Living in Valley Village — Neighborhood Guide

About Valley Village

Valley Village is an LA City neighborhood in the central San Fernando Valley between North Hollywood and Studio City. Tree-lined residential character with concentrated mid-century courtyard apartment inventory.

Where Valley Village begins and ends

Unusually for this record, the edges are hard ones you can see from a car: Burbank Boulevard on the north, the Tujunga Wash on the west, the Ventura Freeway on the south and the Hollywood Freeway on the east, enclosing 2.08 square miles. Three of those four boundaries are a freeway or a flood-control channel, which means the neighborhood cannot bleed into its neighbors and a comparable is either inside it or clearly is not.

Size, density and who rents

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. The 2010 census counted 24,330 residents at a density of 11,690 per square mile and a median age of 36. It spent most of its existence as part of North Hollywood and only gradually established a separate identity, which is why its name still does not appear on some maps and why sellers and buyers sometimes describe the same building differently.

Who lives in Valley Village

Middle-class to upper-middle-class central Valley demographic with significant Orthodox Jewish community and established-family base. Entertainment-industry residents drawn by proximity to Burbank and Studio City studios.

The apartment stock in Valley Village

Mid-size buildings, and a per-door range that is narrower than most of the submarkets in this record. The properties that trade run from single digits into the thirties of units, on Valley land, with the per-unit figures on the closings page landing in the middle of everything published on this site — well above the East Valley, well below the Westside. Buyers are private and exchange-driven. The draw is a stabilized rent roll in a neighborhood with hard boundaries, a school reputation and a long record of resisting new supply.

For what that looks like in practice: the 4 Valley Village apartment buildings in our own closed record run from 9 to 34 units, with a median of 19. See every one of them →

What the buildings actually are

The stock tells the story of the 1985 fight directly. Underneath is the 1930s and 1940s single-family fabric the studio workers built. Over it, from the 1960s through the early 1980s, came the two- and three-story stucco apartment blocks that residents organized against — the buildings that trade here today. The dispute mattered because it was about exactly this product: the limits the council passed in September 1986 and reversed shortly afterwards were an attempt to stop more of it being built. The practical consequence for an owner is that most of the multifamily inventory predates 1 October 1978 and is therefore rent-stabilized, and that new competing supply has been politically difficult here for forty years.

Buildings worth knowing by name

Historic districts and what they restrict

No Historic Preservation Overlay Zone covers the neighborhood. The 2015 demolition of Marilyn Monroe's former house on Hermitage Avenue, carried out while landmark consideration was still pending, is the clearest local demonstration of what that means: absent a designation already in place, historic association alone does not restrain a redevelopment. Individual buildings can still carry their own status, so confirm any address against the city's own records rather than assuming either way.

Who works here

Neighborhood-serving retail. Residents commute to Burbank, Studio City, and Downtown LA employment.

Getting around

Bus service. Metro B Line (Red) stations at North Hollywood and Universal City are adjacent.

Rail, and what it does to a site

No rail station lies inside the boundaries. What the neighborhood has instead is freeway access on two of its four sides — the Ventura Freeway to the south and the Hollywood Freeway to the east — which puts it within a short drive of the studios in Burbank and North Hollywood. That is a car-commuter tenant base rather than a transit one, and it is stable for the same reason the studios are.

Schools and colleges

LAUSD. Colfax Charter Elementary and Carpenter Avenue Elementary serve the resident population.

The schools by name

LAUSD schools inside the neighborhood include North Hollywood High School at 5231 Colfax Avenue, Colfax Charter Elementary at 11724 Addison Street, Burbank Boulevard Elementary at 12215 Albers Street, and Amelia Earhart Continuation School at 5355 Colfax Avenue. The school reputation is a live part of why tenants choose this neighborhood over cheaper options a mile away, and it is worth stating plainly that North Hollywood High is in Valley Village despite its name.

Landmarks and public spaces

Valley Village Park, NoHo Arts District (adjacent), Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

Parks and recreation

Valley Village Park, the NoHo Arts District (adjacent), the LA River bike path, Universal Studios (adjacent).

Dining, culture, and character

Ventura Boulevard (adjacent, in Studio City) provides the principal dining corridor. Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Magnolia Boulevard host neighborhood-scale restaurants.

Local events and traditions

Valley Village Neighborhood Council events, community programming through local schools.

Notable associations

Valley Village's mid-century courtyard apartment buildings represent a distinctive architectural era and have become a focus of adaptive preservation among LA multifamily preservationists.

Who represents it

Represented by the Valley Village Neighborhood Council, whose boundaries are Burbank Boulevard, the Tujunga Wash, the Ventura Freeway and the Hollywood Freeway.

A bit of history

Originally part of North Hollywood; distinguished as Valley Village in the 1990s. Heavy mid-century residential development gives the neighborhood its current architectural character.

What buildings here have actually sold for

Every figure below is computed from the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record in Valley Village — 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 $263,472 per unit.

The largest closing in the Valley Village record is 12245 Chandler Blvd at $10,025,000 (34 units); the smallest is 4936 Whitsett Ave at $2,200,000 (9 units). The record here runs from 2014 to 2018, and the busiest single year was 2018 with 2 closings.

How these figures are calculated, and what we do not claim →

Valley Village against the other 25

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.

Common questions about the neighborhood