The Beverly Hills Flats

When people in Beverly Hills say the flats, they usually mean the single-family blocks between Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, from Doheny Drive on the east to the city line near Whittier Drive on the west. This guide uses that definition. The streets south of Santa Monica are flat too, but their lots are smaller and the rules differ in places, and north of Sunset the land turns into hillside.

The layout goes back to the first plan for the town. Landscape architect Wilbur Cook drew three tiers: a business district and smaller lots south of Santa Monica Boulevard, the middle tier between Santa Monica and Sunset laid out on gently curving streets with larger lots toward Sunset, and estates in the foothills above. The city's 1996 street-tree plan describes the middle tier as land meant for upper-middle-class families.

Two things frame the flats. Beverly Gardens Park runs along the whole southern edge, 1.9 miles and 23 blocks from Doheny Drive to Whittier Drive. Along the top is Sunset, with the Beverly Hills Hotel and Will Rogers Memorial Park facing each other at Canon Drive. Century City is about 2 miles away by car.

The city keeps an inventory of about 27,500 public trees, and roughly 7,100 of them stand in the flats. When I matched each tree to its nearest street in September 2026, most streets still showed one dominant species. North Maple Drive is 92% camphor trees. North Palm Drive is 87% jacaranda, and North Elm Drive is mostly Chinese elm. North Crescent Drive and North Camden Drive are mostly southern magnolias, North Arden Drive fern pines, and Alpine Drive Shamel ash.

The tall, skinny palms that show up in most photos of Beverly Hills are Mexican fan palms. They're the most common tree on North Canon, North Beverly, North Bedford and Foothill Road. On the far west side, Whittier Drive and North Alta Drive are about 90% jacaranda, and they turn purple when the trees bloom in late spring. North Roxbury Drive is 82% tipu trees, the species the city's 1996 street-tree plan picked to replace aging American elms there.

Trees on private land are regulated too. You need a city permit to remove a protected tree that stands between the house and the street. That covers native trees at least 24 inches around and any tree at least 48 inches around, and a grove of 50 or more trees can be protected anywhere on the lot. If you're planning a rebuild, bring an arborist in early, because the city can ask for an arborist's report before it issues a removal permit.

The flats are in what the city code calls the Central Area. The house and every other building on the lot together can't exceed 1,500 square feet plus 40% of the lot area, so a 14,500-square-foot lot allows about 7,300 square feet above ground. The same cap covers both units if you build a second unit under the state's SB 9, and if a lot is split, the new lots together get no more floor area than the original lot had.

Basements don't count toward floor area in single-family zones. The code treats a level as a basement if its finished floor is no more than 3 feet above finished grade anywhere around the building, and a basement can extend past the house footprint as long as that part stays below grade. On a rebuild that makes a basement the one place to add space the formula doesn't count. Garages don't count either, up to 400 square feet.

North of Santa Monica Boulevard the main house can have a plate height of 22 feet and a building height of 28 feet with a flat or sloped roof, or 32 feet with a ridgeline roof, and a few more feet are allowed when each side yard is at least 10 feet. Exterior plans for a new house or a remodel that changes the look from the street go through design review. Since 2006 the code has also barred a house from sitting on more than one lot or being built across a lot line, and it caps each lot's width and depth at the average for its block, so buying the house next door doesn't let you build a compound. The City Council can waive some of these limits only through a Central R-1 permit.

The flats are in the Beverly Hills Unified School District. Its elementary schools are El Rodeo, at 605 Whittier Drive in the western flats, and Horace Mann, south of Wilshire; Beverly Vista is the middle school and Beverly Hills High School is the main high school. The district assigns elementary schools with its online school finder, and if your school of residence is full in a grade, a child can be placed at the other one. Hawthorne School on North Rexford Drive held its last promotion ceremony in May 2024, and the campus has housed the district office since early 2025. Run your address through the district's finder to be sure.

The Beverly Hills Police Department covers the flats. Its May 2022 monthly report, the most recent I found on the city site, put the average response to emergency calls at 2.52 minutes. The Beverly Hills Fire Department inspects brush clearance each spring in the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, which the city says covers the area north of Sunset and a few blocks south of it. On CAL FIRE's 2025 map for cities, blocks near Sunset such as Bedford and Rodeo at Lomitas are Very High or High, a band below them is Moderate, and about half of the flats, mostly the blocks toward Santa Monica Boulevard, isn't in a hazard zone at all.

Metro's D Line subway opened its Wilshire/La Cienega station on May 8, 2026, about 2 miles east of the middle of the flats, and the next section through Beverly Hills and Century City is still under construction. Beverly Hills is its own city, so the City of Los Angeles transfer tax under Measure ULA doesn't apply to sales here.