9 California Towns Slowly Disappearing into the Ocean

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Picture this, a house on a cliff in Southern California. Ocean view, three bedrooms, a two-car garage, a pool. Then one morning, the homeowner walks into the kitchen and notices something off about the floor. It's tilted, just a little. Not enough to spill a glass of water, but enough that a marble would roll. They call a contractor. The contractor measures the foundation. The foundation has moved 4 inches in a week.

[00:00:23]That's not a horror movie. That's Tuesday in Rancho Palos Verdes, where NASA satellites are now tracking entire neighborhoods sliding toward the Pacific at 4 inches per week. And that's just one of nine places in this state where the same thing is happening at different speeds, in different ways, to different people, often without making the news.

[00:00:41]Today, we're going through nine California towns that are quietly disappearing into the ocean. Some you've heard of, some you haven't. We're going from the slow burn at number nine down to the place where million-dollar homes are right now, this year, sliding visibly across the ground. Real places, real geology, real people watching the coast move underneath them. Let's get into it.

[00:01:00]>> Number nine, Capitola, Santa Cruz County. Capitola is the kind of place that ends up on a calendar. It's California's oldest seaside resort.

[00:01:08]They've been welcoming visitors since 1874, and the village beach is ringed by buildings painted in soft pastels that curve around a little river mouth.

[00:01:17]There's a wooden wharf, there's a beach.

[00:01:19]The whole thing looks like a postcard somebody framed and forgot to update.

[00:01:23]But the postcard is misleading, and Capitola knows it. In January 2023, a series of atmospheric rivers slammed into the Central California coast. In one storm, part of the Capitola Wharf, a structure that had been there for over a century, physically broke in half. The middle section collapsed into the water.

[00:01:41]The seawall along the village beachfront was breached in multiple places. Homes flooded. The damage total from that single event landed somewhere north of $20 million for a town of about 10,000 people. What makes Capitola interesting isn't the storm. Storms happen. What makes Capitola interesting is why the storm was so destructive, and the answer is sand, or rather the lack of it. The rivers that used to carry fresh sediment down to beaches like this one have dams on them now. So, less sand reaches the coast each year than the ocean takes away. The beach loses ground every single winter, and every year there's a little less buffer between the waves and the village. Capitola has tried trucking in sand. It works, sort of, temporarily.

[00:02:26]Picture filling a bathtub while the drain is open and the faucet is on a timer. You can keep up for a while, but you're not solving anything. Here's the part most visitors miss when they walk through the village snapping photos of the painted buildings. That seawall protecting the beachfront? It's old.

[00:02:43]Replacing it is a project that runs into the tens of millions for a small city.

[00:02:48]The wharf reopened after years of repair work. The village is still beautiful, but January 2023 was a preview, not a fluke, and climate scientists are clear that storms like that are going to keep coming. Worth a visit. Just maybe check the forecast first. Number eight, Ocean Beach and the Great Highway, San Francisco. You might think a city the size of San Francisco wouldn't be on this list. It is, and the part that's vanishing is bigger than you'd guess.

[00:03:15]The Great Highway is a four-lane road built in 1929 that runs for 3 and 1/2 miles along the western edge of San Francisco between the city and Ocean Beach. For nearly a century, it's been the road locals drove to watch the sunset, to walk dogs, to surf. The southern stretch between Sloat Boulevard and Skyline has been losing ground to the Pacific for years. Parking lots gone, lanes closed, sandbags stacked and restacked every winter. In 2024, San Francisco voters passed Proposition K, which permanently closed 2 miles of the upper Great Highway to cars. On March 14th, 2025, the gates locked for the last time. The new park, Sunset Dunes, opened a few weeks later. That stretch is, in plain language, never going to be a road again. Here's the part the news coverage tended to skim over. The reason San Francisco was willing to close a major coastal road wasn't aesthetics. It was the realization that the road south of Sloat could no longer be defended at any reasonable cost. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is now building a buried seawall to protect a much bigger problem, the Lake Merced Tunnel. That's a 14-ft diameter pipe sitting under the Great Highway carrying a huge share of the city's wastewater.

[00:04:26]If erosion breaks it, San Francisco has a different kind of disaster on its hands. The southernmost stretch, Great Highway Extension, is slated to close to cars permanently starting in 2026. The official planning term for what San Francisco is doing here is managed retreat. The plain English version is the city looked at the math, looked at the ocean, and decided that defending the road wasn't worth it. So, they're moving inland and letting the coast take what it's going to take. Imagine standing on the new Sunset Dunes Promenade on a foggy afternoon. Surfers are paddling out, cyclists are passing.

[00:04:59]There are benches now where there used to be lanes. It feels peaceful. What it actually is is one of the largest organized coastal retreats in American urban history dressed up as a park. San Francisco isn't fighting the ocean here, it's negotiating terms. If you live anywhere on the California coast and you want a preview of what your city's coastal future probably looks like, drive out to Sunset Dunes and walk it.

[00:05:23]This is what the next 30 years are going to be. Number seven, Big Sur, specifically the stretch around Rocky Creek. Big Sur is what people think of when they imagine the California coast.

[00:05:34]Cliffs dropping straight into the Pacific, Highway 1 carved into the rock, Redwood Canyons. The drive from Carmel to San Simeon is on most travel bucket lists for a reason. But, Big Sur has a problem most postcards don't show, which is that the cliffs Highway 1 was built on are not, geologically speaking, especially cooperative. On March 30th, 2024, after days of heavy rain, a section of Highway 1 just south of Rocky Creek Bridge collapsed straight into the Pacific. The southbound lane of one of the most famous roads in the world dropped into the ocean. About 1,600 people, tourists, residents, restaurant workers, hotel staff, were stranded on the wrong side of the slide. Caltrans had to run twice daily convoys to escort people in and out. The road didn't fully reopen for months. This is not the first time. This is not the 10th time.

[00:06:24]Sections of Big Sur's Highway 1 have collapsed in 2017, 2021, 2023, 2024. And those are just the major slides. A 2022 study documented cliff losses along this coastline of up to 16 feet per year in the most active areas. Here's the part that the postcards really don't tell you. The communities along Big Sur, and these are small, a few hundred residents in some places, family-run lodges, gas stations that have been there for generations, depend on Highway 1 for everything. Groceries, school buses, emergency services, the entire local economy. When the road goes, the town doesn't disappear all at once, but it does become an island. And the road keeps going. I want to stop here for a second because there's something worth saying about Big Sur that doesn't fit on a postcard. The people who live there know exactly what they signed up for.

[00:07:15]They're not naive. They've watched the cliffs come down. They've watched friends move out because the road kept closing. They stay anyway because Big Sur is Big Sur. That's not stupidity.

[00:07:25]That's a relationship with a place, and the place is changing under them. If you've ever wanted to drive Highway 1 through Big Sur, do it. Check Caltrans road status the morning of, leave early, and understand you're driving a road that is slowly and very visibly losing the argument with the ocean. Number six, Del Mar, San Diego County. Del Mar is a beautiful coastal town just north of San Diego. It's known for horse racing, expensive real estate, and a stretch of sandstone bluffs that look, from a distance, like they've been there forever. They haven't. They're crumbling and there's a train on top of them. The Los Angeles rail corridor is one of the busiest passenger rail lines in the country. The Pacific Surfliner uses it.

[00:08:07]Amtrak uses it. Freight uses it. about 2 mi through Del Mar, it runs directly on top of coastal bluffs made of soft, water-soluble sandstone. Geologists who study these bluffs estimate they erode about 4 to 6 in per year on average.

[00:08:22]Some stretches go faster. Since 2019, there have been at least a dozen documented bluff collapses near the tracks. Some small, some large enough to halt train service. In February 2019, a researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography happened to be standing nearby with a camera when 50 yd of cliff slid down to the beach. He caught the whole thing on video. The footage is unsettling not because the collapse is huge, but because of how casual it looks. The earth just decides and goes.

[00:08:50]The agency in charge, SANDAG, is now in the middle of a multi-phase $88 million stabilization project. Soldier piles drilled 60 to 70 ft down, drainage systems, retaining walls. The honest description from SANDAG itself is that the current work is a short-term solution designed to buy 30 years. 30 years. That is the explicit on-the-record time frame. The long-term answer is to move the tracks inland.

[00:09:15]That project, relocating the rail, is estimated to cost between 2 and 1/2 and 5 billion dollars. The funding is not secured. Estimates put completion no earlier than the mid-2030s. Imagine being a homeowner on Seaview Avenue in Del Mar. Million-dollar property, ocean views, the train horn at night, and one morning a 55-ft slab of cliff at 14th Street falls onto the beach below at 12:15 p.m. while a researcher records it. You're not living in danger today.

[00:09:43]You're living in a long, slow, geological negotiation that the public agencies have priced at 30 years of stalling and several billion dollars of eventual retreat. Tourists who visit Del Mar see the racetrack and the village.

[00:09:56]They don't see the soldier piles. They should. It's the most visible engineering investment in coastal triage anywhere in California. Number five, San Clemente and San Onofre State Beach, Orange and San Diego counties. If you've heard of Trestles, you've heard of this stretch of coast. Cotton's Point, Lower Trestles, some of the most famous surf in the world, plus a state beach so iconic that surfers fly in from Australia and Japan to ride it. In 2024, parts of San Onofre State Beach were essentially inaccessible. Not closed by court order, not blocked by protest, just no longer reachable because the access road and parking lot had been so chewed up by storms and high tides that the state lost more than half of the original 350 parking spaces. The beach is still there. Getting to it is a different question. The same coastline also has a railroad on it, and that's where this story gets ugly. Landslides during heavy rains in 2021, 2022, and 2024 repeatedly shut down the Pacific Surfliner. Repair costs ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Orange County Transportation Authority's response was to dump rock, a lot of rock. Since 2021, OCTA has placed over 26,000 tons of boulders along the shoreline as emergency armoring. In 2024, they applied to make it permanent.

[00:11:15]Here's what 26,000 tons of rock does to a beach. The sandy stretch in front of Cypress Shores essentially disappeared.

[00:11:22]The lateral access, the ability for you to walk along the beach at low tide from one point to the next, is now blocked.

[00:11:28]Cotton's Point, the northernmost break of Trestles, has been measurably degraded as a surf break. The Surfrider Foundation is fighting this in court and in front of the Coastal Commission.

[00:11:38]Their argument is straightforward.

[00:11:40]Armoring works in the short term and makes erosion worse in the long term because the rocks reflect wave energy outward and tear up the beaches on either side. There's a quote from Surfrider's filing that I think about a lot. They wrote in essence, "Alternative modes of transportation exist.

[00:11:56]Alternative beaches do not." That's the trade-off this entire stretch of coast is making in real time. The railroad is being saved, the beach is being lost.

[00:12:05]Both of those statements are simultaneously true and the people who live in San Clemente and the surfers who come from everywhere to ride Trestles are watching the math happen on the sand. Visiting San Clemente right now is strange. The pier is busy, the downtown is charming, and then you walk down to the water and the shoreline is just rock. 6-ft tall boulders where there used to be sand. It looks like the aftermath of something because it is.

[00:12:31]Number four, Encinitas, San Diego County. Encinitas is roughly 25 mi north of downtown San Diego. The beaches are good, the town is the kind of relaxed surf village postcard that Southern California sells very effectively to the rest of the country. Coffee shops, yoga studios, people who actually surf in the morning before work. The bluffs above the beach are made of sandstone. They are tall, they are not stable. On August 2nd, 2019, a roughly 30-ft wide chunk of cliff at Grandview Beach in Encinitas gave way without warning. Three women, Elizabeth Cox who was at the beach celebrating her recovery from breast cancer along with her family members Anne Clave and Julie Davis, were killed when the sandstone came down. The lifeguard, according to the wrongful death suit that followed, had told the family it was safe to sit there. I want to stay here for a moment because this is the kind of detail that lists like this tend to skate past. Three people died on a sunny afternoon at a beach where you can park, walk down, and sit on a towel. The bluff did not give a warning. It did not crack first. It just came down. And in the years since, despite legislation, despite increased signage, despite ongoing federal funding for a sand replenishment project that's been authorized since 2016, there have been more collapses at nearby beaches.

[00:13:46]There was a major one at Grandview on May 29th, 2021. There have been others.

[00:13:52]The mechanics of why it keeps happening are not mysterious. Decades of urban development on top of the bluffs added irrigation, sprinkler systems, non-native plants that need a lot of water. All that water seeps down through the sandstone, weakens it, and gravity does the rest. The city has known this for a long time. The Encinitas-Solana Beach Coastal Storm Damage Reduction Project, five-year sand renourishment cycles meant to absorb wave energy before it hits the bluff base, finally began deliveries in 2024 after years of delay. Here's the thing about Encinitas, though. The beaches are still open.

[00:14:26]People still sit at the bluff bottoms.

[00:14:28]Lifeguards still post warning signs, and most people still walk past them. The signs are unambiguous. People go to the beach to enjoy the beach, not to read warnings about geological instability.

[00:14:39]And the bluffs keep doing what bluffs do. If you visit Encinitas, and you should, it's a great town, read the signs. Stay away from the cliff base.

[00:14:47]The math on which sections will fail next is not predictable, and it does not care who you are. Number three, Half Moon Bay and Miramar, San Mateo County.

[00:14:57]Half Moon Bay is the small coastal town about 30 minutes south of San Francisco on Highway 1. Pumpkin Festival in October, Maverick's Surf Competition offshore, a historic downtown that hasn't been overdeveloped, genuinely lovely. Just north of Half Moon Bay's downtown, along Mirada Road in the Miramar neighborhood, is a residential stretch that has been at the center of one of the most consequential coastal lawsuits in California history. In 2016, a winter storm took out about 20 ft of coastal bluff at the end of Mirada Road.

[00:15:26]Homes were threatened. The Casa Mira Homeowners Association, which represents a 10 townhouse condominium complex built in 1984, applied for permission to build a 257-ft concrete seawall to protect their properties, plus a sewer line, an older apartment building, and a segment of the California Coastal Trail. The California Coastal Commission said no, or rather they said yes to a 50-ft wall to protect the 1972 apartment building and the coastal trail, but no to the rest because the 1984 condos and the sewer line were built after the Coastal Act of 1977, meaning under the state's reading of the law, they aren't entitled to mandatory seawall protection. The homeowners sued. Local court ruled for them. The Coastal Commission appealed.

[00:16:10]In December 2024, the appeals court sided with the commission. In 2025, the California Supreme Court declined to review, letting the decision stand. This is not a minor case. This is the legal foundation that determines what happens to thousands of California coastal homes built after 1977, which is to say, the vast majority of recent coastal development. If your house went up after the Coastal Act, the state has now established that you do not automatically have the right to armor the shoreline to protect it. The plain English version, the bluff is going to keep eroding. The condos at the end of Mirada Road sit on top of it. The state has told them they cannot wall off the ocean. The road itself, Mirada Road, has been damaged by storm waves repeatedly.

[00:16:52]It was reduced to one-way traffic in March 2024 because the rock revetment underneath it failed. The pedestrian bridge across Arroyo de en Medio was closed as unsafe in 2020 and didn't reopen until late 2023. If you drive Highway 1 through Half Moon Bay on a clear weekend, it looks like paradise.

[00:17:09]If you walk down Mirada Road and look at the bluff edge, you can see the future of California coastal property law standing on a sandstone cliff that is actively coming apart, every coastal homeowner in the state should know about this case. Most don't. Number two, Imperial Beach, San Diego County.

[00:17:25]Imperial Beach is a small working-class coastal city of about 26,000 people pressed up against the US-Mexico border at the southernmost tip of California.

[00:17:34]It is, by almost every published metric, the most flood-vulnerable city in the state. In December 2015, a strong El Niño-driven swell combined with a king tide and slammed into Seacoast Drive, the residential street that runs directly along the beach. Water washed completely over the riprap meant to protect the homes. Garages flooded, living rooms flooded. The pattern repeated in 2019 and again during high tide events that don't even require a storm. Mayor Paloma Aguirre has been blunt in interviews. Imperial Beach is surrounded by water on three sides, the Pacific to the west, San Diego Bay to the north, the Tijuana Estuary to the south, and there isn't really a high ground option. Here is the part that makes Imperial Beach genuinely different from anywhere else on this list. The flooding doesn't only come from the ocean, it also comes from underneath the city. Picture this, a clean, dry afternoon. You're standing on a street in Imperial Beach, maybe a half mile from the actual beach. You lift up a storm drain cover. The drain is supposed to be empty. It's not. There's water sitting 6 in below street level on a sunny day. That water is the Pacific Ocean pushed up under the town through the rising water table. As sea levels rise, heavy salt water forces the fresh water table up. The fresh water finds the storm drain system. The storm drains are old. They have cracks. The cracks let water in. So, when rain finally does come, the drains can't accept it because they're already half full of sea water that snuck in from below. The water has nowhere to go but onto the streets. This is happening now, not in 2050, not in 2100. Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography have called Imperial Beach a canary in a coal mine. Not because it's an obscure scientific curiosity, but because every other coastal city in California is going to face this exact problem on a longer time horizon. What makes Imperial Beach number two on this list isn't that it's the most physically threatened place in California, it's that the people who live there are on average less able to absorb the cost than people in most other coastal towns. This is a working-class community next to a border. Property values are lower, flood insurance is harder to afford, the city's tax base is smaller than its neighbors in the wealthier parts of San Diego County, and the problem is happening to them first, not because they did anything wrong, but because of where the geography put them. Imperial Beach is a glimpse of what the next 20 years look like applied to the people least equipped to fight it. The mayor knows this. The city is doing what it can. Scripps installed a flood alert sensor network in 2018, the first city in California to get one, but sensors detect water, they don't stop it. Number one, Rancho Palos Verdes, Los Angeles County. Here we go. Rancho Palos Verdes is not a working-class town. It is one of the wealthiest cities in California.

[00:20:26]Clifftop ocean views over the Pacific, multi-million-dollar homes, a famous horseback riding community, the kind of place where the city council debates landscape ordinances, and the average household income makes most of the country look poor. It is also, as of right now, the most actively, visibly disintegrating piece of coastal real estate in the United States. In 2024, NASA's UAVSAR airborne radar instrument mapped the slow-motion landslide complex on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Between September 18th and October 17th of that year, a four-week window, the land in the residential area slid toward the ocean by an average of about 4 in per week, not per year, per week. In some zones during peak movement, the rate hit a foot per week. The geology has been there for decades. The Portuguese Bend landslide, the largest of the slide complexes, has been moving slowly since the 1950s. What changed is water. Two consecutive winters of record-breaking rainfall in Southern California in 2023 and 2024 saturated the clay layers underneath the peninsula and turned them into a lubricant. Houses started moving, roads buckled, gas lines were cut for safety, electric service had to be shut off in entire neighborhoods because the landlines couldn't keep up with the ground motion. The iconic Wayfarers Chapel, a glass church designed in 1949 by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had been a Southern California landmark for three quarters of a century, was carefully disassembled in 2024 piece by piece to be reconstructed somewhere stable. There's nothing more on the nose than that. A church built to celebrate the natural setting was taken apart to escape it.

[00:22:02]Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in September 2024. FEMA and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services launched a $42 million buyout program. Roughly 85 homeowners applied. The city anticipates being able to actually offer buyouts for about 23 properties. The rest are still there, on land that is, in a literal physical sense, leaving. The city of Rancho Palos Verdes has spent $48 million on landslide work from October 2022 through June 2025. Another 18 and a half million is budgeted for this fiscal year alone. The total city budget is around $40 million annually. Let that math sit for a second. The landslide is costing the city more than its entire annual budget, and the city is paying for it because nobody else will. The geologists report that since the slide was reactivated in the 1950s, more than 5.8 million cubic yards of sediment have been deposited into the Pacific Ocean from this single peninsula, enough to to over 200,000 football fields. That's the dirt that used to be the ground under people's houses. Here is why Rancho Palos Verdes is number one and not anywhere else on this list. The people who live there are on paper in the best possible position to fight back. The city is wealthy, the state is invested, NASA is monitoring from orbit, FEMA is writing checks, engineers are drilling dewatering wells around the clock and pumping out hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater. The full weight of American institutional capacity is being brought to bear on this specific square mile of California coastline, and the land is still moving. It has slowed since late 2024 because of the dewatering, but it has not stopped. The experts who study it say it cannot be stopped, only managed. This is the thing. Imperial Beach is on this list because a poor community is being hit first. Rancho Palos Verdes is on this list because money, government, science, and federal resources together cannot beat the underlying physics. If you wanted a single image to summarize the future of the California coast, it is a hundred million-dollar home in Portuguese Bend with a generator on the lawn, solar panels on the roof, and the floor slowly tilting toward the Pacific because the clay layer 600 feet down is wet. A Zillow listing in the slide zone right now describes the home as being offered for a fraction of its pre-movement value. That phrasing is real. That phrasing exists. What ties all nine of these places together isn't the ocean. The ocean is doing what oceans have done forever. What ties them together is that in every single case, the warning signs were there. In some cases, for decades. And the response, the political will, the funding, the willingness to make hard decisions about which neighborhoods to defend and which to relocate, has been slower than the geology, always. Three things actually help if you're buying, renting, or vacationing on the California coast.

[00:24:48]First, look up the address on FEMA's flood map before you do anything else.

[00:24:52]It's free, it takes 5 minutes. Second, ask specifically about post-1977 construction and seawall rights because after the Casa Mira ruling, that distinction now controls billions of dollars of California property. Third, when you see a warning sign at the bluff base, read it. The signs are there because something already happened. Drop a comment if you live in one of these places and I missed something. Local knowledge wins.