Stand at the corner of Palm Canyon Drive and Camino Monte Vista and you can see the whole argument in one frame. On one side, century-old citrus-grove lots behind hedges and privacy walls, houses that have carried the same architectural bones since the 1920s. On the other, a cobblestone drive leading into a gated cluster of brand-new detached homes with rooftop decks and private elevators, the first new construction this neighborhood has seen in decades. Both are Old Las Palmas. Neither one tells you what the address actually costs to own.
That's the question worth sitting with if you're comparing Palm Springs neighborhoods and Old Las Palmas keeps coming up as the answer for prestige. The neighborhood has sold on one premise for a hundred years: you don't build here, you inherit. The Twelve at Old Las Palmas, a 12-unit project from one of the desert's longtime developers working with designer Michael Walters of Dakota DesignWorks, breaks that premise. Phase one is already showing three fully detached units on Pena Lane, priced from $1,995,000 up to $2,495,000, each with its own dipping pool, rooftop kitchen, and elevator. That's new information for anyone evaluating this neighborhood, and it changes the math in ways that go beyond square footage.
A Neighborhood Built Around One Product
Old Las Palmas has never had a second tier of housing stock. It's roughly 290 single-family lots, most dating to the mid-1920s subdivision of what had been citrus grove land, developed by builder Alvah Hicks and Prescott Stevens, the same developer behind the old El Mirador Hotel. The homes range from Spanish Colonial to mid-century, and a meaningful share carry historic designation from the City of Palm Springs, which comes with two things buyers need to weigh against each other: eligibility for the Mills Act property tax program, which can cut property taxes by roughly half for qualifying historic homes, and a Certificate of Appropriateness process that puts exterior changes under city review before you touch them.
That trade has defined the neighborhood's value proposition. You get land, history, and a tax break, in exchange for giving up some control over what your house looks like from the street. New construction was never part of that equation, because Mills Act designation depends on a structure actually having historic significance. A house built in 2026 doesn't qualify no matter how well it's detailed.
What $1.995 Million to $2.495 Million Buys Instead
The Twelve doesn't offer the tax break, and it doesn't ask for the exterior review either. What it offers is the zip code, the walk to Palm Canyon Drive shopping and dining, and a maintenance profile that looks nothing like the estates surrounding it. The completed model unit is available for private tours now, and the listed specs for phase one show 2,245-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath detached homes with no shared walls, elevators, and private cocktail pools on each lot.
That's a genuinely different product sitting inside the same boundary lines as $7 million estates. Recent sale and listing activity on Old Las Palmas estates has put the typical transaction somewhere around $2.76 million as of spring 2026, with the largest properties clearing well past $7 million. The Twelve's pricing sits inside that range, but it's buying a fraction of the land and none of the provenance. What it buys instead is a locked door you can walk away from for the season and come back to exactly as you left it, which is a different kind of value than an architect-attributed 1930s Spanish estate, even if the address on the mailbox reads the same.
| The Twelve at Old Las Palmas | Legacy Estate | |
|---|---|---|
| Construction | New, 2025-2026 | 1920s to mid-century |
| Typical price | $1,995,000 to $2,495,000 | ~$2.76M median, estates to $7M+ |
| Land | Small detached lot, shared streetscape | Large, often original-subdivision lot |
| Exterior changes | Standard permitting | City historic review if designated |
| Mills Act eligible | No | Only if designated historic |
| Maintenance | Grounds and exterior managed | Owner-maintained |
The Bill Landing on the Same Streets
Here's where the timing gets interesting. While The Twelve markets itself on low-maintenance living, homeowners a few doors down are working through the opposite problem: a six-figure infrastructure bill they didn't see coming when they bought.
In August 2026, the Palm Springs City Council preliminarily approved the engineer's report for an Old Las Palmas utility assessment district, the formal step that moves the neighborhood toward creating a property tax assessment zone to fund burying overhead power lines. Homeowners there are looking at costs reported to run over $100,000 each once the shared line-burying work is assessed, on top of a separate expense that's easy to miss in early conversations: state tariff rules require each property owner to pay for the "cutover," the private connection running from the street to their own electrical panel, which Southern California Edison estimated could add another $8,000 to $40,000 per property. The push started with a neighborhood kickoff meeting in April 2025, after the city passed an ordinance letting neighborhoods petition to form their own assessment districts rather than waiting on the utility to act.
That's not a hypothetical cost floating somewhere in city planning documents. It's a real line item that will land on whichever owner holds title when the assessment is finalized, regardless of how long they've owned the home or whether they were even present for the vote.
The Question Nobody's Asking Out Loud
Here's the friction a buyer actually needs to resolve before writing an offer on either product: does a brand-new parcel inside a gated development like The Twelve sit inside the same assessment district boundary as the surrounding estates, or was it carved out separately during permitting? Assessment districts are drawn parcel by parcel, and new subdivisions built after a district's boundary work began don't automatically inherit the same treatment as the lots that triggered the petition in the first place. That distinction is knowable. It shows up in the engineer's report and the assessment district map the city council is working from, both public record through the city's planning department, and it's worth confirming before you assume either way.
This is the actual decision in front of a buyer comparing these two products, and it's more specific than the usual old-versus-new tradeoff. An estate buyer might be getting Mills Act savings that offset part of a six-figure assessment over time. A Twelve buyer might be getting a smaller footprint at a similar price point precisely because that footprint carries none of the exposure the surrounding streets are now absorbing, or might be picking up a pro-rated share of the same bill without the tax offset to soften it. Both scenarios are plausible. Neither is guessable from a listing sheet.
Local coverage has also described the broader Palm Springs market as cooling into 2026, which puts real pressure on The Twelve to justify pricing that sits close to established estate territory. A buyer with time to compare both products has more leverage in that conversation than the marketing suggests.
A Few Straight Answers
Does buying new construction in Old Las Palmas exempt me from the utility assessment? Not automatically. Whether a specific parcel is inside or outside the assessment district depends on how the boundary was drawn in the engineer's report, which is public record through the city. Confirm parcel status before assuming either way.
Can I still get a Mills Act reduction if I buy an estate in Old Las Palmas today? Only if the property already carries historic designation from the City of Palm Springs, or if you pursue and receive that designation after purchase. New construction doesn't qualify regardless of design quality.
How much of The Twelve is currently available? Phase one lists three fully detached units on Pena Lane. Additional phases are part of the twelve-unit plan but pricing and availability should be confirmed directly, since project pages note that figures are subject to change.
Whichever side of Palm Canyon Drive you're picturing yourself on, the boundary lines and the assessment rolls are worth pulling before the emotional case for the address does the deciding for you. That's the kind of due diligence Bernal-Smith Group walks Old Las Palmas buyers through property by property, parcel map and all.
