San Fernando Valley incorporated as distinct city from Los Angeles?

[Strategos' Risk]

If San Fernando was its own city how would the regional politics be different between it and L.A.? Would it be anything resembling the relationship between San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area in general, specifically San Jose or Silicon Valley? Or is that more like the relationship between L.A. and Orange County?

San Fernando and Hollywood literally had a vote to secede a couple of decades ago, but it failed.

https://www.kcet.org/history-societ...ion-and-urban-politics-in-san-fernando-valley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Valley_independence_and_secession

"Valley City" seems real weak sauce a name for such a place.

Choice quotes from the first article:

"The Valley was a metropolitan paradox: an archetypical postwar suburb located within the limits of the nation's second largest city," notes historian Michan Andrew Connor in a recent article for the Journal of Urban History. Connor and Yale's Laura Barraclough have pointed out that the Valley's identity lay in a "culturally imagined rural past" that stood at odds with its perception of an expanding Los Angeles.

In 1977, a failed attempt to secede from Los Angeles proper resulted in L.A.'s delegates to the state legislature closing the loopholes that had allowed for the effort in the first place. Valley residents drew sharp distinctions and complained that their taxes went disproportionately to public services that SFV residents did not use. Many SFV leaders believed that downtown interests unfairly outweighed them politically in municipal debates.

Twenty years later conservative stalwart Tom McClintock and Assembly member Spencer Hertzberg managed to ferry a bill through the state legislature that opened the door for new dreams of secession; mobilization followed. The Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment (VOTE) formed to take up the mantle of an independent Valley. VOTE fundraised, lobbied elected officials, petitioned, and carried on a consistent public relations beat advocating for independence. By 1998, polls reported that 60 percent of Valley residents supported secession, compared with only 47 percent citywide. Four years later VOTE mounted a new campaign for Valley independence when Prop F appeared on the 2002 election ballot.

Lots of resistance to African American integration from the 1950s to 1960s. Mexican American immigration into white areas with less controversy, rising to 43% Hispanics by 2002.

As VOTE built its case for secession in the late 1990s, Latino and African American groups pushed them for an explanation as to why minority communities should back a secession movement that had clear ties to homeowner associations that had historically worked to exclude non-white property owners. At a 1998 public forum, Latino American Civic Association member Irene Tovar asked VOTE leaders to tell minority communities just "how we would be better off as a city?" Challenges came again at a January 1999 NAACP meeting and VOTE leaders still had not answered the question. The reality, VOTE leaders slowly realized, was that they needed a supermajority to win secession to overcome citywide opposition. That made one thing clear: "You lose the Latino vote and you lost the vote you need to make secession happen."

"When this community, and its non-profits, look at the leadership of the secession movement ... they see people who have opposed low income housing in their communities, supported Prop 184," and had achieved or attempted very little in regard making adequate "provision(S)" for the Valley's poorer residents.[/S]

To bridge this divide, Michiel, Svorny and others used race neutral ways of taking about community agency. VOTE promoted local control, reduced government, "and community empowerment as means by which all valley residents might demand and receive greater recognition and service from local government in a new city." Svorny also convinced leaders to downplay the argument that Los Angeles pilfered tax money from SFV by disproportionately providing services to other parts of the city. According to her analysis, the Valley paid for 31.5 percent of city taxes and consumed nearly 30 percent of its services which, when weighed with administrative costs, hardly looked like exploitation. In sum, she and VOTE leaders argued, the disadvantaged had the most to gain.

Hm, if this article is correct, then it's a good thing that SFV didn't secede after all. That said, I wonder what would've happened if it had been incorporated as a separate city to begin with.