Those Who Gambled for Great Views Assess Their Luck, Losses : Hillsides: Residents know mudslides can be the price of living in a premier location. A few houses are declared unsafe.

The worst of the rains had passed, but they left behind grim reminders on homes scattered through the hillside neighborhoods that invariably are counted among the San Fernando Valley’s premier places to live.

Posted on the front of these unluckiest of homes are bright red and white notices--tacked there by the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

“UNSAFE. Do Not Enter,” they read.

“It’s a tragic thing and it’s sad,” Stephen Manger said as he stood outside his sister’s Woodland Hills house, which was declared unsafe after the recent storms washed away ground beneath the back deck. Because of the notice, Manger’s sister and her husband spent the weekend removing furniture, and they’re not allowed to return until a study determines whether the rustic dwelling is stable, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Walt Kainz said.

Like others in Santa Monica Mountains communities from Calabasas to Studio City, they lived in an area where flooding or mudslides can be the price of a million-dollar view or a lush setting that seems a world away from city life.

On Sunday, many surveyed their homes to see if they had won the gamble this time.

Despite muddy streets, battered sandbags and fallen tree limbs, most felt they had.

On Beverly Ridge Drive in Sherman Oaks, where back yards end in cliffs, Bernice Albrecht, 64, said she hadn’t thought of the consequences of heavy rain when she moved there 17 years ago.

“We came from New York,” she said. “We didn’t know.”

Since then, Albrecht has learned about mudslides. But she reported Sunday that her yard was all there--and that she hadn’t felt the least threatened by the rains.

“If I didn’t this week,” she said, “I never will.”

Blocks away, however, a red and white UNSAFE notice was posted on a house on Camino de la Cumbre.

Around the corner, another couple had prepared for the storms by parking their car at the end of the road so they could leave the area if necessary. They also stocked up on food in case mud kept them inside.

This Sherman Oaks family had become seasoned storm veterans since 1962, when they bought their house. There’s a hill in the back and a cliff in front, right across the street, and they have lived through four storms that sent mud rolling “like lava flowing” down the cliff, the wife said.

The husband recalled the worst as a 1969 storm during which the mud knocked down a power pole and blocked the road in both directions. He and his wife were forced to evacuate through their back yard with their 5-year-old son and baby daughter.

But over the years, they’ve realized that the mud always flows to the right and left of their house. So, “the longer we’re here, the less we worry,” the wife said. Indeed, there was no damage this time.

Like many hillside residents, they declined to give their names for fear their neighbors would be angry because their tales might devalue property.

They said, however, that they would never dream of selling their spot in the hills, which allows them to see deer and hear the calls of coyotes.

“Between the fires and rain, most of the time it’s lovely,” the wife said.

Also addicted to the “wonderful” hillside life is Belle Braglia, 55, of Woodland Hills. But she worried about her $400,000 home after part of the hill in the back yard slid away during Wednesday’s rains.

She asked the Los Angeles Conservation Corps to cover the area with plastic tarps and dig trenches to drain the water into the street.

Nonetheless, Braglia also has no intention of moving from an area that is “five minutes away from everything and you feel like you live in the country.”

Guy and Fay Jensen, 60, said they have the answer to flood and mudslide worries.

They also live in Woodland Hills, but made sure to buy right at the top--on a broad flat pad on San Blas Avenue.

“I’d lived on the side of a hill in Canyon Country,” Guy Jensen said. “Every time you look around, you see people on the side of a hill have problems. People on top of hills don’t have problems.”

* WEATHER: A dry day, then more rain due. A3