Living in Palms — Neighborhood Guide

About Palms

Palms is a dense Westside LA neighborhood between Culver City and Mar Vista, characterized by 1960s-era multifamily inventory at scale and proximity to the Expo Line.

Where Palms begins and ends

Palms has no official city-drawn boundary. It is generally taken as the Palms Neighborhood Council area plus Zone 1 of the Mar Vista Community Council, bounded broadly by Culver City to the south, Mar Vista to the west, Rancho Park and Cheviot Hills to the north and the 405 corridor to the east.

Size, density and who rents

About 1.5 square miles with roughly 41,700 residents — near 28,000 people per square mile, which makes it one of the densest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Renters are close to nine in ten of the population: the 2000 census put rentals at 87% of occupied dwellings and more recent counts put it higher still.

Who lives in Palms

Dense, young, transient demographic heavily weighted toward renters, tech-industry workers commuting to Westside employers, and UCLA-adjacent demographics. Diverse population with no single dominant group.

The apartment stock in Palms

Palms is the most apartment-dominated submarket on this list. Close to nine in ten residents rent, and the housing stock is mostly apartment buildings on a footprint of about a square and a half that is among the densest in Los Angeles County. The typical building is a 1950s to 1970s walk-up on a residential block, and because most of it predates October 1978 it falls under the LA City RSO. The single-family pocket in the north-west corner is the exception rather than the pattern. The arrival of the Metro E Line station in 2016 put the neighborhood on a rail line to both Downtown and Santa Monica, which changed the buyer pool more than it changed the buildings.

For what that looks like in practice: the 13 Palms apartment buildings in our own closed record run from 7 to 118 units, with a median of 18. See every one of them →

What the buildings actually are

Palms is dingbat country. The dominant type is the 1950s to 1970s wood-frame, stucco-clad walk-up raised over open tuck-under parking, repeated block after block on a two-square-mile footprint. It is the reason the neighborhood holds so many units on so little land, and it is also the reason seismic retrofit status is one of the first questions a buyer asks here. Tuck-under parking is what creates a soft story — a ground floor with too few shear walls to brace the floors above — and it is the reason Los Angeles adopted Ordinance 183893 in January 2015, under which the city identified roughly 13,500 buildings needing seismic retrofit. Many of them are dingbats. What the retrofit ordinance means when you sell →

Buildings worth knowing by name

Historic districts and what they restrict

Los Angeles adopted its Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance in 1979 and had designated 35 HPOZ neighborhoods by 2023. Inside one, all exterior work — alterations, additions, landscaping and new construction — goes through additional review by an HPOZ board working from a published preservation plan. That constrains what a buyer can do with a building, so it belongs in the diligence conversation rather than after it. Boundaries are parcel-specific; confirm any address against the city's own map before assuming either way. Palms has no HPOZ. The nearest is the Gregory Ain Mar Vista Tract, in adjacent Mar Vista.

Who works here

Westside tech corridor spillover (Santa Monica, Culver City, Playa Vista). Residential-heavy submarket with small retail along National and Motor.

Getting around

Metro E Line (Expo) at Palms and Culver City stations. I-10 and I-405 freeway access.

Rail, and what it does to a site

The Metro E Line station at Palms opened 20 May 2016, putting the neighborhood on rail to both Downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Buildings within walking distance of it may fall inside a Transit Oriented Communities tier, which is a direct input to what a developer will pay for the site.

Schools and colleges

LAUSD. Palms Middle School and Palms Elementary serve the resident population.

The schools by name

Palms Elementary, Palms Middle School, Clover Avenue Elementary and Charnock Road Elementary serve the neighborhood, alongside Le Lycee de Los Angeles and New World Montessori.

Landmarks and public spaces

Palms Park, Woodbine Park, Cheviot Hills (adjacent).

Parks and recreation

Palms Park, Woodbine Park, Rancho Park (adjacent), the Cheviot Hills trails (adjacent), and the Ballona Creek bike path.

Dining, culture, and character

National Boulevard and Motor Avenue host small neighborhood restaurant clusters. Adjacent Culver City's dining scene is a short distance away. The commercial density of Palms itself is modest relative to neighboring submarkets.

Local events and traditions

Palms Neighborhood Council events. Broader Westside community programming.

Notable associations

Palms is one of LA's oldest Westside neighborhoods, annexed to the city in 1915 — predating most of the surrounding Westside development.

Who represents it

Represented by the Palms Neighborhood Council, with part of the area falling under the Mar Vista Community Council.

A bit of history

Annexed by LA in 1915. Developed heavily in the 1950s-1970s with the multifamily boom. The Metro E Line (Expo) station at Palms opened in 2016, on the Santa Monica extension, and catalyzed transit-adjacent redevelopment.

What buildings here have actually sold for

Every figure below is computed from the Sterman Multifamily Group’s own closed record in Palms — not from a market report. Price per door falls as buildings get bigger, which is why this is banded by size rather than given as one number: comparing a six-unit building to a forty-unit building on price per unit compares two different products. Across all 13 closings the median is $296,875 per unit.

The largest closing in the Palms record is 10751 Rose Ave at $31,700,000 (118 units); the smallest is 3121 S Canfield Ave at $2,135,000 (9 units). The record here runs from 2015 to 2026, and the busiest single year was 2020 with 3 closings.

How these figures are calculated, and what we do not claim →

The same building, sold twice

These are Palms buildings the group closed, and then closed again for the next owner. The change between the two prices is what that specific building did over that specific hold — not a market average, and not a claim about what any other building will do. A short hold and a long hold are different transactions, so the period is shown alongside the number.

The streets we keep coming back to

Repeat presence on one street is worth more to a Palms owner than a citywide total: it means the buyer pool, the rents and the quirks of that block are already known here. These are the Palms streets where the Sterman Multifamily Group has closed more than one building — 4 buildings across 2 streets.

The full Palms closing record →

Palms against the other 25

These are the 26 Los Angeles submarkets where the group has closed the most buildings, on our own record rather than a published index. The spread is the reason a citywide per-unit figure is close to useless for pricing a specific building.

Common questions about the neighborhood