Palisades Village & the Bluffs Homes for Sale

About the Neighborhood

Where Pacific Palisades Began, and Where It Is Beginning Again

Pacific Palisades began here. In 1921 the Pacific Palisades Association, formed around the Methodist minister Charles H. Scott, bought roughly 1,100 acres from the developer Robert C. Gillis and held its Founder's Day on January 14, 1922, distributing lots to subscribers by lottery. The plan was a Chautauqua assembly by the sea, with lecture halls, churches and an educational institute, and by that June 725 of the original 1,600 lots had gone. The commercial heart that grew from it, the Business Block on Sunset at Swarthmore, was dedicated in 1924 to a Spanish Colonial Revival design by Clifton Nourse and became a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2010.

The residential half of this area is the group of streets running south from Sunset toward the ocean bluff, known locally as the Via Bluffs after Via de la Paz and Via de las Olas. Most of the remaining streets carry the names of American colleges in alphabetical order, Antioch, Bowdoin, Carthage, DePauw, Earlham and Friends, a naming scheme shared with the Alphabet Streets north of Sunset and traceable to the community's founding purpose. The area was platted largely within Tract 9300 in 1928 and held roughly 670 houses plus several condominium buildings, on flat, walkable blocks between the village shops and the bluff edge.

The bluff itself has a long engineering history. Potrero Canyon, which cuts between these streets and the beach, eroded badly from the 1930s onward and eventually took houses and back yards with it, prompting a decades-long acquisition, fill and stabilization program. The result is George Wolfberg Park at Potrero Canyon, 46 acres with about 1.75 miles of walking paths, a series of basins and native planting, dedicated in December 2022, with a pedestrian connection down to Pacific Coast Highway and Will Rogers State Beach long planned. Landslide history remains a real diligence item on bluff-adjacent parcels, and geotechnical review belongs in every escrow here.

The January 2025 fire hit this part of Pacific Palisades hardest. Damage mapping placed the largest continuous swath of destruction between Radcliffe and Swarthmore, running from Palisades Charter High School down toward Pacific Coast Highway, and the 1924 Business Block was among the losses. Across the community the fire burned 23,448 acres and destroyed 6,837 structures before containment on January 31, 2025. Recovery has been visible: by mid-July 2026 public permit tracking showed roughly 1,600 new home applications submitted, close to 1,100 permits issued, about 900 houses under construction and the first certificates of occupancy issued.

Commercial life is returning on a faster clock than housing. Rick Caruso's Palisades Village, the outdoor retail district that opened in September 2018 on the blocks around Swarthmore, survived the fire structurally but took heavy smoke damage, and reopened in August 2026 after a restoration reported at more than $100 million, with nearly all of its space leased and the majority of tenants opening at once. For buyers, the practical questions are consistent: parcel-level damage and debris records, whether plans and permits transfer, utility restoration on the block, insurance quotes obtained inside contingency, and bluff geology where it applies.