The Palms, a community of West Los Angeles, California, is the oldest neighborhood annexed to the city of Los Angeles, founded in 1886 and annexed to the city in 1915. The community was settled midway between Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean as an agricultural and vacation community. Today it is a primarily residential area, with a large number of apartment buildings and ribbons of commercial zoning. Westside Village, an upscale residential area, comprises Palms's northwest section. It is served by two freeways and five bus lines. Locally, the main employer is Sony Pictures in adjacent Culver City.

Palms has no official boundaries, but it lies generally northwest of Culver City, south of Cheviot Hills, southeast of Rancho Park and northeast of Mar Vista. The 1886 subdivision map filed with Los Angeles County showed Palms as bounded on the northeast by what would today be Manning Avenue. Irene Street, within Palms, has been placed by the city inside the Westside Neighborhood Council to the north. When Palms was annexed to the city of Los Angeles in 1915, the bounds extended westward from Arlington Avenue on the southeast and about Rimpau Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard on the northeast to Pico and Exposition Boulevards on the northwest. West of Overland Avenue wasn’t annexed until 1927. The portion of Palms girded by Overland, Sepulveda, National, and Charnock Road was developed just before World War II as Westside Village and is considered by its property owners' group (the Westside Village Civic Association) to be a distinct neighborhood.

Until the early 1960s, most of Palms was single-family homes and small duplexes and triplexes, most of which were built in the Craftsman and Spanish Colonial styles that dominated Southern California in the first quarter of the 20th century. Under pressure to provide affordable housing, the city of Los Angeles rezoned most of the district for large multifamily dwellings. (Homeowners' associations in Westside Village, Mar Vista, Rancho Park, and Beverlywood successfully banded together to fight against any such rezoning in their neighborhoods.) This had the result of most of Palms' historic housing stock being razed and replaced with two-story (or larger) apartment buildings. Very few original houses remain, and many of those are on lots where additional housing units have been built on what were once backyards. Palms is now one of Los Angeles' most densely populated neighborhoods.

The housing stock in historic Palms is now almost completely composed of apartment buildings, and 92% of the population there are renters. The upscale Westside Village district contains the only significant remaining concentration of owner-occupied single-family homes, largely constructed by developer Fritz Burns in assembly-line style just before World War II; most of these houses have been expanded during their lifetime, and some have been replaced in recent years by bigger, two-story dwellings. Apartment buildings, including two UCLA family- and graduate-student housing complexes, line even Westside Village's major thoroughfares.

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