Living in Encino
Encino is a City of Los Angeles community in the south San Fernando Valley with no separate city government, municipal code or council of its own. LA City Planning places it in the Encino-Tarzana Community Plan Area north of the Santa Monica Mountains, where Encino makes up roughly half the plan area, generally south of the Sepulveda Basin and east of Lindley Avenue.
The name is a label, not a boundary. City Planning's own materials distinguish the community from the plan area, and some southeast pockets near the Sepulveda Pass have shifted association over time, so parcel-level city tools rather than neighborhood maps answer zoning, school-attendance, hazard and service questions. The research packet is blunt on one more point: no official population figure exists for Encino as a single geography, so any confident-sounding number you see is a proxy built from Census tracts and should say so.
Practically, everything municipal is a City of Los Angeles matter, from land-use regulation and building permits through fire service, with the community's advisory voice running through its certified neighborhood council rather than any local government.