The View Is Worth $265,000--and a Neighborhood Wants to Buy It

What’s a precious view of the Pacific Ocean worth?

A group of Pacific Palisades residents have bid $168,000 so far in a furious neighborhood lobbying campaign.

This is a monied area where people still insist there are some things worth more than money.

“I know that when I’m long gone, there’ll still be that view,” said Lloyd Ahern, one of the residents raising money to buy a tennis-court-size piece of oceanview land at the lip of Las Pulgas Canyon and preserve it as open space.

At first, Ahern and other residents on a couple of pretty, tree-lined streets in the Palisades believed that it would be simple to come up with the cash to save the property from development. After all, the first $125,000 in pledges came easily.

“There was so much money pledged, we thought, ‘Pfft, this is a piece of cake,’ ” said Deborah Lloyd, an eight-year resident of Las Casas Avenue, which leads to what has come to be known as the Las Casas-Grenola view site.

It was only later, she said, that a dedicated band of residents there “realized we were going to have to squeeze the neighborhood dry.”

Sure enough, when it came time to write checks, people couldn’t always deliver the generous amounts they had pledged.

Residents thought that local branches of national grocery chains and banks would gladly donate in exchange for having their company’s name emblazoned on a plaque at the site. They didn’t.

So last summer, that small band started going door to door, churning out newsletters, coaxing their neighbors to give just a little more, all to ensure that they and future generations could enjoy the simple pleasures this scrap of land affords: a view of the Pacific, the shade of an old eucalyptus and a rough canyon trail toward the beach.

They have until July 20 to meet the owner’s comparatively low asking price of $265,000, and the goal is in sight.

The owner, Stuart Millar, bought the Grenola Street property in the 1970s and eventually got the necessary permits to build a nearly 5,000-square-foot house on it. Then Millar, a film producer who still owns a house in the area, moved to Manhattan and decided to sell the land. It has been on and off the market since the late ‘80s, and at one time listed for around $800,000.

When Millar dropped the price to $390,000, neighbors realized that “now was the time we either act, or lose it,” said Blake Mirkin, who lives next door to the site.

Mirkin, a commercial real estate broker, spearheaded the negotiations with Millar, who agreed to a price of $265,000 and gave the community a year to raise it.

As of last week, residents had raised $168,000.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which will own and maintain the property if the deal goes through, has agreed to donate $25,000. The Coastal Conservancy and the city and county of Los Angeles have each pledged the same amount.

All the Committee to Save the Las Casas-Grenola Viewsite has to do now is raise a final $22,000 to cover closing costs and some improvements that the mountains conservancy wants to make to the land.

The conservancy opened a special account for Las Casas-Grenola donations last fall, and will refund donors’ money if the deal falls through.

Lloyd, who describes the site as a place “where every stroller-pushing mom goes,” estimates she has lobbied about 120 of the 160 houses in the Las Casas-Grenola loop.

“Only one person out of all those people said we were all idiots, and that a beautiful house there would increase our home values,” she said. For most in the area, “the issue of open space is huge.”

In addition to knocking on doors, handing out fliers and (fruitlessly) wheedling large corporations, the view-site committee this spring tried to drive home its point by blocking the ocean vista with a 10-by-10-foot wooden sign that read: “No View For You!”

Donations have ranged from $25 to $25,000, with one family deciding to forgo some planned home improvements so they could contribute several thousand dollars.

This kind of community response is “very much off the scale” compared to other instances in which communities tried to buy land, said John Diaz, chief of planning and land acquisition for the mountains conservancy.

“You can certainly think of things in the scheme of things that are more critical” than saving this morsel of open space, said Paul Gabbert, a six-year Grenola resident, but it’s hard to argue with the value it has for the community as a place to play, chat and walk the dog.

“This site has always been, way before I got there, a place where people congregate. . . . They really didn’t want to lose it to some kind of developer.”

Though Millar said he can’t afford to drop the price any lower, he is rooting for the neighbors, explaining that he would like to sell the land and get on with his life.

“I would be at least as disappointed as any of them if it didn’t work out,” Millar said.

Ahern, the view-site committee’s “neighbor emeritus,” lived in Mirkin’s house from 1979 until last June. He spent years opposing various developers’ proposals to build in Las Pulgas Canyon.

Though the group is still vigilantly soliciting donations, Ahern said he’s almost sure that the site will soon belong to the public.

“It’s really the soul of that whole area,” he said.