Pacific Palisades currently has about 27,000 residents. It is an affluent and primarily residential area, with a mixture of large private homes, small (usually older) houses, condominiums, and apartments. It has a small central business district on Sunset Boulevard--consisting of restaurants, stores, banks, and offices--known as the "village." It also includes some large parklands and many hiking trails.

Originally the home of the Inceville movie studio, the first of the many "movie ranches" used for making western films and housing a small number of mostly Latino fishermen, the area was first subdivided in the 1920s and settled by Methodists. One subdivision has streets named for Methodist missionaries. For many decades it had a virtual ban on local drinking, a Chinese restaurant famously holding the only liquor license in town. The Presbyterian Church formerly owned a conference center in Temescal Canyon before it was sold to become part of Topanga State Park. Will Rogers owned a large ranch adjoining the Palisades in Santa Monica Canyon, now also a state park, and helped to attract movie stars to the area. It has been the home to a number of intellectuals, such as Aldous Huxley.