Home Remodeling in West Hills, California

West Hills (formerly associated with Canoga Park) is located in the western San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County and just about 45 minutes (depending on traffic) from downtown Los Angeles. It is off of U.S. 101 (the Ventura Freeway) via the Valley Circle Boulevard/Mullholland Highway off-ramp.

According to the 2008 Mapping L.A. project of the Los Angeles Times, West Hills is flanked on the north by the Chatsworth Reservoir, on the east by Canoga Park, on the south by Woodland Hills, on the southwest by Hidden Hills and upon the west by Bell Canyon in Ventura County.

In 1987, Los Angeles qualified the following bank account of the boundaries of West Hills Neighborhood Council:

Bell and Dayton creeks in West Hills are several of the headwaters of the Los Angeles River that originate in the Northwest San Fernando Valley. The Los Angeles River itself begins at the confluence of Arroyo Calabasas (Calabasas Creek) and Bell Creek in Canoga Park. These and other small creeks supply stormwater and suburban runoff water to the Los Angeles River, and several are considered year-round creeks. Although the creeks are now channeled and manage within real walls, they reach form a significant urban wildlife landscape and contribute to the population of native wildlife left within the San Fernando Valley.

Both Bell Creek and Dayton Creek in particular have standard attention due to their headwaters origins inside the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the Simi Hills. The SSFL is mandated for an environmental cleanup due to its uses as a testing middle for rocket and missile engines, nuclear reactor research and fuel reprocessing, and tall technology reason systems. It was in addition to the site of a partial nuclear core meltdown in 1959. Prominent contaminants attach radionuclides, VOCs-volatile organic compounds, Chromium, Lead, Benzene, and other components of rocket engine fuel and cleaning compounds.

This region experiences warm and teetotal summers similar to average temperatures peaking at 96 degree highs throughout August. West Hills has a climate similar to other locations in the west San Fernando Valley, such as within reach Woodland Hills bearing in mind a long standard weather station at Pierce College. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, West Hills has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, abbreviated “Csa” on climate maps.

The present day West Hills Place was the homeland of Native Americans in the Tongva-Fernandeño and Chumash-Venturaño tribes, that lived in the Simi Hills and close to Bell Creek and other local tributaries to the Los Angeles River. Native American civilizations had inhabited the San Fernando Valley for an estimated 8,000 years. The village, Hu’wam, of the Chumash-Venturaños, was located at the base of Escorpión Peak (Castle Peak) near present-day Bell Canyon Park. It was a meeting and trading dwindling for them taking into account the Tongva-Fernandeño and Tataviam-Fernandeño people. A cave close Hu’wam, known as the Cave of Munits, is the believed home of a mythical Chumash shaman named Munits, who was killed by an eagle after murdering the son of a Chumash chief. Escorpión Peak is one of nine alignment points in the ancestral Chumash homelands, believed vital to maintaining the bill of the natural world.

From 1797 to 1846, the area (future West Hills) was part of Mission San Fernando Rey de España (Mission San Fernando). After Mexico won independence from Spain, it innovative became part of Rancho Ex-Mission San Fernando in Alta California. In 1845, a remove land succeed to for Rancho El Escorpión was issued by Governor Pío Pico to three Chumash people: Odón Eusebia, Urbano, and Urbano’s son Mañuel. It encompassed the house west of present-day Woodlake Avenue in West Hills, with its adobe ranch buildings (present 1840s—1960s) sited in contradiction of Bell Creek close present-day Bell Canyon Park.

California was admitted to the United States in 1850, with Spanish and Mexican home grants requiring a federal house patent to maintain ownership. The United States Public Land Commission patented the Rancho to indigenous grantees Odón Eusebia, Urbano, and Mañuel in 1876. In 1912 the Chumash heirs sold Rancho El Escorpión to George Platt. He acknowledged a dairy operation upon renamed Platt Ranch variously called Ferndale, ‘escorpion,’ or Cloverdale Dairy. The Rancho El Escorpión-Platt Ranch was not incorporated into Los Angeles and its water system until 1958 and was left undeveloped until 1961.

West Hills was originally portion of Owensmouth (founded 1912) and renamed Canoga Park (1931).

Under the leadership of Joel Schiffman, residents of a three-square-mile area in western Canoga Park began a petition advocate in 1987 to set against the larger community and sustain a neighborhood of their own to be called West Hills, the similar name that a 303-home subdivision in a user-friendly unincorporated area had carried for years. The Los Angeles city district of 4,700 single-family homes and 35 businesses would be bounded by Roscoe Boulevard on the north, Woodlake Avenue, Sherman Way and Platt Avenue on the east, Victory Boulevard on the south and the county line upon the west. Proponents said the change would come occurring with the maintenance for the area “political clout” and deposit property values. The drive, which was opposed by the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce, was partially financed by a genuine estate firm, whose owner, Lynn Garvanian, said the name fiddle with would “add 5% to the value of homes.” The toss around was quickly criticized as “snobby and greedy” by members of the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce but defended by supporters who said it would allow the neighborhood to maintain its residential character. Petition leaders said they hoped a further name would surgically remove the more well-to-do West Hills area from Canoga Park’s “fading factories, aging subdivisions and X-rated bars and theaters.”

As the petition desire expanded to combine three more areas – two on the edge of the Chatsworth Reservoir and one upon the western edge of Canoga Park – the Canoga Park Chamber of Commerce took an approved stand adjacent to the separation, with president William Vietinghoff calling it “a source of separation and disharmony . . . an extremely risky precedent for the combination San Fernando Valley.” Council enthusiast Hal Bernson, however, said he did not “look at it as a slam next to Canoga Park – just as a activity of people wanting identity.”

On January 16, 1987, Councilwoman Joy Picus all the rage petitions representing 3,364, or 77% of the 4,333 households in the Place within her councilmanic district, and she immediately said she would concentrate on the city’s transportation department to put up boundary signs as the residents requested. Many of the latter normal the name bend to go to thousands of dollars of value to their properties. Two weeks vanguard Picus other another two-mile-wide section of Canoga Park that gave West Hills the Fallbrook Mall and Platt Village shopping centers, along with several smaller retail strips and some older residential tracts built in flatland areas. This complement was denounced by Schiffman, who said it did “a lot to erode the community identity we sought.”

In what was called a “stampede,” other areas sought approach into West Hills, one homeowner upon Santa Susana area saying residents there wanted to “divorce ourselves from Canoga Park’s element.” Council fanatic Hal Bernson definitely to be credited with a square-mile area with 423 households bounded by Roscoe Boulevard upon the south, Parthenia Street upon the north, Shoup Avenue upon the west and Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the east, although the commercial northwest corner of Roscoe and Topanga Canyon boulevards was to remain in Canoga Park. Those additions expected that from approximately a third to nearly half of the former Canoga Park was to be portion of the additional West Hills.

Still, a demand continued for door to West Hills. A community meeting scheduled for August 31, 1987, had to be repeated superior the thesame evening in the proclaim of some four hundred people packed a meeting room at the Fallbrook Mall to wrestle when the decision on where the firm boundary should be. The highly developed event drew three hundred. A poll was taken among very nearly 8,500 residents in an area between Topanga Canyon Boulevard and the recently adopted West Hills affix at Woodlake and Platt avenues to pick an eastern border. More than a hundred protestors gathered in stomach of Ficus’s office to protest any enlargement of West Hills, chanting “Hell, no, we won’t grow!” But other residents wound through the Place in car caravans, shouting from megaphones and waving signs urging “Vote to Fallbrook.” In the end, Picus made a controversial decision to touch the eastern boundary of West Hills from Platt and Woodlake avenues to Shoup Avenue, a decision that did not entertain everybody.

In 1994, the Canoga Park and West Hills communities achieved a “partial rapprochement” when event leaders voted to form a joined Canoga Park/West Hills Chamber of Commerce, which is nevertheless in existence.