Valley, the mountain ranges separating the San Fernando Valley from much of the rest of Los Angeles — the Santa Monica Mountains to the south, and the Verdugo Mountains to the east — act as a psychic barrier. “There’s a lot of people who live over the hill that have this condescension for the Valley: ‘Why would I ever go there? ’” she says. “Well, it’s 20 minutes away. But it’s like 20 minutes over the mountains, which makes people psychologically feel like it’s further.”
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The San Fernando Valley (locally known as “The Valley”) is an urbanized valley in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of Southern California.
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Los Angeles is not the only major metropolis in the U.S. that ribs its nearby suburban enclave. But the Valley itself is an anomaly — it is famously loathed.
As the historian Michan Andrew Connor has written, the Valley is a “metropolitan paradox: an archetypical postwar suburb located within the limits of the nation’s second largest city.” Hate for the Valley is also an idiosyncrasy, given that Angelenos aren’t the only ones who tend to turn their noses up at their neighbors across the way. The practice of hating on the Valley stretches far beyond the Southland — a perception that’s become so profoundly entrenched in American life that many people who have never set foot in California are aware of the Valley and have opinions about it.
The burst of pop cultural offerings shot in the Valley through the 1970s and 1980s — including “Encino Man” and “Valley Girl” — no doubt had a substantial role in projecting an inaccurate image of the vast region’s residents outward, reducing them to vapid, shopping-obsessed and overwhelmingly white stereotypes. “It’s interesting that the portrayal of the Valley is the place where rich white girls go to the mall and spend daddy’s money,” Lambert says. “There’s rich parts of the Valley, obviously, but the majority of it is working class and Latino.”
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The Great Wall of Los Angeles is seen in Valley Glen, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2025.
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Valley scorn goes back even further than that. It plucks at the same thorny issues present within countless suburban American pockets, such as racial tensions — some of which are held over from redlining practices in the housing market that dictated where certain residents could live — and the decline of blue-collar industries and affordable housing, which has hollowed out the California middle class.
Yet those who love to hate on the San Fernando Valley, which counts nearly 2 million residents spread over 260 square miles, tend to cite other quirks about it when arguing that this culturally rich area is somehow a lesser place: They scoff at the weather (a dry heat that’s notably toastier than other parts of Los Angeles, especially the Westside) and joke about places like Chatsworth, once an epicenter of the adult film industry. They decry the mini-malls that dot neigborhoods like Van Nuys.
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As the entertainment industry’s backlot, the Valley has long acted as a stand-in for Anywhere, USA suburbia. “You’ve seen it on screen so many times, even if you don’t know that you have,” Lambert says. “I don’t think I really know what the Midwest looks like, because I’m so used to seeing the Valley play the Midwest.” As such, it’s become a hypervisible microcosm of what’s happening in other disparate parts of the country — and it’s partially why these usual knocks on an average suburbia, reinforced by pop culture, have taken on an outsized tenor that’s stubbornly persisted for at least half a century.
The Sherman Oaks Galleria is seen in Sherman Oaks, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2025.
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“The sense of [the Valley] is a nowhere place, a flat and vertical architecture, strip mall after strip mall,” says Karen Tongson, a cultural critic and professor at the University of Southern California. “That’s where I think the derision for it lies: What could possibly happen there that’s of interest?”
‘Vals go home’
The Tongva people were the original and longtime inhabitants of the Valley, building sizable communities along its edges with a predominant settlement in present-day Encino, according to Kevin Roderick’s “The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb.” Franciscan priests working with the Spanish empire sought to baptize indigenous populations living in the area, building a mission at San Fernando in 1797, where Native people were enslaved. In the ensuing century, landowners, including Isaac Lankershim and Isaac Van Nuys, began planting wheat fields around the Valley and subdividing wide swaths of surrounding land. Vintners and farmers followed in droves, planting bounties of oranges, peaches and apricots in orchards that stretched into the Valley.
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By the early 1900s, a handful of cities had been incorporated around greater Los Angeles County, including Long Beach and Azusa. The Valley was its own entity, but that changed when the city of Los Angeles was in dire need of tapping a different water source for its residents. When civil engineer William Mulholland secured the rights to flow water from the Owens Valley hundreds of miles down to LA, it needed to go through the San Fernando Valley. On Nov. 5, 1913, crowds lined up around the Newhall Pass in Sylmar to witness Mulholland opening the gates of the aqueduct. Two years later, much of the Valley voted to annex to Los Angeles.
Crowds attend the grand opening of the Los Angeles aqueduct, Nov. 5, 1913.
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The Valley and Los Angeles alike grew immensely in the decades after that, in terms of population and infrastructure. Beautiful movie theaters like the El Portal in present-day North Hollywood and Studio City’s eponymous picture house were constructed to cater to its growing number of residents. The Valley’s flourishing agricultural industries significantly impacted Southern California’s image during this period of 1920s expansion. “So much of LA’s growth and expansion was due to the Valley,” says deGuzman, who now teaches at UCLA. “It was due to the massive transformation of wheat fields into citrus groves. It was the image of the lemons from the San Fernando [Heights] Lemon Association slapped onto the boxes of Sunkist crates, shipped all across the country, that marketed all of LA.”
Its temperate weather also attracted out-of-towners seeking to assuage their tuberculosis at “sanitariums,” which cropped up in places like Sylmar as retreat centers. Early filmmakers, many of them arriving from the East Coast, saw the Valley’s expansive ranchlands as the ideal backdrop for their Western epics. Film studios like Universal set up shop in “Valleywood,” with Columbia and Warner Brothers following. In the late 1930s, Walt Disney set up his animation studio in Burbank, and stars of the day, including Lucille Ball, John Wayne, Bob Hope and Barbara Stanwyck, decamped to their peaceful homes in the Valley when they weren’t on set.
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Actress Lucille Ball is shown posing at her San Fernando Valley ranch home.
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The Valley continued its staggering growth well into the post-war era, with young families moving into modest homes in the burgeoning suburbs. Tommy Gelinas, one of nine siblings who grew up around Sherman Oaks, Porter Ranch and other Valley regions, says that veterans returning from the war became part of Valley-area car clubs that raced souped-up whips down Van Nuys Boulevard. The hot rod groups commingled with other collectives further down the hill, which sparked rivalries between Valley and more central LA car clubs, he says. When Valley residents would head down to the beaches along the Santa Monica and Venice coastline in the 1960s and 1970s, they were met with sneers from surfers who made it clear they weren’t welcome, he adds. They even put up signs on the sand that read: “Vals go home.”
Not that Gelinas and his friends ever cared; they had enough thrills to go around back home. “We were racing motorcycles in the Valley, we were hunting in the Valley, we were riding our skateboards in the drained pools in the Valley,” he says. “So we didn’t care.”
By that point, the Valley had become well-established not only as the predominant LA suburb but as the archetype of the stuffy suburbs themselves. “Valley boosters, real estate magnates and city planners themselves were so effective at making the San Fernando Valley synonymous with bedroom suburbia,” deGuzman says. “The leisure and the backyard barbecues and the pools just became such a lasting, controlling image.”
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An exterior view of an Eichler Home in the Balboa Highlands of Granada Hills originally built in the early to mid-1960.
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That marketing came at the expense of the Valley itself. The Valley became reduced to this whitewashed image of suburbia, particularly as certain neighborhoods were consciously segregated. The practice went back decades, to when tracts of agricultural land were subdivided in the Valley to reinforce class and race divisions between wealthy white landowners and the people who worked in the fields, predominantly Japanese and Mexican immigrants.
Those exclusionary housing practices eventually became what author and professor Laura Barraclough has called “a patchwork quilt of sorts that suggests not residential integration, but carefully monitored separation to achieve the twin goals of economic productivity and white exclusion” in her book “Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege.”
“The image of the San Fernando Valley as a predominantly white, exclusionary, exclusive space, of course, left out the really rich history of neighborhoods such as Pacoima in the northeast San Fernando Valley,” says deGuzman, where cultural luminaries including Ritchie Valens and Danny Trejo grew up. “Those really rich, multiethnic, multicultural communities, where Black, Asian, Latinx communities, shared space, shared politics. That was never a part of how the city, if not the world, sees the San Fernando Valley.”
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Behind the white picket fence
A mere minute after 6 a.m. on Feb. 9, 1971, the ground rattled violently. Freeway overpasses crumpled, cars flattened, and walls of single-family homes caved in on themselves. The 6.6 magnitude earthquake had struck the city of San Fernando, near Sylmar, leaving more than 60 people dead and thousands injured. The damage underscored how underprepared cities were for seismic ruptures, which led to extensive mapping initiatives that would help mitigate future disasters.
A hospital damaged by an earthquake in the San Fernando Valley, February 1971.
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But amid the destruction wrought by the Sylmar earthquake, something deep in the Valley had begun to boom: the pornography industry. Lambert, whose forthcoming podcast is about the adult film star Jenna Jameson, says that porn took root in the Valley throughout the 1970s because traditional Hollywood soundstages refused to rent to pornographers. Thus, producers began churning out these productions in the suburbs, from Encino mansions to Chatsworth basements.
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That juxtaposition — of the white picket fence surrounding a suburban house where people are surreptitiously boning on camera inside — is central to the Valley as a place of contradictions. As Lambert describes: “It’s both a normal place and the weirdest place on earth.” Combined with the murders that had gripped Los Angeles a few years prior at the hands of the Valley-based Manson Family, “Porn Valley” had a considerable hand in the area’s dismissal in a cultural sense. Around that era, Andy Warhol photographed the young actress Diane Lane wearing a popular shirt at the time that read “nuke the Valley.”
Adult film actress Juli Ashton pictured in the hot tub of a San Fernando home (and film set).
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The perception of the Valley as an archetypal suburbia gone to rot began trickling into films released in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “‘Foxes’ or ‘Safe,’ which is also set in the Valley, reinforces that sense of it as a kind of weird, toxic wasteland where there’s also pornography,” Tongson says. The emergence of blockbuster films later in the 1980s, like “The Karate Kid,” both “put an eye on the Valley and basically created a character for it,” Tongson added.
But the Valley’s most enduring cultural image, of the daffy “Valley girl,” came about almost by accident. The experimental musician Frank Zappa, a countercultural Laurel Canyon figure, wrote a satirical song lampooning the consumerism of young people his teenage daughter, Moon Unit, had seen around malls in the Valley.
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The resulting 1982 song “Valley Girl” features Moon Unit interjecting with now-ubiquitous markers of the lilting accent dubbed “Val-speak”: phrases including “like, tooootally” and “fer sure.” Zappa wanted to satirize the Valley with the song, but it became a Billboard chart hit. When the movie “Valley Girl” premiered a year later — a “Romeo and Juliet” story featuring a young Hollywood punk who falls in love with a woman from the Valley — and malls throughout the Valley began holding televised “Valley girl” competitions, the stereotype had become sculpted in stone.
The stars of the film “Valley Girl” 1983.
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Aside from reducing the Valley to a punch line, the hate also animated what Tongson sees as the clash between suburban enclaves and their relationship to the city center. “In the Reagan era, I think that there was this reinforcement of the suburban and urban divide where safety resided versus where the more derelict explorations of subcultures and other things resided,” she says.
Hollywood continued pointing and laughing at the Valley throughout the ’90s with films like “Clueless,” wherein the Beverly Hills-based protagonist, Cher Horowitz, gets stuck at the Circus Liquor store in North Hollywood after a party in the Valley gone sour. When she calls her stepbrother to pick her up there, he groans, “You owe me.” In the cult 1999 film “Go,” one character hisses at another: “Don’t get 818 on me,” a nod to a predominant Valley area code. One episode of the HBO Hollywood dramedy “Entourage” is dedicated to the crew being stuck in the Valley during a heat wave.
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Circus Liquor is seen in North Hollywood, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2025.
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But in the 2000s, a new crop of stars, including the Canadian rapper Drake and the reality TV stars the Kardashians, realized that their money went further in the Valley. These high-profile moves, which happened during the tabloid era, began to give places in the wealthy western edges of the Valley, like Calabasas and Hidden Hills, along with Sherman Oaks, a different place in the cultural lexicon.
Celebrating the 818
Valley lifers have developed a thick skin when someone from central LA dogs their way of life. Some residents have advocated for the Valley to be separated from the city of Los Angeles, arguing that the taxes they pay disproportionately benefit residents living on the other side of the hill and that politicians in Downtown LA don’t always have their best interests in mind. That helped foment a secession movement that got off the ground in 1977 but ultimately failed.
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The idea of Valley secession reemerged again in the late 1990s, after the closure of several industrial plants — including the Van Nuys General Motors factory — left thousands of people without a job, and poverty rates saw a notable uptick, according to PBS SoCal. In 2002, a ballot measure asked Valley residents once again if they wanted to be their own entity outside Los Angeles. That didn’t pass, either.
A person goes fishing at Lake Balboa in Van Nuys, Calif., on Sept. 15, 2025.
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According to deGuzman, the secession movement failed in part because it played into an image of the Valley that never existed. Along with the ballot initiative, another item allowed residents to vote on a new name for the San Fernando Valley. One of them was “Camelot.”
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“There was this momentum to make the Valley into its own independent city, and it played on a lot of the imagery of the Valley of the 1950s of the dirt roads, of the orange groves, of the ranch houses,” he says. “But there was always this xenophobic tinge to ‘reclaiming the Valley to the way it used to be.’ It meant, of course, a rejection of the multicultural Valley that was a result of immigration changes, of mass migration from Asia, from Latin America.”
Several decades on, antipathy toward the Valley is “also tied to the effort to actually break the valley away from Los Angeles,” deGuzman adds. “It was one more reason to see the Valley as a joke.”
But increasingly during the nascent internet age, something began to develop alongside LiveJournal and MySpace: Genuine pride in the Valley itself, without eschewing its flaws. The Latino punk band Los Abandoned released a propulsive song in 2006, “Van Nuys (Es Very Nice),” that acknowledges its oddball charms while realizing that “it’s not paradise.” In that era, Tommy Gelinas first began the Valley Relics Online Museum and Vault — a blog dedicated to preserving memories of the San Fernando Valley. Gelinas, a collector of neon and other memorabilia, eventually transformed his idea into a museum. These days, it houses props from iconic films like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and treasures from the record store chain Licorice Pizza — which also titled Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, a love letter to the Valley, a few years ago.
FILE: Olivia Flowers, second from left, and guests attend an 818 Day party on Aug. 18, 2016, in Los Angeles.
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The San Fernando Valley also began holding an 818 Day celebration, held annually on Aug. 18, dedicated to celebrating the unique treasures of this region. A few years ago, as part of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, the local artist Vincent Enrique Hernandez led a series of Valley tours, whisking people around where he grew up with homemade postcards and personalized stories about what makes it special. Instagram pages such as Valley Haunts challenge the idea that the Valley’s architecture — which includes programmatic architecture, inventive neon and, yes, strip malls — is not without wonder. Even embracing the so-called Valley Girl accent has also cropped up in recent years. “I’ve seen a lot of people reclaim ‘Valley Girl’ as also a term of empowerment,” Lambert says, “People who are like, ‘Oh, you’re from the Valley?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I like it there.’”
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The Valley’s many distinctive cities have continued to develop into destinations for dining, cultural and ecological delights, including Anajak Thai, a restaurant routinely rated as one of the top places to eat in Los Angeles; the performing arts haunt the Soraya; the marvels of Griffith Park, where cowboys and equestrians still ride horses from more rural areas in Burbank and Glendale; the ambitious expansion of Universal Studios; and the LA area’s first self-sustaining ecological park, in Tarzana, breaking ground last year.
It’s even made former Valley haters eat their words, much to the delight of those born and bred there. “Back in the ’80s, I would have a few friends on the other side of the hill, and they would talk s—t about the Valley,” Gelinas says. “And a lot of them 1760356326 live in the Valley.”