Own a building here? Pacoima multifamily broker — Michael Sterman’s closing record, comparables and process →
Pacoima is a dense, working-class neighborhood in the northeast San Fernando Valley, one of the oldest communities in the Valley. About seven square miles, built out as the Valley suburbanized after World War II — a bedroom community for the industrial jobs that once anchored the area.
A neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles in the northeast San Fernando Valley, covering 7.14 square miles — one of the largest submarkets in this record by area. The Ronald Reagan Freeway runs through it and the Golden State Freeway forms an edge. Van Nuys Boulevard, laid out as the main street in 1888, is still the spine.
A City of Los Angeles neighborhood, not a separate city — LA City rules, LA City taxes, LA City enforcement, and Los Angeles rent stabilization on any building whose certificate of occupancy predates 1 October 1978. It is also densely populated and young: the 2010 census counted 103,689 residents in the 91331 ZIP code, at a median age of 29.5 and a median household income of $49,842. That is a workforce renter base, and it is the reason the buildings that trade here are the largest in this entire record and the per-door figures the lowest.
Majority Latino community today, with a longstanding Black community whose roots trace to the mid-20th-century Great Migration era, when racially restrictive covenants elsewhere in Los Angeles left Pacoima as one of few neighborhoods where Black families could buy homes. Working-class, family-oriented population.
This is the largest-building, lowest-per-door submarket published on this site, and those are two statements of the same fact. The properties that trade here run from the fifties into three figures of units, against single digits on the Westside pages. A buyer here is buying scale and a stabilized rent roll on inexpensive land, not land value or optionality. The buyer pool is private capital and exchange money looking for unit count, and it is a genuinely different set of buyers from the ones bidding on an eight-unit building in West Los Angeles — which is the whole argument against a citywide average price per door.
For what that looks like in practice: the 4 Pacoima apartment buildings in our own closed record run from 52 to 100 units, with a median of 65. See every one of them →
Large postwar apartment blocks, built for scale rather than for show: two- and three-story walk-ups and garden courts on generous lots with surface parking, most of them from the 1950s through the 1970s. Because almost all of it predates 1 October 1978, Los Angeles rent stabilization covers effectively the entire multifamily inventory. There is very little pre-war stock and almost no architectural premium — buildings here are valued on income and unit count, not on character.
| Building | Year | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Whiteman Airport | A general aviation airport owned by Los Angeles County, sitting inside the neighborhood. Its presence is a permanent land-use fact: it constrains what can be built nearby and it is an overflight consideration for buildings on the approach. | |
| Ritchie Valens Park | 1994 | Paxton Park was renamed for the singer, who grew up here, in 1994. |
No Historic Preservation Overlay Zone covers the neighborhood. The constraints that matter here are the rent-stabilization ordinance, the zoning, and — for sites near Whiteman Airport — the airport's operating envelope. Individual buildings can still carry their own designation, so confirm any address against the city's records rather than assuming.
Historically an industrial and manufacturing base; factory closures in the early 1990s reduced that base significantly. Today's economy leans on local retail, logistics, and services. Whiteman Airport, a county-owned general aviation airport, sits within the neighborhood.
Currently bus-served. Metro's East San Fernando Valley Light Rail project, under construction along the Van Nuys Boulevard corridor connecting Van Nuys, Panorama City, Arleta, and Pacoima, is expected to open in 2031 and will be the first rail service to reach the neighborhood directly.
Today the neighborhood is served by buses — Metro Rapid line 761 and Metro Local lines 92, 166, 224, 230, 233, 294 and 690 — plus the Ronald Reagan and Golden State freeways. The long-dated item to underwrite against is the East San Fernando Valley light rail line, which is planned to reach Pacoima with three stations in 2031. That is far enough out that it should not carry weight in a valuation today, and near enough that an owner holding for a decade should know it is coming.
LAUSD, plus charter options including Pacoima Charter School. Vena Avenue Elementary and Montague Charter Academy are among the higher-rated public options serving the area.
LAUSD schools serving the area include San Fernando High School, Pacoima Middle School, Charles Maclay Middle School, and Telfair Avenue, Haddon Avenue, Sara Coughlin and Hillery T. Broadus elementary schools.
Ritchie Valens Park, named for the rock and roll pioneer who grew up in Pacoima. Whiteman Airport. "Mural Mile," a stretch of building-facade murals by local artist Levi Ponce begun in 2013. The Discovery Cube Los Angeles science museum.
Ritchie Valens Park is the neighborhood's signature public space.
| Park | What is there |
|---|---|
| Ritchie Valens Park and Recreation Center | Renamed in 1994 for the singer who grew up in the neighborhood. |
| Hubert H. Humphrey Memorial Park | Includes a year-round heated outdoor pool. |
| David M. Gonzales Recreation Center | Open since 1 June 1950. |
| Roger Jessup Recreation Center | Neighborhood recreation facility. |
Latino food culture anchors the neighborhood's dining scene. The annual La Bamba festival celebrates Ritchie Valens and the neighborhood's musical and cultural heritage; "Mural Mile" adds a visible public-art identity to the commercial corridor.
| Institution | Since | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| David M. Gonzales Recreation Center | 1950 | Opened on 1 June 1950, and one of the longest-standing public facilities in the neighborhood. |
| Hansen Dam Municipal Golf Course | 1962 | Public course opened in 1962 on the flood-control land at the neighborhood's edge — a large permanent open space that will not be developed. |
The La Bamba festival, an annual celebration of Ritchie Valens and Pacoima's Latino musical heritage.
Ritchie Valens, the rock and roll pioneer behind "La Bamba," grew up in Pacoima before his death in 1959; Ritchie Valens Park and the annual La Bamba festival both carry his name forward in the neighborhood.
Represented by the Pacoima Neighborhood Council within the City of Los Angeles neighborhood council system.
Originally Tongva and Tataviam land; Spanish settlement reached the San Fernando Valley in the 1770s. Pacoima was one of the few LA neighborhoods where Black families could buy homes during the era of racially restrictive covenants — by 1960, most of the San Fernando Valley's Black population lived in Pacoima and neighboring Arleta. Latino immigration, especially from Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, grew from the late 1960s onward, and the neighborhood is majority Latino today with a longstanding Black community.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1769 | Spanish expedition enters the San Fernando Valley; Mission San Fernando Rey is founded nearby in 1771. The name Pacoima comes from the Tataviam word Pakoinga, meaning entrance — Spanish speakers heard the ng as an m and wrote it down that way. |
| 1873 | Senator Charles Maclay buys 56,000 acres of the former mission lands, secularized by the Mexican government in 1834. |
| 1887 | Jouett Allen buys 1,000 acres and subdivides them into one-acre tracts, establishing the town. |
| 1888 | The main street, now Van Nuys Boulevard, is laid out. Building codes of the day require homes costing at least $2,000. |
| 1915 | Los Angeles annexes Pacoima on 22 May, by Ordinance 32192 N.S. |
| 1940s | From the late 1940s, African American families settle here after being excluded from other neighborhoods by racial covenants. By 1960 nearly all 10,000 African Americans living in the San Fernando Valley were in Pacoima and neighboring Arleta. |
| 1960s | From the late 1960s, immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador arrive. By 1990 the census records the neighborhood as 71% Hispanic or Latino and 10% African American. |
| 1992 | General Motors closes its Van Nuys assembly plant, cutting 2,600 jobs. Lockheed sheds more than 8,000 between 1990 and 1994. The east Valley's industrial employment base contracts sharply, and rents and values here still carry the mark of it. |
Every figure below is computed from the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record in Pacoima — not from a market report. Price per door falls as buildings get bigger, which is why this is banded by size rather than given as one number: comparing a six-unit building to a forty-unit building on price per unit compares two different products. Across all 4 closings the median is $153,691 per unit.
| Building size | Closings | Median per unit | Range per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 51+ units | 4 | $153,691 | $128,324 – $177,500 |
The largest closing in the Pacoima record is 12711 Branford St at $17,750,000 (100 units); the smallest is 12320-12332 Osborne Place at $6,800,000 (52 units). The record here runs from 2012 to 2016, and the busiest single year was 2015 with 2 closings.
How these figures are calculated, and what we do not claim →
These are the 26 Los Angeles submarkets where the group has closed the most buildings, on our own record rather than a published index. The spread is the reason a citywide per-unit figure is close to useless for pricing a specific building.
| Submarket | Buildings | Units | Median per unit | Size range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hollywood | 24 | 562 | $282,589 | 3–75 |
| Koreatown | 21 | 465 | $158,958 | 4–96 |
| West Hollywood | 21 | 206 | $354,286 | 2–22 |
| Sherman Oaks | 17 | 349 | $237,708 | 6–47 |
| Palms | 13 | 337 | $296,875 | 7–118 |
| Glendale | 12 | 224 | $258,854 | 5–92 |
| Van Nuys | 12 | 380 | $171,801 | 4–68 |
| North Hollywood | 11 | 191 | $271,429 | 5–46 |
| Santa Monica | 8 | 100 | $616,667 | 3–27 |
| Reseda | 8 | 506 | $156,639 | 10–138 |
| West Los Angeles | 6 | 62 | $575,000 | 7–16 |
| Hancock Park | 6 | 129 | $230,519 | 7–35 |
| Los Feliz | 5 | 123 | $225,000 | 6–48 |
| Panorama City | 5 | 178 | $135,849 | 22–53 |
| Fairfax | 5 | 31 | $425,000 | 3–13 |
| Burbank | 4 | 47 | $298,917 | 10–15 |
| Toluca Lake | 4 | 84 | $337,625 | 5–40 |
| Mid-City | 4 | 26 | $256,458 | 6–8 |
| Valley Village | 4 | 81 | $263,472 | 9–34 |
| Pacoima | 4 | 282 | $153,691 | 52–100 |
| Silverlake | 3 | 38 | $243,333 | 10–16 |
| Venice | 3 | 30 | $425,000 | 3–17 |
| Mar Vista | 3 | 21 | $354,167 | 5–10 |
| Studio City | 3 | 51 | $322,857 | 5–39 |
| Tarzana | 3 | 266 | $229,661 | 30–118 |
| Winnetka | 3 | 90 | $250,000 | 12–52 |
The place facts on this page — founding dates, acreages, opening years, boundaries — were checked against these sources on 2026-09-09. The closing figures are computed from the group’s own transaction archive. Where two sources disagreed on a number, the claim is stated only to the level both support.
A neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles in the northeast San Fernando Valley, covering 7.14 square miles — one of the largest submarkets in this record by area. The Ronald Reagan Freeway runs through it and the Golden State Freeway forms an edge. Van Nuys Boulevard, laid out as the main street in 1888, is still the spine.
A City of Los Angeles neighborhood, not a separate city — LA City rules, LA City taxes, LA City enforcement, and Los Angeles rent stabilization on any building whose certificate of occupancy predates 1 October 1978. It is also densely populated and young: the 2010 census counted 103,689 residents in the 91331 ZIP code, at a median age of 29.5 and a median household income of $49,842.
Large postwar apartment blocks, built for scale rather than for show: two- and three-story walk-ups and garden courts on generous lots with surface parking, most of them from the 1950s through the 1970s. Because almost all of it predates 1 October 1978, Los Angeles rent stabilization covers effectively the entire multifamily inventory. There is very little pre-war stock and almost no architectural premium — buildings here are valued on income and unit count, not on character.
No Historic Preservation Overlay Zone covers the neighborhood. The constraints that matter here are the rent-stabilization ordinance, the zoning, and — for sites near Whiteman Airport — the airport's operating envelope.
Across the 4 Pacoima buildings in the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record, the median is $153,691 per unit, on buildings ranging from 52 to 100 units. Price per door falls as buildings get larger, so the figure for a specific building depends on its size, vintage and in-place rents.
Pacoima is workforce-housing multifamily, not a story submarket. The buyers who compete for it are underwriting real in-place cash flow against real operating costs on older Valley stock, not paying for a narrative. That discipline is exactly why the four buildings I've closed here since 2012 traded in a tight, honest price-per-unit range instead of a wide one.
Michael Sterman will walk through comparables, buyer pool, and timing specific to your building — no obligation, no pitch.
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