If you grew up in the Valley, you already know the Tom Petty line. It's a long day living in Reseda. There's a freeway running through the yard. What you may not know is that when he wrote it, Reseda wasn't a punchline. It was the heart of the Valley — the place the rest of the West Valley was orbiting around, not the place commuters cut through on the way to somewhere else.
I work this whole corridor, from Encino to Calabasas, and the most consistently underestimated zip code on my map is 91335. Reseda. The forgotten one. The one buyers from Woodland Hills look past without realizing they're looking past the original.
Where the Valley actually began
Reseda was founded in 1912 as Marian, one of the first planned townships in the San Fernando Valley after the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company subdivided the old Lankershim Ranch. It was renamed Reseda in 1921, after the small fragrant flower — the reseda odorata, or mignonette — that grew wild in the fields.
For most of the 20th century, this was the commercial spine of the West Valley. Sherman Way was the main street: a wide boulevard of two-story brick storefronts, a Spanish-revival theatre, a movie palace, a department store, a granary. The 1947 Reseda Theatre was a destination. The town had its own newspaper. The post office on Sherman Way and the public library a block off it were the civic anchors of everything west of the 405. Woodland Hills was the orchards. Calabasas was the ranch land. Reseda was the town.
You can still see it if you slow down on Sherman Way between Reseda Boulevard and Wilbur. The bones are there. Some of the buildings are the originals. A few are even doing business in the same spaces their grandparents opened.
What was lost
Three things, in sequence, quietly moved the Valley's center of gravity west.
The freeway. When the 101 was routed through the southern Valley in the late 1950s and 60s, it bypassed Sherman Way entirely. Commerce followed the off-ramps. The Topanga Plaza opened in Canoga Park in 1964; the Promenade and the broader Warner Center build-out followed in the 1970s and 80s. Retail dollars that had concentrated on a few blocks of Sherman Way for fifty years moved two miles west and never came back.
The earthquake. On January 17, 1994, the magnitude-6.7 Northridge earthquake struck. The popular name attaches the quake to Northridge, but the epicenter sat directly beneath Reseda. The damage was concentrated here. Apartment buildings on Reseda Boulevard pancaked. The retail strip on Sherman Way lost roofs and façades that had stood since the 1920s. Insurance money rebuilt the housing, mostly. The commercial heart of the town it did not rebuild.
The drift west. Through the 1990s and 2000s, every dollar of new West Valley luxury development pushed further along the 101 — Warner Center, Woodland Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Westlake Village. The narrative of "the West Valley" came to mean those names. Reseda, sitting east of all of them, became the place that the West Valley story forgot it had started in.
Reseda did not decline. It was simply stopped being talked about.
Why Reseda matters again
Three things are turning the conversation around in 2026.
1. The city is actively investing here.
The Reseda Rising initiative, run through the office of the local council district with private development partners, has been steadily reshaping Sherman Way for the better part of a decade. The historic Reseda Theatre is being restored as a community arts venue. New mixed-use projects are filling in the empty parcels left after 1994. The Sepulveda Basin recreational corridor on Reseda's eastern edge has expanded. The Orange Line stop at Reseda and Oxnard has been repositioned as a transit hub. None of this is glossy yet. All of it is real.
2. The zoning has quietly changed.
Reseda is now one of the most permissive single-family neighborhoods in the West Valley for ADUs, lot splits, and small-scale multifamily. The state-level housing legislation that has reshaped California — SB 9, AB 2011, the ADU bonus programs — lands harder here than it does in Hidden Hills, where covenants and HOAs blunt the impact. For an investor or a multi-generational family, that is a real difference. The same lot in Reseda and in Woodland Hills do not have the same upside.
3. The price gap has become structural.
This is the part that matters if you're a buyer. As of the spring 2026 market:
- Median single-family home in Reseda: under $1M, with much of the stock still trading in the mid-to-high $800s.
- Median in Woodland Hills proper: well north of $1.5M, and rising.
- Median in Encino south of the boulevard: over $2.5M.
- Average lot size in Reseda: meaningfully larger than what the same dollar buys in Encino or Sherman Oaks.
The mid-century ranch homes here — three bedrooms, two baths, 1,600 to 2,000 square feet, on flat 7,000-square-foot lots with original hardwoods and room for a pool — are the kind of inventory that has effectively disappeared in the rest of the West Valley. Reseda still has thousands of them.
What this means if you're a buyer
Reseda is not the trophy market. It is not Hidden Hills. It is not the place I send a relocating NFL family. It is something else — and something the Valley has not had a name for in a long time: a genuinely livable single-family neighborhood inside the West Valley, at a price that a teacher and a nurse, or a young family, or a first-time buyer using a CalHFA program, can actually reach.
For the buyer priced out of Woodland Hills, this is the answer. Same school catchments at the western edges. Same fifteen-minute drive to Warner Center. A house with a yard, not a townhouse with a permit. Half a million dollars of difference on the contract.
For the long-view investor, the structural setup is harder to find anywhere else in Los Angeles: flat lots, permissive zoning, an actively revitalizing commercial corridor, transit access, and a starting price that still pencils. The play is not flipping. The play is buying the house, holding the land, and letting the next decade do what the last one didn't.
The freeway is still running through the yard. The yard, it turns out, is worth a second look.