Let’s be honest. Nobody on the Westside asks “where do you live?” to make small talk. They ask so they can place you. Within four seconds of your answer, they know all about you. They can guess where your kids go to school, what you drive, which farmers market you go to, and whether you’ve ever said “the 10” out loud with real emotion in your voice. (You have. We all have.)
This is not a real estate guide. Zillow exists for that, and you’re already on it at midnight. This is the stuff you actually need to know. Curate accordingly.
Malibu (90265)
You don’t live in LA. You live in Malibu, and the sign on PCH says so: “21 miles of scenic beauty.” It used to say 27. The city changed it in 2017, so technically you lost six miles and nobody held a vigil. Your town square is the Malibu Country Mart, your grocery store is the Whole Foods where surfers and billionaires wait in the same checkout line, and your entire calendar is organized around whether PCH is open, closed, down to one lane, or “open to residents only.” You’ve had a residents’ pass on your dashboard more often than you’ve had a reservation at Nobu. Your neighbors in the Palisades are rebuilding block by block while your own building department moves at the speed of a sea lion on a hot rock. You love it here. You will never, ever leave. You’d just like a permit sometime before Pepperdine graduates another class.
Spot yourself: Malibu Country Mart, 11am on a Tuesday, in a linen set and a trucker hat, pretending not to notice the guy from the show you binged.
Your tell: You call it “the ‘Bu” and you’re not being ironic.
Topanga (90290)
You live in what the chamber of commerce calls a “high energy vortex,” and you didn’t laugh when you read that. Your neighbors are a session musician, a sound healer, an astrologer, and a guy who’s lived in a yurt since 1987 and owns more land than anyone in Brentwood. The local chamber’s list of canyon essentials includes a rattlesnake wrangler, and you have him saved in your phone. Your idea of a fancy dinner is the Inn of the Seventh Ray, where the food is described as energized by the sun, and you’ve cried there at least once (a wedding, a breakup, or the bread). Your road down to the beach was closed or down to one lane for more than a year and you handled it better than anyone in Santa Monica handles a lane closure on Montana. You say you’re going to sell and move to Ojai. You’ve been saying it for eleven years.
Spot yourself: The Topanga Days parade on Memorial Day weekend, barefoot, with a kid on your shoulders and a tambourine you didn’t bring.
Your tell: You refer to Santa Monica as “town.”\
Pacific Palisades (90272)
You’re from the Palisades, and you say it the same way you always have, maybe a little louder now. Right now you’re probably renting in Santa Monica or Brentwood (rents in 90402 jumped almost 15% the spring after the fire, and some of that was you). You check the Pali Rebuild Map the way other people check the stock market. You have a contractor on speed dial, a binder of permit paperwork, and a strong opinion about whether to rebuild at 110% of your old square footage. The shopping center reopened with a ribbon-cutting and a brand-new Elyse Walker flagship before most of the houses had walls, and you have complicated feelings about that. You also went on opening day and bought the necklace that says “Palisades” on it. You’re coming back. Everyone you know is coming back. The group chat has a countdown.
Spot yourself: Your lot on a Saturday morning, coffee in hand, showing an out-of-town friend where the kitchen is going to go.
Your tell: “We’re rebuilding.” (Said like a promise, never a complaint.)
The Riviera (90272)
You live in the part of the Palisades that didn’t burn down, and you will never, ever say it that way. You say “we were lucky.” Then you change the subject to the golf. Your neighborhood is about 700 homes on big, quiet lots, split by Sunset into Upper and Lower Riviera, and you know exactly which one you’re in. The Reagans used to live on Amalfi, which you bring up the way other people bring up a celebrity sighting. Your street has more construction trucks than residents right now, because half the Palisades is rebuilding around you, and you have stopped complaining about the noise out loud. You send your contractor to help your friends. You host the moms whose kitchens are still a slab. You’re a little guilty, a lot grateful, and you have somehow become everyone’s favorite person to have a glass of wine with.
Spot yourself: Driving down Amalfi with a lasagna on the passenger seat for a friend who’s still in a rental.
Your tell: “We were lucky.” (Every time. And you mean it.)
Brentwood (90049)
Your town square is a red barn from 1948. The Brentwood Country Mart has a post office, a fire pit, a fried chicken counter, and a barbershop where Ronald Reagan used to get his hair cut, and you have run into three moms from school, an ex, and a man you’re 80% sure was in a Marvel movie there, all before 10am. You jog the coral-tree median on San Vicente, which is technically a protected Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, so every morning you are doing lunges on a landmark. Your street is lined with hedges so tall you’ve never seen your neighbor’s front door, which everyone agrees is the point. And since the fire, half your Palisades friends are renting on your block, so the carpool got bigger, the dinner parties got better, and the rent went up for everybody.
Spot yourself: Sunset and Barrington at 2:45pm, in pickup traffic, on a phone call you’ll be on for forty minutes.
Your tell: You say you live in Brentwood. You actually live in Brentwood Park, Brentwood Glen, or Mandeville Canyon, and you’ll specify if pressed.
North of Montana (90402)
You don’t live in Santa Monica. You live North of Montana, and you wait a beat after you say it so people can react. Your friends have known you for three years and have never seen the inside of your house. They’ve only seen the four contractor trucks parked outside it. (Somebody is always redoing something. It’s never finished. It’s not supposed to be finished.) You know which side of 14th Street everyone lives on, because that’s Franklin vs. Roosevelt, and you have thoughts about both. Your street has its own private security patrol and you still post in the block chat when a car idles too long. And Halloween? You’re on the 16th and Georgina circuit, which means your front yard has a budget, a theme, and an animatronic something that a set decorator definitely touched.
Spot yourself: Montana Ave, Saturday, 9:15am. Holding a coffee you aren’t drinking, next to a stroller you aren’t pushing.
Your tell: You say “the neighborhood” and mean eleven blocks.
North of Wilshire (90403)
You’re three blocks from Montana and you tell people within ninety seconds of meeting them. You have all the walkability and half the hedges. You live in a Craftsman or a condo with a courtyard and a lemon tree, and you’ve stopped pretending it’s temporary. You walk everywhere and silently judge anyone who drives to Montana. Your Trader Joe’s is on the ground floor of a luxury condo building, which you find very European. You have a Zillow alert set for 90402. You will deny this.
Spot yourself: Walking to Montana with a canvas tote, in the exact outfit the NoMo mom is wearing, but from Quince.
Your tell: “We’re basically North of Montana.”
Ocean Park (90405)
You live in the part of Santa Monica that’s basically Venice with better parking enforcement. Your house is a 1920s bungalow with a front porch, a skylight and a price tag that would make the original owner faint, because fifty years ago this was “Dog Town,” the cheapest corner of Santa Monica, where people lived in the storefronts on Main Street and grew hydroponic tomatoes in the windows. Artists moved in for the rent. Richard Diebenkorn painted 145 canvases here and named the whole series after your neighborhood. The artists are gone now, and one of those paintings is worth more than your house, your neighbor’s house and the coffee shop on the corner. You walk to Main Street for everything, the Sunday farmers market is your church, and your neighborhood runs a social club with a summer picnic series, which you attend and pretend is ironic.
Spot yourself: The Main Street farmers market, Sunday at 9am, with a bag of peaches and a dog in a bandana, deciding whether to keep walking into Venice.
Your tell: You say you live “by Main Street” so nobody confuses you with the people who live by the Promenade.
Silver Triangle (90291)
You love Venice. From exactly four blocks away. Your house started life as a 1,200-square-foot postwar bungalow and is now a “five-year architectural collaboration” with a flat roof, a lot of glass, and a hot tub you call a water feature. You walk to Abbot Kinney for coffee, to the canals for golden hour, and to the boardwalk never. You have friends in the condos around the man-made lake (yes, there’s a lake. In Venice. Behind a gate.) but that’s a whole different personality type, and you’ll get to them another time.
Spot yourself: The canals at 6:45pm. Linen everything. A dog with a better haircut than your husband’s.
Your tell: You call it “the Triangle” like everyone should already know.
Venice Beach (90291)
You live on a walk street, which means you can’t drive to your own front door and you consider this a personality trait. Groceries arrive by wagon. The surfboard lives by the gate. You’ve either been here since 1994 or you bought in 2021 and dress like it’s 1994. Your neighbors are a painter who’s been in the same rent-controlled apartment for forty years, a founder, and a man with a cold plunge whose job no one has ever been able to identify. You hate what Abbot Kinney turned into. You’re there four times a week.
Spot yourself: Pulling a Radio Flyer full of Erewhon bags down a walk street, wetsuit half on.
Your tell: You say “old Venice” and get a little misty.
Sawtelle (90025)
You live in an apartment one block off Sawtelle, and your kitchen is decorative. Dinner is wherever the line is shortest, which is never Tsujita. When the Tsujita line is too long, you cross the street to Tsujita Annex, where the line is also too long. You know which boba spot has the good brown sugar, which karaoke box takes a walk-in at 11pm, and which parking structure validates. Half your building went to UCLA and the other half works in tech in Santa Monica, and nobody has ever met the landlord. You’re one of the only people on the Westside who can walk to ramen, coffee, a toy store and a grocery store without moving your car, and you are smug about it. You’ll move to Mar Vista eventually. You’ll still drive back here for dinner three nights a week.
Spot yourself: In line at Tsujita at 7pm on a Wednesday, already planning what you’ll buy at Giant Robot afterward.
Your tell: You give directions by restaurant, never by street.
Westdale (90066)
You can draw the Mar Vista Elementary boundary map from memory. You tell people you bought the house “for the yard.” It was for the school. You read every Nextdoor post on your street, and you have notes. Your neighbors list their top interests as dogs, gardening, and home improvement, which is why your street sounds like a leaf blower at 9am every Saturday. The block party is in June and you’re on the committee. No. You are the committee.
Spot yourself: Mar Vista Rec Center, already signed up for everything. You signed your friends up too.
Your tell: “We’re in the boundaries.” (Unprompted. To the barista.)
Mar Vista, Below the Hill (90066)
You live in the flats west of Centinela, where Mar Vista runs into Venice on one side and Santa Monica on the other. Your house is either a 1950s bungalow with a new black-framed addition, or it’s one of the 52 Gregory Ain houses on Beethoven, Moore and Meier, in which case you say “post-and-beam” a lot and lost two bidding wars before you finally got it. Your kid’s public school has a chicken coop and a native-plant “wildlands,” and the other parents are filmmakers and chefs. Sunday is the farmers market at Grand View and Venice, when the street closes to cars and becomes the village you pretend to have.
Spot yourself: Grand View and Venice, Sunday, 10am. A flat of blue eggs in one hand, a kid on a balance bike in the other.
Your tell: You tell people from out of town you live in Venice, and people from LA you live in Mar Vista.
Culver City (90230, 90232)
You moved here for the schools, and you say “our district” like it’s a member of the family. Your husband works at Sony, Apple, Amazon, or “a production company you haven’t heard of.” You tell everyone Culver is a small town inside LA. Then you complain that the small town now has a wine bar where you need a reservation on a Tuesday. You’re thrilled and furious about how much it’s changed, often in the same sentence. And yes. Even though you’ve lived here six years you still end up on the wrong Culver Boulevard at least once a week.
Spot yourself: Downtown Culver on a weeknight, still wearing your work lanyard.
Your tell: “It’s twenty minutes to everything.” (Except anywhere inside Culver City.)
Del Rey (90066)
“Not Marina del Rey. Not Playa del Rey. Del Rey.“ You have said this sentence roughly four thousand times. Even realtors get it wrong. You’re boxed in by Culver City, Playa Vista, the Marina and Venice, which means everyone assumes you live somewhere else. You got a yard without a forty-offer bidding war, your favorite restaurants are a taco spot and a diner, and you aren’t apologizing for either. Nobody has ever asked about your school boundary, and you like it that way.
Spot yourself: Paco’s Tacos on a Tuesday night. No reservation. Best night of the week.
Your tell: “It’s between Culver and the Marina.” (Hand gesture included.)
Westchester (90045)
Are we counting Westchester? We’re counting Westchester. You’d honestly prefer we didn’t, because the secret is getting out. Kentwood is hometown America ten minutes from LAX: real lawns, cul-de-sacs, kids on bikes, a Little League schedule on the fridge. The planes fly over your house and you don’t hear them anymore. Your guests do. Every time. And you have your own “North of,” too. It’s North of 77th, and you say it exactly the way your friend says North of Montana, just in a Patagonia vest.
Spot yourself: Truxton’s on a Thursday, at a table for eleven.
Your tell: You’re the friend who drives everyone to LAX. You charge in wine.
Welp. That’s the Westside, block by block. Every one of you thinks your zip code is the best one, and every one of you is a little bit right. The only thing we all agree on is that the 405 is a crime against humanity.
Which one are you? Be honest. Then send this to the friend who’s definitely a Westdale.
Did I nail your zip code and now you’re mad about it? Email us at everybodyknowsinla@gmail.com.