Palisades Highlands

The Highlands recorded 15 vacant-lot sales, the highest count of any Palisades neighborhood, while accounting for only 6 of the 93 permits issued in the February 2026 sample. Alphabet Streets, by contrast, had 11 sales and 29 permits.

That inversion is the clearest signal in the neighborhood-level data. Where rebuilding is expensive and slow, more owners sell. The Highlands is where the cost of hillside construction, the length of the permit path, and the size of the insurance shortfall intersect most sharply.

The Highlands sits on canyon and hillside terrain. Parcels commonly require deep geotechnical investigation, caissons, retaining walls, and engineered grading and drainage — none of which appears in an insurance carrier’s square-foot replacement estimate in any realistic amount.

The fire compounded this. Loss of vegetation altered soil composition and increased erosion and slope-instability risk across the Palisades hillsides, making slope compliance a central focus of permit review rather than a routine sign-off.

Access is its own constraint. The Highlands is served by limited road access, which affects deliveries, concrete pours, crane scheduling and the practical cost of running a site far from the flats.

Get a real geotechnical report and a builder’s site-specific estimate before you make the decision, not after. The gap between a carrier’s estimate and a Palisades rebuild budget averaged roughly $1.45 million per home across the fire area; on a hillside parcel needing caissons and retaining structure, that gap is at the wide end.

That is not an argument against rebuilding. It is an argument for knowing the real number early enough that the decision is yours to make deliberately, while there is still time to pursue additional recovery under your policy.