‘Back to the Future II’ Got This Wrong: Marty McFly’s House Is Doing Fine

Many of the predictions about 2015 in “Back to the Future II” have come true. Video conferences! Drones! Flat-screen TVs! Virtual reality glasses! Holographic advertising! And the Cubs might even win the World Series! (Ha, just kidding about that last one.)

But the way Marty McFly’s house is depicted? Not so much.

In 1985, in the fictional town of Hill Valley, CA, McFly was growing up in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch amid well-tended homes on neat streets in Lyon Estates. He was desperate to get out, perhaps to the aspirational neighborhood of Hilldale, with its decidedly grander homes.

By the time McFly sped 30 years forward, straight into the wild and wacky 21st century—in fact, to today, Oct. 21, 2015—McFly had arrived. Sort of. He finally lives in a house in Hilldale, but it’s sort of a dump. And the neighborhood’s the pits! As one character describes it, it’s “nothing more than a breeding ground for tranks, lobos, and zipheads.”

We might expect his old house, in his old neighborhood—which appears in all three “Back to the Future” films—to have suffered the same fate. In real life, though, the actual house used for the exterior, 9303 Roslyndale Ave. in Arleta, CA, has changed little, and it’s easy to see why it was chosen as McFly’s original home.

“This was a typical single-family residence in an older, established neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles,” says Gerardo “Jerry” Ascencio, broker-owner of San Fernando Realty, who grew up in the area and has been working there for 25 years. The home and its environs say stability, suburbia, uniformity; it was the neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, says Ascencio, where Ritchie Valens grew up.

It communicates much the same thing today.

“Not much has changed other than a new high school on the old location of a large retail membership store,” Ascencio says. There’s also a new library, a new city hall, a new generation of politicians giving the area a voice, and a new demographic. It was largely white in the 1980s, he says, and now it has a majority of Latino residents.

This part of Arleta is still “a very desirable neighborhood of standard entry-level ‘bread and butter’ housing that is still in the reach of a first-time buyer or a move-up buyer coming out of a condo,” Ascencio says. The average home price is currently $379,000, way the heck less than Los Angeles at large, where the average is $699,000.

The Hilldale house, which is thought to be at 3793 Oakhurst St. in El Monte, CA—a three-bedroom, three-bathroom home last sold, according to our records, for $338,000 in 2004—is likely still fine, too, but it may not have appreciated much. Similar nearby homes are selling for $399,000. It’s far from the suburban decay depicted in the film, and it’s still a little more upscale than Arleta; the average home price here is $485,000.

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