Paddle out from the access point just north of the Sepulveda Dam on a Saturday morning and you get about a mile before the river simply ends for you. Not because the current dies out or the water turns shallow, but because a barrier sits across the channel and there is nowhere further to go. Turn around, paddle back, load the kayak into the car. That's the whole trip.
It is a small, specific frustration, the kind that only registers if you actually own a kayak and actually use this stretch of the Los Angeles River. But it says something larger about the 2,000 acres of park land that most Sherman Oaks residents already treat as a backyard: Lake Balboa, the golf courses, Woodley Park, the dog park. The basin has always been generous with acreage and stingy with connection. A plan moving through Los Angeles City Hall right now is built almost entirely around closing that gap, and pieces of it are already further along than most people walking the reservoir-style loop around Lake Balboa realize.
A park deficit hiding inside a very large park
Here's the number that doesn't square with what the basin looks like from the ground: Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks are classified by the city's Bureau of Engineering as park-poor, with roughly 0.2 acres of park space for every 1,000 residents. Los Angeles County's own target is 4 acres per 1,000 people. That's a twentyfold gap, in neighborhoods that sit directly against one of the largest open spaces in the San Fernando Valley.
The math works out that way because a lot of the Sepulveda Basin's 2,000 acres isn't credited as neighborhood park space in the way a corner playground would be. Some of it is flood infrastructure. Some of it, by the Army Corps of Engineers' own 2011 accounting, is inactive or reserved for vegetation management rather than active recreation. The basin is enormous and technically public, but a meaningful slice of it has never functioned as usable park land for the people who live closest to it. That's the tension the current Vision Plan is trying to resolve.
What's already there, and already yours
None of this is a knock on what exists today. Residents who use the basin regularly already know its geography by name:
- Lake Balboa (Anthony C. Beilenson Park), with boat rentals and fishing
- Woodley Park, with cricket pitches and a model aircraft field
- The Japanese Garden, tucked into the basin's eastern edge
- Three 18-hole golf courses, Balboa, Encino, and Woodley Lakes, that together host more than 250,000 rounds of golf a year
- A dog park inside the recreation area, popular with a neighborhood that has a lot of pet owners
- The Balboa and Hjelte Sports Centers, tennis courts, an archery range, and a velodrome
That list is also why the golf community pushed back hard when the Vision Plan's early drafts floated eliminating two of the three courses to make room for habitat restoration. The final plan retained all 54 holes across all three courses. It's a useful data point on how this process actually works: not a top-down redesign imposed on the basin, but a negotiation between competing, legitimate uses of the same 2,000 acres.
Three options, one river, and a fight over how much to unbuild
The planning team, made up of Olin, Geosyntec, Agency Artifact, and several other firms working with the city's Bureau of Engineering, put three design alternatives in front of the public: The Wildlands, The Terraced Floodplain, and The River Valley. All three shared the basics, more soccer fields, pickleball courts, a proper kayak launch, better bike and pedestrian paths, new bridges. Where they split was how aggressively to de-channelize the concrete-lined stretch of the LA River running through the basin, turning it back into something closer to a natural, soft-bottomed waterway.
The Wildlands option went furthest on habitat restoration. It was also the option that would have removed the most existing recreation to get there, including golf holes. Community feedback pulled the final plan back from that edge. What emerged keeps the golf courses intact while still pursuing river restoration on the segments where it doesn't require tearing out amenities people already rely on.
What actually moves first
The plan carries a total price tag of roughly $4.8 billion across 46 to 47 individual projects, depending on which planning document you're reading, spread over about 25 years. That range in project count is a rounding difference between two releases the same week, not a discrepancy in the underlying plan.
Some of these projects are councils and agencies away from a shovel. Others are already further along than the basin's day-to-day users might expect.
| Status as of the plan's most recent public updates | Project | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Already in planning | Balboa Aquatic Center | Part of ongoing city planning |
| Already in planning | Hjelte Soccer Field upgrade | Part of ongoing city planning |
| Already in planning | LA River trail extension, White Oak to Burbank | Part of ongoing city planning |
| Long-term, full build-out | River widening, White Oak to Balboa | $655 million |
| Long-term, full build-out | Freeway underpass improvements | As low as $5 million |
| Not expected until the late 2030s | Several habitat and de-channelization components | Included in the $4.8 billion total |
The wide spread between a $5 million underpass fix and a $655 million river-widening project is the plan in miniature. Some of what residents will notice is closer to a paint job. Some of it is closer to reengineering the flood control system built around the Sepulveda Dam.
The basin's connection to the 2028 Summer Olympics, which is slated to use Sepulveda Basin as a venue, has put informal pressure on a handful of projects to move faster than the 25-year timeline would otherwise suggest. That pressure hasn't rewritten the whole schedule. The plan's own presentation materials note some elements aren't expected to break ground until the late 2030s regardless of what happens in 2028.
Why nothing here moves quickly
Part of the reason the basin has taken this long to get a comprehensive plan at all comes down to who actually has authority over it. The land is owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Day-to-day recreation is managed by the city's Department of Recreation and Parks. The Bureau of Engineering is leading the Vision Plan itself. And politically, the basin sits primarily in Los Angeles City Council District 6, with neighboring districts like CD4 supporting from the outside rather than leading. That's four separate layers of jurisdiction before a single soccer field gets resurfaced.
This isn't new to the current plan. Years before the Vision Plan existed, Congressman Brad Sherman secured $3 million in federal funding specifically for revitalizing the Sepulveda Basin Sports Complex, work that predates the current plan entirely. The basin has been attracting piecemeal federal, state, and local dollars for years. What changed in 2024 was the first attempt to put all of that under a single, comprehensive framework instead of a series of unconnected grants.
What this means for a Saturday in the basin right now
None of this changes what a weekend at the basin looks like this fall. The golf courses are open, all 54 holes across all three. The kayak launch still stops after a mile. Woodley Park's cricket pitches and model aircraft field are running the same as they were last year, and the dog park is still the dog park.
What's changed is context. The next time the model aircraft field gets a new fence, or the trail between White Oak and Burbank gets paved, or the Balboa Aquatic Center breaks ground, that's not an isolated parks department upgrade. It's one piece of a $4.8 billion plan that residents living around the basin's edge, in Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys both, spent nearly two years shaping through public feedback, including the feedback that kept the golf courses standing. The basin residents already use is being rebuilt underneath them, a project at a time, on a timeline that stretches well past this decade.
If you're curious how the basin fits into daily life beyond the Vision Plan, our guide to Ventura Boulevard living covers the corridor a few blocks south. And if you want to talk about what any of this means for a specific Sherman Oaks address, Adam Dehrey is always glad to have that conversation.
