Pool removal in EncinoFrom Ventura Boulevard to Encino Hills: a leave-no-trace pool demolition for a neighborhood named after its oaks.

A Valley neighborhood with two housing stories

The flats and the hills do not share one kind of backyard.

Encino sits in the central southern San Fernando Valley and on the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains. Mapping L.A. and Wikipedia place Reseda, Lake Balboa and the Sepulveda Basin to the north, Sherman Oaks to the east, Brentwood to the south and Tarzana to the west.^[2][3] The name comes from Rancho Los Encinos — the ranch of the holm oaks — and from the Spanish word related to those trees.^[2]

The neighborhood’s two primary ZIP codes tell different housing stories. Taken together (91316 and 91436), the ACS 2024 5-year estimates count about 19,993 housing units. About 75 percent were built before 1980, and about 45 percent were built in the 1950s or 1960s.^[4][5][6] About 54 percent of those units are single-family detached homes.^[4]

ZIP 91436, which covers more of the hillside and larger-lot Encino, looks even more like estate country: about 82 percent of its housing units are single-family detached.^[6] Those are the yards where a pool is often original to the house, the side gate may be the width of a car rather than a loader, and “leave no trace” means protecting a landscape that cost more than the demolition.

Ventura Boulevard, White Oak, the hills

Local landmarks are useful for more than color.

Ventura Boulevard is Encino’s frontage: Encino Commons, shops and the long commercial strip people use as a landmark when they describe which side of the neighborhood they live on.^[2] A few blocks away, Los Encinos State Historic Park preserves buildings from Rancho Los Encinos, including the de la Ossa adobe.^[2][7]

The neighborhood’s namesake tree is gone. A California live oak long known as the Encino Oak died in 1998; a monument stands near Ventura Boulevard and Louise Avenue.^[2] The oaks that remain, along with the park, are a reminder that Encino yards are often about trees as much as they are about turf — another reason a demolition route has to be planned instead of improvised.

Hill streets climbing off Ventura toward Mulholland raise the bulletin’s slope rule and, when a site is mapped in the Hillside Grading Area, the extra grading pre-inspection.^[1] On the Valley floor, toward Balboa and the Sepulveda Basin, access is often easier, but the same permit and compaction rules still apply.

If you plan to build — an ADU, a casita, a larger outdoor structure with footings — Encino follows the citywide rule: the shell comes out, fill is compacted and tested to at least 90 percent relative compaction, and no foundation goes in until the compaction report is approved.^[1][8]

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Encino pool removal questions

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