COMMENTARY : Defection Smacks of Greed

If you live in Sepulveda, you can’t make many excuses. You’re not in the hills or near a mall or a large park. There are no fancy restaurants. You’re smack dab in the middle of the hot, windy San Fernando Valley.

Strip malls and 24-hour gas stations line Sepulveda Boulevard, along with more than a couple motels that may not offer hourly rates but look as if they do. There are three 7-Elevens, where you can microwave a decent burrito and wash it down with a Diet Coke Slurpee for less than $3, nothing to scoff at in these uncertain economic times.

Graffiti often mark the walls, and gunshots sometimes ring through the night. You’re close enough to hear the gentle rumble of the San Diego Freeway.

Immigrants live here, and poor people in crummy apartments and young families who buy condominiums. There’s a middle-class neighborhood west of the freeway, with homes that are likely to have a recreational vehicle or power boat parked in the two-car driveway. Older folks live in quieter neighborhoods that were once horse ranches.

In other words, Sepulveda has all the variations of mankind that make this city worth putting up with, if you have the temerity to peek past your living-room curtains.

In Sepulveda, what you see is what you get. It’s an honest place.

At least, it was.

I was sitting on the couch last Thursday night, in my townhouse on the boulevard, when the tornado hit. I don’t have a dog, but like Dorothy, I was swept up and whisked to the Land of Oz.

Or, in this case, North Hills.

Here’s the deal: A few months ago, the aforementioned middle-class homeowners decided they didn’t want to be associated with immigrants or apartment dwellers. They didn’t want anything to do with graffiti or strip malls.

So they took the western half of Sepulveda and renamed it North Hills. There isn’t but a single hill in sight, so this was a perfectly ludicrous moniker.

Fine, let them have it. As an east Sepulvedarian, I didn’t mind being disconnected from a group of people who were deluded enough to believe that altering the name on a street sign would elevate their social standing, or change the fact that dealers were peddling drugs on an avenue four blocks away.

Such folly is nothing new. A chunk of Canoga Park knighted itself West Hills a few years back. Maybe the North Hillians heard a rumor that when a section of Van Nuys recently jumped ship and swam to Sherman Oaks, property values rose overnight.

The guy who led the North Hills revolt made a point of downplaying the money. But then he’s a real estate agent. There’s no proof of this, but I have a hunch that if you took all the real estate agents in the world and gave them each an ounce of ethics, they might have a shot at being stereo salesmen.

Anyway, the North Hills folks swore up and down that their defection was born of intense neighborhood pride. They even suggested that, once separated from the riffraff, they might be inclined to pitch in and help Sepulveda. From arm’s-length apparently.

Well, as quick as you could say “Women and children first,” the rest of Sepulveda ran for their life jackets. Last week, they too voted to become North Hills.

Sepulveda was cast into the void.

Again, the cry of the day was community pride. Togetherness. All for one and one for all. Never mind that the original North Hills was livid at being reunited with the masses, which is the only saving grace in this lunacy.

Listen, I’m not insensitive to the desires of property owners. I happen to be president of my homeowners association--though mostly because nobody else would volunteer. But when it comes to a list of personal values, I don’t believe those assigned to property should be paramount. This whole North Hills episode smacks of greed and small-mindedness which, come to think of it, aren’t exactly strange bedfellows.

If these people cared about the neighborhood, they could have spent their energy on painting over graffiti every day. They could have formed Neighborhood Watch groups or showed up at City Hall to ask for more police patrols. They could have protested the permit for another mini-liquor-mart on the boulevard. (I’m assuming that the sort of people who would want to live in a place called North Hills would oppose mini-liquor-marts which, by the way, are one of the few places where one can procure both Beer Nuts and the latest issue of Monster Truck magazine.)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind living beside bourgeois elitists, or even being shunned by them. I just don’t like them telling me where I live.