Huntington Palisades Homes for Sale

About the Neighborhood

Curved Streets Above the Bluffs

The land under Huntington Palisades passed through two failed ventures before the houses came. Abbott Kinney bought 247 bluff-top acres in 1887, planted eucalyptus and called it Santa Monica Heights; Collis Huntington later acquired it and built a long wharf in a bid to make Santa Monica the region's port, a bid Los Angeles ultimately resolved in San Pedro's favor. In 1926 Huntington's heirs sold 226 acres to Robert C. Gillis's Santa Monica Land and Water Company, which renamed the tract Huntington Palisades, opened it that January, and saw the first house completed on Ocampo Drive before the year ended.

The plan, influenced by the Olmsted Brothers, favored curved streets, planted parkways and semicircular drives around open space, and engineer W. W. Williams named the streets for places in Mexico — Chapala, Toyopa, Alma Real, Ocampo, Pampas Ricas. Deed restrictions set minimum construction budgets, barred commercial uses and capped houses at two stories, and lot buyers received membership in an owners' organization that survives as the Huntington Palisades Property Owners Corporation. Roughly five hundred homes stand on wide, flat lots between Chautauqua Boulevard, the village and the bluff edge above Pacific Coast Highway and Potrero Canyon.

The January 2025 fire hit this tract hard. Press coverage and damage surveys documented the destruction of a large share of its homes, along with Corpus Christi Catholic Church, whose remains were later demolished ahead of planned rebuilding, and most of the nearby Palisades Charter Elementary campus. The adjacent Palisades Village retail center survived and has announced a 2026 reopening. Rebuilding is underway: community-wide, more than nine hundred rebuild permits had been issued by late spring 2026 and the first completed homes had received certificates of occupancy, with new construction now visible on Huntington streets alongside cleared and listed lots.

Flat, regular lots make rebuilding here more straightforward than on the hillsides, and like-for-like projects up to about ten percent larger qualify for streamlined review under post-fire city and state orders. Two overlays still matter. Parts of the tract, particularly toward the bluff, fall within the California Coastal Zone, where non-exempt projects need coastal approvals — confirm status parcel by parcel. Bluff-edge and canyon-rim parcels also warrant geologic review, since the palisades themselves are an eroding escarpment above Pacific Coast Highway. Every parcel sits in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, which brings current ignition-resistant construction standards to each rebuild.

Buyers should verify the basics that now define the neighborhood: debris-removal certification and any soil testing for a given lot, utility and water-meter status on the block, whether architectural plans or in-process permits transfer with a sale, and the property owners corporation's rules and any assessments. Ask about current access at George Wolfberg Park in Potrero Canyon, which opened in 2022 and links the Recreation Center area toward the beach. Expect several years of construction activity around you, with the noise, parking and truck traffic that entails, and get insurance quotes early, since the post-fire market prices each parcel individually.