The Urban Stress of Suburban Life : Growth: Valley residents are becoming increasingly troubled by significant increases in population, crime, traffic and graffiti. An insurance agency vice president compares the congestion with being ‘in a 10-gallon fish tank with a million fish.’

Karen Gonzalez won’t let her children ride their bicycles one block from their house to the local mini-market in Van Nuys.

Marian Taylor is filled with fear as she listens to the police helicopters fly over her Sherman Oaks house. “They’re shining a light in your area, and you know someone’s hiding behind a bush,” she says.

Sally Whitehead, who has moved from the northeast Valley to the West Valley, sees the urban blight “moving across the Valley like a wave.” She finds the traffic and the crime most stressful.

Valley residents are becoming increasingly troubled by the growing urbanization of the Valley. Congestion and fear of crime have become major sources of stress in their lives.

There are facts to support these fears. The Valley, once symbolic of suburbia, has experienced significant increases in population density, crime, traffic and graffiti.

* In the past decade, population in the San Fernando Valley portion of Los Angeles has increased 12%.

* Major felonies--such as murders, rapes, robberies and car thefts--have jumped 62% in the past 10 years.

* Traffic on some of the Valley’s major intersections has increased as much as 15% over three years.

* Since October, the San Fernando Valley region of the Department of Recreation and Parks has seen an 83% increase in the number of graffiti-removal job orders.

What is happening in the Valley is representative of what is being seen across the country in what were once suburban communities--rapid increases in population density and economic activity in what were not long ago considered quiet residential neighborhoods.

Suburban areas are changing so rapidly that urban planners don’t have a name for the newly urbanized suburbias, says Edward Soja, a UCLA professor of urban and regional planning. He calls the phenomenon the “exopolis” or outer city.

Other urban planners refer to these growing areas as “post-suburbia,” “the edge of the city” or “urban nodes in suburbia.”

Part of what makes post-suburbia stressful is that the residents assume that somehow they can escape the urbanization wave. “They are blind to it until it overwhelms them,” Soja says.

Many Valley residents are in the process of being overwhelmed.

Pinky Eastman, 50, who was a student at Van Nuys High School in the ‘50s, feels isolated because she now knows only two or three people in her neighborhood, when she once had friends up and down the block.

Eastman, a retired teacher, lives on a street of large custom houses with big yards in the center of Van Nuys. In the past five years, she has realized that she and her husband are living “in a three-block pocket of lovely homes surrounded by a ghetto, just two miles from a serious gang area.”

Gonzalez, 38, an insurance agency vice president, compares the congestion in the Valley with being “in a 10-gallon fish tank with a million fish.”

She lives with her husband, a junior high school vice principal, and their two children--9 and 10--in central Van Nuys.

Gonzalez is also concerned about the influence of nearby gangs on her children and the increase in crime in her area.

“I don’t walk at night anymore,” she laments, “and I really can’t even go out in my front yard after 10 p.m.” She dreads going to the market because people are angry and short with each other.

“It has all become so impersonal and there is no community sense whatsoever,” Gonzalez says.

Taylor, 62, and her husband no longer take walks at night because they don’t feel safe in their neighborhood. “I felt 50,000 times more comfortable on a trip to Portugal than I do in Sherman Oaks,” she says.

She moved to the Valley in 1952, and since 1977 has lived in a house that was her mother’s on Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. In the early ‘70s, Magnolia was still a two-lane rural street. It’s now four lanes, and Taylor goes to sleep at night to the sound of street noise, fire engines and police sirens.

Taylor is also troubled by the traffic. “Going anywhere is stressful because the freeway in the Valley is crowded any time of the day,” she says. Taking Sunday drives is a thing of the past for the Taylors, because the freeway traffic, even on weekends, makes such excursions more pain than pleasure.

Of the traffic congestion, Whitehead says, “When the 118 freeway first went in, it was like flying. Now it takes me 40 minutes to get to Van Nuys from the West Valley. There’s no free space in the Valley anymore, anywhere.”

One of the telltale signs of the growing urbanization in the Valley is the graffiti that pops up even in the most affluent neighborhoods. Graffiti has more than doubled in the past 10 years, according to Whitehead, who is executive director of Project HEAVY (Human Efforts Aimed at Vitalizing Youth), a youth and family services organization based in Van Nuys.

“Ten or 12 years ago graffiti used to be something people saw in blighted areas. Now there’s no holes barred, and it’s everywhere,” she says. Project HEAVY, which is financed by the city and county of Los Angeles, spends $210,000 a year on graffiti removal in the San Fernando Valley.

The Department of Recreation and Parks fields more than 90 requests a week to wipe out graffiti in Valley park facilities.

The changes in the Valley have not happened suddenly, but have gradually created what Soja calls “peripheral urbanization.” Some of the densest centers in Los Angeles today are actually outside the old inner cities, a concept that seems to contradict most people’s assumptions about the suburbs, Soja says.

Rex Beaber, a psychologist and attorney who is a confirmed ex-Valley resident, says that people have bought houses in the Valley believing they were getting a suburban community in exchange for a slightly longer commute.

“Historically, you tolerated basically a one-half hour drive to the Westside or downtown. And when you got home, you were in a relatively attractive low-density area. Living in the Valley always involved making a time trade-off,” he says. “They were getting some remoteness to the central city, and a bigger house for the buck, an extra bedroom, a pool.”

But that trade-off has undergone an evolution. “The traffic time has been worse than doubled and it’s not a bargain to live there anymore,” says Beaber, who now lives and works in Westwood.

And now the remoteness is a thing of the past, too. The big question for most people today, he says, is how many more freeway exits can we go to get an extra bedroom?

To Craig Finney, a professor of Leisure Studies at California State University, Northridge, the stress of living in the Valley is due almost entirely to the loss of control people feel when confronted with traffic, noise, crowded living conditions and crime. For example, Finney, who has worked in the Valley for 20 years, says the increased truck traffic on the freeways causes him enormous stress.

“What can be worse than have a truck zoom past you when you know it can instantly kill you and you have no control?” he says. “Traffic is the ultimate zapper,” he says.

Urban blight is extremely demanding on people, putting them in physiological and psychological overload as they try to keep up with it and protect themselves and their families, Finney says.

Most people, he says, aren’t even aware of the ex-urban stress they endure--the traffic, the crime, the pace of everyday living--until they get away from it. Coming back from a relaxing vacation can be what it takes to drive the impact of daily stress home. “We don’t realize the stress until we withdraw for awhile. I just came back from a trip to Vancouver, and I was depressed for days, Finney says.