We live in la jolla on mount soledad, and needless to say, a lot of the houses in la jolla are built on fill. (ours is not, but across the street where the views are better, are all on fill, dirt that was probably scrapped from our lot.) Depending on how nervous you are about things, how steep the canyon you are on is, etc. I would suggest a couple things.
1) During escrow hire a soils engineer to do a report for you. This might be a bit expensive, but could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars later. And a house built in the 60’s probably had minimal compaction done.
2) Ask the soils engineer to give you a sense of what re-compaction would cost. Alternatively, many people in our neck of the woods have been putting in caissons and truss beams. Apparently they are about half the price of having the site re-compacted.
3) If possible, look into insurance issues. If you are on a canyon it might be very difficult to get homeowner’s insurance for two reasons. 1) Fire, and 2) landslides. For instance I can tell you that AAA wouldn’t even consider quoting anywhere near Mt Soledad. (We ended up going with Geico)
