The Encino most residents actually live in each July is not the one that shows up on lifestyle roundups. It is a small triangle: a stretch of Ventura Boulevard where a new dinner room finally makes the walk east of Balboa worthwhile, a Sunday parking lot on Victory that becomes the neighborhood's living room for five hours, and a 2,000-acre basin that opens to boats when the weather turns dry. This year, that triangle carries a different weight than it did last summer.
The reason is on the calendar. In 2028, portions of the Sepulveda Basin will host Olympic competition, and the preparatory work that reshapes the site's edges will begin well before the torch arrives. If your habits already include the loop around Lake Balboa or a Sunday market run followed by lunch on the boulevard, this is the last full summer in which each of those anchors stands in the version you know.
What Actually Changed on the Boulevard
The most concrete addition to the eastern boulevard this year is Popular, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, now open at 18047 Ventura Blvd with a Mediterranean fusion menu, elevated seafood dishes, and crafted cocktails. It has been open since March, long enough for a Sunday-night rhythm to form and short enough that most residents still refer to it as the new place. The kitchen is led by Executive Chef Dor Priezler, with a seafood-forward approach, and the room fills earliest on weeknights between seven and eight, when the neighborhood tests it against Petit Trois down the street and the long-established tables closer to Balboa.
What Popular did for the block is less about any single dish than about extending the dinner corridor. For years the eastern end of Encino's boulevard lost momentum after nine. A late reservation now reads as a plausible weeknight rather than a small event, which changes the calculus for anyone deciding whether to drive over the hill or eat closer to home. It is a small shift, and the sort of shift only regulars notice.
The Sunday Rhythm at Victory and White Oak
The other anchor is older and quieter. Every Sunday, over 30 farmers from Central and Southern California, more than 25 food vendors, and around 10 crafters set up from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, rain or shine, at the ONEgeneration lot on Victory between Balboa and White Oak. It is not the largest market in the Valley, and it does not try to be. The scale is deliberate: a place where you can walk the full loop in twenty minutes and still recognize half the people doing the same.
Summer is when the market's produce mix earns the drive. What is arriving in the stalls now includes:
- Raspberries and stone fruit at their short window
- Grapes, figs, and melons as July deepens
- Peppers, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, and summer squash from the valley farms
That list comes from the market's own summer inventory of raspberries, stone fruit, grapes, figs, melons, pears, peppers, cucumbers, corn, eggplant, and summer squash, and it is a useful reason to plan the morning around the market rather than treating it as an errand. The point of local knowledge here is timing: stone fruit peaks earlier than it feels like it should, and the vendors who bring the best of it tend to sell down by ten thirty. A portion of each week's proceeds supports ONEgeneration's community programs and services, which is the quiet civic reason the market has held its footprint on Victory as long as it has.
If the market is the morning, the boulevard is the afternoon. A short walk between the two, with a stop at one of the shaded benches near Encino Commons, is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a set piece.
The Basin's Summer Window
The third anchor is the one most residents underuse. The Sepulveda Basin sits at the geographic center of the Valley, and its summer character is defined by two things happening on different water.
The first is the paddling window on the river itself. The Sepulveda Basin River Recreation Zone extends from above Balboa Boulevard to the confluence of Haskell Creek below Burbank Boulevard, and is open for recreational non-motorized boating during the summer, with restricted access to some protected wildlife areas along the banks. Kayaks and canoes launch from the boundary access points; the middle access is pedestrian only. For anyone who has driven past the basin for years without registering that a soft-bottom stretch of the Los Angeles River runs through it, this is the season to correct that.
The second is Lake Balboa itself, which is a different body of water and a different experience. A 1.3-mile footpath surrounds the lake and is restricted to foot traffic except for wheelchairs and baby strollers, with a specially designated path for non-motorized, wheeled vehicles winding through the park. Swimming is not permitted, and the water is reclaimed from the Tillman plant, so the lake reads as scenery rather than swim. In July the flowering cherry trees planted around its perimeter carry no blossoms, but the shade they throw at seven in the morning is the reason regulars start their loops before eight.
A note on the practical geometry, because it matters. The 2,000-acre basin holds a wildlife reserve, the Sepulveda Dam, the Tillman Water Reclamation plant treating 40 million gallons of water per day, Anthony C. Beilenson Park, Lake Balboa, and The Japanese Garden. Each of those is a separate morning. Treating the basin as one destination is the mistake most first-summer residents make; the reward for treating it as five is a July calendar that never repeats a Saturday.
A Last Summer of the Basin as You Know It
Which brings the argument to its point. During the 2028 Summer Olympics, the area around the Sepulveda Dam will host basketball (3x3), BMX racing and freestyle, modern pentathlon, and skateboarding. The competition footprint is not the whole basin, but the preparation footprint is broader than the venues alone. Access roads, staging areas, temporary structures, and the security perimeter that precedes a Games by many months all draw from the same 2,000 acres that currently absorb the neighborhood's Saturday mornings.
The practical read for residents is this. Lake Balboa's loop, the river zone west of Woodley, the Japanese Garden's discrete 6.5 acres beside Tillman, the cricket complex at Woodley Park, the model airfield behind it, and the community garden's 800 plots on twenty acres will each be affected on a different schedule and to a different degree. Some will feel it in staging vehicles by 2027. Some will not feel it meaningfully until the Games themselves. The point is not to catastrophize the change. The point is that a summer spent using the basin now, at its full undisturbed footprint, is a summer that will read as a benchmark against the ones that follow.
That is the argument for treating this July with a little more intention than the last one. Book the kayak morning. Take the loop before the heat. Walk into the Japanese Garden on a weekday. Do the market on Sunday and eat on the boulevard that night. The three anchors are not disconnected: they are the shape of the neighborhood at rest, and they are the version worth committing to memory.
If you own a home in Encino and are thinking about how the neighborhood's next few years might change your position, whether you are considering a move, a renovation to hold, or simply a clearer read on where value is heading in the streets south of the boulevard, Joan Duffy brings a builder's eye and three decades of Valley specialization to that conversation. Let's Connect.
