Valley Glen

Valley Glen wasn't around until semi-recently. They just broke off parts of Van Nuys and North Hollywood to make what is a pretty crappy neighborhood. It's mostly a lot of run-down houses surrounded by big thoroughfares. There aren't really any young, hip people in the neighborhood except for maybe a little bit of trickle down from North Hollywood. And, the traffic is usually pretty terrible on Victory Blvd.
It's definitely more residential and palatable around Los Angeles Valley College. As far as community colleges go, this one is pretty good. And, the area surrounding the Woodman - Burbank intersection does have some cute property.
But, as you get back toward Vanowen St, it is not pretty. It's really industrial and it just looks like a wasteland. There is one good thing here: Target. Although, this Target is the worst Target city . . . at least there is one here, right? I guess. Oh, and Round Table Pizza is pretty amazing. There aren't that many of them in the city and there's one in Valley Glen. Other than that, I just wouldn't recommend this place for anything. I would rather live in Burbank if I were gonna live in the east valley. But, who knows, maybe it will gentrify in the next few years and be great. It definitely isn't now.

I’m not sure when this area came to be called Valley Glen, I remember no mention of this growing up here. It seems like it is yet another attempt to break areas of the Valley up into smaller, more manageable chunks so that they can be more easily managed. What you end up with is a place like this—with no true character as of yet. People I have met from the area have one thing in common though: they love to complain about the mess the local city council made of Victory Blvd. when they tried to fix it up. Apparently they ended up just driving business away with the prolonged construction project, closing up areas for weeks on end and diverting traffic just as the economic crisis hit. So now you find lots of boarded up buildings instead of businesses here.

You can pretty much tell what kind of a neighborhood you will get by the area it borders. So you have nicer areas bordering Sherman Oaks on the southwest and a lot more of a run down industrial feel up by Sun Valley. Near North Hollywood, you get the usual blend of young people looking for nicer areas to live at affordable prices.

Valley College is also in Valley Glen. It’s a community college—a good one—but it does not really attract students to live here or give the area a college town feel. It does provide jobs and you will find Valley College instructors who live in the area and it also attracts a lot of young people on the way to class—a fact that local businesses could take better advantage of.

It’s hard to judge which way Valley Glen will go or what character it will take. It definitely feels like a community in transition however. It could become a sort of transitional area between North Hollywood and Sherman Oaks—which might be a nice place to live—or you could end up with just the lower regions of Pacoima and Sun Valley—which would definitely not be nice.