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is a district in the San Fernando Valley region of the City of Los Angeles, California.
It is bordered by the Los Angeles districts of Mission Hills on the west, Arleta on the south, Sun Valley on the southeast, Lake View Terrace on the northeast, and by the city of San Fernando on the north. Major thoroughfares include San Fernando Road, Van Nuys Boulevard, and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The Golden State and Ronald Reagan freeways run through the district.
Pacoima's first inhabitants were the semi-nomadic Tongva and Tataviam Native American tribes; the name
in fact comes from the Fernandeño language and translates to "the entrance". In 1797, Spanish colonists built the nearby Mission San Fernando Rey, but the Pacoima area remained without permanent settlement until 1887. In that year, former Republican California State Assemblyman and California State Senator Charles Maclay purchased 56,000 acres (227 km
) in the area with a loan of $117,500 from a friend, U.S. Senator Leland Stanford (president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, former Governor of California, and founder of Stanford University). MacLay proceeded to subdivide the tract into agricultural parcels, most of which were used for the production of Southern California staples such as citrus, nuts, beans, wheat, and vegetables. As was the case in most of the San Fernando Valley, the lure of plentiful, cheap water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct proved irresistible to Pacoima's farmers, and the district was annexed by Los Angeles in 1921.
During World War II, the desperate need for housing for workers at Lockheed's main plant in neighboring Burbank led to the construction of the San Fernando Gardens housing project. By the 1950s, the rapid suburbanization of the San Fernando Valley had come to Pacoima, and the area changed almost overnight from a dusty farming area to a bedroom community for the fast-growing industries in Los Angeles and nearby Burbank and Glendale, with transportation access provided by the Golden State Freeway. While racial segregation barred African-Americans from most of the Valley, Pacoima was home to a large black population until the 1990s, in addition to whites and Latinos. Industrial decline, capped by the demise of Lockheed's Burbank operations in the 1990s, led to the departure of most of the white and black population from the 1970s onward; by the 1980s, the area was majority-Latino. Since the late 1970s, it has been one of the poorest districts in the city of Los Angeles, with San Fernando Gardens a particular locus of poverty and crime. However, the district has received a great deal of attention from the Los Angeles Police Department since the arrival of new chief William J. Bratton in 2001: according to LAPD statistics, the area has seen the largest decrease in crime during that period of any of LAPD's patrol areas.