They’ve Discovered a Small Piece of Paradise : Census: Unlike nearby areas, Palisades Highlands grew in the 1980s. Ten years ago it didn’t merit its own census tract, but today nearly 3,000 people call it home.

So sparsely settled that it did not merit its own census tract 10 years ago, the Palisades Highlands is today home to nearly 3,000 people, half of them in the 40-60 age group and almost all of them prosperous Anglos, the 1990 Census found.

Real estate agents are not embarrassed to market the Highlands as Shangri-La, a hidden valley tucked away only minutes from the beach, where the sun shines when it’s foggy below, and where curving streets lead to the streams and sycamores of Topanga State Park.

The Highlands is one of the few neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Brentwood in which the population grew in the last 10 years, and construction is under way on the last of the 1,694 household units planned for the area.

The continuing growth has some old-timers worried. The area is already home to so many high-income younger people that their speeding BMWs are scaring the wildlife, said Barbara Reiber, 75, a condo-dweller since 1976.

“We have the yuppie population up the hill, who drive very fast and don’t stop when they run over deer,” she said. “It’s not really too cozy a climate for raccoons and coyotes any more.”

But her Paradise is not yet lost. “When that happens, I just look up the canyon,” said the former Brentwood resident.

Highlands residents are lured by the quiet views of city, ocean and hillside, the sense of security provided by private patrol cars and the lack of escape routes for the criminal element, and by housing values that are somewhat lower than the surrounding areas of the Palisades and nearby Brentwood.

There is one traffic light, no school, no gas station, no nightclub.

“I drive 22 miles to downtown L.A., but when I get home I’m glad to be there,” said Stephen A. Bost, 36, an attorney and former Santa Monica resident. “At night, honest to God, you can see stars that when you live in most parts of this town you had no idea they existed.”

About 88% of the people who live in the Highlands’ existing 1,096 household units own their homes, which range from $350,000 condos to $3.5 million estates in gated, guarded enclaves inhabited by such worthies as James Worthy, the basketball player, and Chevy Chase, the comic actor.

According to Census Bureau data, about a quarter of the units are worth half a million dollars or less; 90% of the homes in the larger Palisades-Brentwood area would go for half a million dollars or more, property-owners told the Census Bureau.

Rents, on the other hand, start lower in the larger Palisades-Brentwood region, where 58% of the 8,792 apartments go for $1,000 a month or less. In the Highlands, 88% of the 124 rental units cost $1,000 a month or more.

“You can actually have a two-bedroom-and-den condo that’s like a little house for under $400,000, and you can’t find anything like that in Brentwood or Santa Monica,” said Rita Nickels, manager of the Jon Douglas real estate office in the Highlands.

Sales have been sporadic in recent months, said Nickels, a 23-year veteran of Palisades real estate.

But bargain-hunters have snapped up some of the lower-priced condos, while recent offerings of higher-priced, higher-altitude mansions have brought in newcomers and veteran residents whose hearts are in the Highlands.

“People trade up within the community. Very few people leave unless they’re relocated,” she said.

Some of the pricier offerings have remained empty for months, however, along with a third of the stores at the Palisades Highlands Plaza, a shopping mall at the foot of the 2 1/2-mile drive up to the Highlands from Sunset Boulevard.

“The recession didn’t help the center. People quit leasing there for about a year,” said Michael Carr, a leasing agent who said he has two clients ready to sign deals for some of the open space.

“I think it’ll be a good center, but its time has just now come,” he said. “Everybody who lives in the Highlands goes by that center every day.”

But Ira Goldfarb, a five-year resident, said that people tend to zoom up the hill once they’re that close to home. He has two speeding tickets to prove it.

The pharmacist, a father of three, said the Palisades is a good place for children but tough on teen-agers, who find the area boring because of its isolation. The teen-agers, however, can take a 25-cent DASH bus ride to Palisades Village or the beach to get away during the summer.

The Census found in the Highlands 681 boys and girls who are 18 and younger, 23% of the population, compared to 16% for Brentwood and the Palisades at large, which recorded a 22% drop in the number of youngsters since 1980.

Greg Autry, who has been building luxury houses in the Highlands for the last seven years, said that he and his wife liked it so much that they recently moved into a condo and plan to build a house of their own.

“It’s not totally exclusive. You get the feeling it is, but from what I see, there’s real diversity,” said Autry, 42, who previously lived in a house he built in Bel-Air.

He added that Highlands residents are “generally successful, and from what I see, they’re successful because they’re hard workers.”

Pressed to name some drawbacks to life in the Highlands, Autry had to think for a minute before he remembered that he lost a shirt helping to beat back the big fire of 1989, which left a swath of charred hillside that is still visible.

The blaze closed off the area for hours, but Fire Department helicopters scooped up water from the development’s reservoir and dumped in on the flames, minimizing the damage.

Despite its small size and isolation, the Highlands is hardly a small town. Some may know immediate neighbors through the associations that look after lawns, pools, gardens and tennis courts, but there is little contact across the economic lines created by disparities in housing costs, residents said.

“Even in our association, not too many people know their neighbors, because they work and they go about their own business. It’s similar to living in an apartment,” said Bernard Lieber, 72, who moved to a Highlands condo after leaving Washington, D.C., 15 years ago.

“People who have dogs get to know each other,” he said. “They don’t know each other’s names but they know the dogs’ names. People don’t even use their front doors. They drive into their garages and that’s it.”

But Nelson Sweetser, 79, a retired engineer, said that the alienation wasn’t as bad as all that. He and his wife, Pat, moved up from Marina del Rey when it got “too crowded,” sometime in the mid-1970s.

“You might even say we like the isolation,” he said.

Palisades Highlands The Census counted 2,926 residents of Palisades Highlands last year. The area grew so much in the last 10 years that it was necessary to split the old Census Tract 2626, which encompassed all of Pacific Palisades north of Sunset Boulevard and west of Temescal Canyon, into tracts 2626.01 (Palisades Highlands) and 2626.02 (the older portions of Pacific Palisades). To compare the numbers with 1980, it is necessary to combine the 1990 data for the two new tracts. When that is done, a portrait emerges of an island of growth in the Pacific Palisades-Brentwood area, which had a 7% population decline overall in the 1980s.

Population

1990 %change from 1990 Brentwood-Pacific Palisades 53,418 -7 Tracts 2626.01/2626.02 8,999 +7

Housing The population decline in broader brentwood-Pacific Palisades region occurred despite a rise in the number of housing units. And in the Highlands and the adjacent neighborhood, housing growth greatly outpaced population growth. The reason: The affluent but aging area has far fewer children.

1990 %change from 1990 Brentwood-Pacific Palisades 25,324 +4 Tracts 2626.01/2626.02 3,690 +17

Children

1990 %change from 1990 Brentwood-Pacific Palisades 8,411 +22 Tracts 2626.01/2626.02 1,876 -3

Ethnic Groups The new neighborhood, Palidades Highlands, and the broader Brentwood-Pacific Palisades region are both overwhelmingly Anglo. Palisades Highlands has a somewhat higher percentage of Asians. For the overall Brentwood-Palisades area, the racial and ethnic percentages were not significantly changed from 1980. The following figures are the percentage of 1990 population.

Anglo Asian Latino Black Other Brentwood-Pacific Palisades 89.3 5.1 4.7 0.8 0.1 Tracts 2626.01/2626.02 86.2 8.1 4.6 0.9 0.2