This winter, for the first time in a quarter century, California was drought free—but not everyone was thrilled. On the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, where some seventy-seven thousand live atop rugged coastal bluffs and steep hills, the near-biblical rains that have inundated the region in recent years pose an existential threat. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the peninsula is some of the most coveted real estate in Southern California. It contains the wealthiest suburb in Los Angeles, with an average household income of $367,000. There are sprawling mansions, winding horse trails, six golf courses, and private clubs boasting initiation fees as high as $300,000. At the luxury Terranea Resort, rooms rent for $700 a night and, were you to stroll the grounds as I did one Saturday afternoon this past January, you might encounter a shareholders meeting for a union-busting law firm with clients like Starbucks and Amazon. From the smoggy flatlands, the peninsula can seem like paradise, but there’s a big problem underfoot, one poised to worsen as the climate grows more volatile: Its terrain is underlain by layers of bentonite clay that, when wet, enable entire masses of earth to separate and slide from the more stable ground beneath. Combine this with cliffside erosion from ocean waves and the fact that the peninsula sits on several active fault lines, and you get landslides. (Here, landslide refers both to the slow-moving but consistent shifting of the earth and to catastrophic episodes of accelerated movement.) The problem has plagued the peninsula for hundreds of thousands of years, but when combined with more recent development in especially hazardous areas and the increasing power of storms, it has grown demonstrably worse—and more costly. This became undeniable between 2022 and 2024, when record-breaking rainfall—the most intense since the late 1800s—accelerated movement to levels not seen in decades, overturning a period of relative stability sustained by prolonged drought and sending twelve homes into a canyon in one part of the peninsula and leaving hundreds of residents indefinitely without power in another. Those that call the Palos Verdes Peninsula home now find themselves approaching a crossroads: Will they double down on costly, ineffective measures to stabilize the land and protect private property, or is a wholesale retreat from paradise in order? Either way, who is going to pay for it? The debate highlights some of the more intractable problems we face when it comes to adapting to climate change. Over a century ago, East Coast financier Frank A. Vanderlip set out to turn the Palos Verdes Peninsula into the nation’s most rarefied residential enclave. At that time, few were aware of the ground’s geological instability. Unburdened by such inconvenient knowledge, Vanderlip pressed ahead with his vision to divide the land that reminded him, as he wrote in From Farm Boy to Financier, “vividly of the Sorrentine Peninsula and the Amalfi Drive” into one hundred-acre parcels containing extraordinary Mediterranean-style estates with tennis courts, swimming pools, and polo grounds. He wanted a country club with a golf course and a yacht club. He hired the Olmsted Brothers, of Central Park fame, to design the community. These were to be private residences, staffed by caretakers and farm workers, designed for periodic or extended stays by members of a tight social circle whose wealth was rooted in eastern capital. By December 1925, roads had been carved, hundreds of thousands of trees planted, boulevards laid out, and a clubhouse erected. Sixty-five percent of available lots had been sold. The Great Depression prevented Vanderlip’s grandiose plan from being fully realized, but developers in the postwar years carried forward the spirit of his ambitions. This second phase brought denser, subdivision-style neighborhoods to the area. Trouble surfaced, however, in 1956 when road construction began to accommodate new residents and connect the functionally isolated peninsula to Los Angeles. As work progressed, cracks in homes and buckling along roads began to appear, signaling land movement. Within two years, the land lurched forty feet toward the sea and dropped ten feet vertically, destroying more than one hundred homes and damaging another fifty, many within the Portuguese Bend Beach Club, a private gated community opened just eight years earlier by Vanderlip’s son. There, hillside cottages and a clubhouse once abuzz with galas were crushed like matchsticks as ground from higher up broke loose onto them. Engineers tried to stabilize the landslide by installing twenty-three large steel-reinforced caisson shear pins deep into the bedrock (think nailing down a book sliding off a table), which only briefly slowed movement before it failed and the slide resumed, carrying some of the caissons down to shore. Angry homeowners filed suit against Los Angeles County over the damage, in the process uncovering a government-commissioned study of California’s oil-bearing regions from 1946 that documented “an extensive landslide area” on the peninsula twenty years earlier. In the end, the court found that the county had failed to warn residents of the risk, resulting in a $9.5 million settlement. The 1956 landslide and resulting legal battle should have provoked serious debate about the wisdom of suburbanizing the peninsula, but the event was largely treated as an anomaly. Development exploded, along with the population: Between 1953 and 1967, it grew 730 percent. But of course, the land didn’t stop moving. Following severe rainfall, major landslides occurred in 1974, 1978, and 1987, mostly affecting Rancho Palos Verdes, the densest of the peninsula’s four municipalities and home to roughly half of its residents. In 1985, the city launched an ambitious engineering effort to halt the Portuguese Bend landslide area, the most active of all. The strategy involved an elaborate system to drain a lake’s worth of water from the mountain, extensive reshaping of the land, and the construction of a massive retaining wall. The price tag? Up to $40 million ($122 million in today’s dollars), a considerable sum given the city’s modest $5.94 million budget and the uncertain science behind such remediation efforts. “You’re talking big bucks there,” Charles Abbott, the city’s public works director, told the Los Angeles Times. He was unconvinced the effort would succeed—as were many residents. “I don’t think there’s a . . . chance in hell they can do it,” said Robert Smolley, a mechanical engineer who lived in the area at the time. But simply doing nothing was never an option, not on a stretch of coastline that valuable: Vacant lots less than a mile from the active landslide area were selling for between $175,000 and $400,000 (roughly $537,000 to $1.2 million today). Indeed, one of the project’s explicit aims was to, as the Los Angeles Timesreported, “return about 500 acres of land to economic viability in an area with some of the most expensive real estate in the country.” Then—as now—Rancho Palos Verdes operated on a shoestring budget, relying primarily on property taxes, and so had a vested interest in preserving the value of private property. But both the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978—which sharply reduced the city’s primary revenue source—and other landslides that decade had severely strained its finances. So to fund the remediation project, the city relied on grant money and its cash reserves. It also created a redevelopment agency that would redirect future property taxes toward the project, as well as future feasibility studies and capital needs beyond it. Despite all the city’s efforts, the project never produced a permanent fix. Phase I, which entailed the installation of some twenty-five dewatering wells, slowed movement to less than one foot over the first five years. Phase II, undertaken in 1988, showed promise, but as the infrastructure of the first phase aged, movement again began to increase. Phase III—completed in 1990 and involving the relocation of sixty thousand cubic yards of soil to form a temporary embankment on the shoreline—proved similarly temporary: Heavy rainfall in 1995 accelerated movement, and within fifteen years the embankment had disappeared. Only three of the original wells remained operational. Another stabilization effort in the late 1990s—involving additional dewatering wells, piping systems, and mass regrading—took place, and although some measures temporarily slowed the slide, by 2005 the ground was moving at the same rate as before 1984, underscoring the failure of these efforts. A 2018 study proposed yet another phased program, with $33 million in capital costs. Advanced planning and environmental review for the project proceeded over the next four years, while the city pursued grants and lobbied local, state, and federal officials for support. Officials gave tours of the landslide area to Senator Ben Allen and a representative from Senator Diane Feinstein’s office in 2021, and that same year requested the full project cost from President Joe Biden through the recently introduced Inflation Reduction Act. But the funding never materialized. Drought conditions in California during that time appear to have reduced the urgency of the landslide threat. But this ended abruptly in 2022 when a particularly aggressive storm season accelerated the pace of movement to about a foot a week in some places. Nine atmospheric rivers crossed California in just three weeks that December, the longest stretch on record. More storms followed. By April, residents in Rolling Hills Estates, located in the central interior of the peninsula, began noticing hairline fractures in their homes. Within months, twelve homes had slid into a canyon. Accelerating land movement spread across the peninsula, reaching Rancho Palos Verdes by the summer, where nearly three hundred homes were affected in and around the Portuguese Bend neighborhood. Gas service was lost first, followed by electricity a month later, after shifting ground brought down a power line and sparked a fire, prompting utility providers to deem continued service too dangerous. More than a year later, power has returned in patches, but 174 homes remain dark and only twenty-two homes have had their gas restored. Last spring, SoCalEdison said in a statement it would only consider restoring electricity once “movement is closer to pre-2023 levels.” But slowing that movement would depend on dewatering wells that require the very electricity being withheld. The Palos Verdes Peninsula seen from the air. | Wikimedia Commons/The Baffler Residents, meanwhile, are struggling to refrigerate food and medicine, keep the lights on, charge devices, and heat their homes. For fifty-two-year-old Steven Barker, life involves “taking cold showers, eating takeout and Crock-Pot meals and grappling with the impossible math of which investments—installing a large propane tank, converting gas-powered appliances, switching to solar panels—are feasible or even possible for a house on the edge of disaster,” as he told the Los Angeles Times. In effect, Portuguese Bend has become California’s largest off-grid community. Among the homes without utility service is Villa Narcissa, one of Vanderlip’s original estates, which sold for $10.5 million in 2020. The sprawling estate has breathtaking views of Catalina Island and includes a 7,700-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, ten guesthouses, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. But today it is not serviced by either Southern California Edison or the Southern California Gas Company. Instead, a fifty-six-kilowatt generator keeps the lights on and the refrigerators running. The irony is difficult to ignore. “It’s so Mickey Mouse, so substandard,” a structural assessor working on homes in the landslide zone told the Los Angeles Times in 2023, “You have a luxury community with world-class golf courses and amazing views of the ocean, but some homeowners are literally living in Third World conditions.” Politicians are quick to blame climate change for the peninsula’s woes—but while the storms of recent years were almost certainly intensified by a warming climate, the deeper problem is that we built there in the first place, despite evidence that the land was unstable. A Landslide Moratorium Ordinance has technically been on the books in Rancho Palos Verdes since 1978, when a landslide destroyed forty-five homes and the city council banned construction in an 1,100-acre area, including Portuguese Bend. But the law has been made all but toothless by carve outs and courts willing to side with property owners. Among the developers who sought out an exemption was Barry Hon, who had assembled three hundred acres within the moratorium zone with an eye toward building luxury condos and a golf course in the early 1990s. Hon was eventually granted an exemption by the city per the recommendation of the city’s geologist, Perry Ehlig, who told the Los Angeles Times that “the city probably doesn’t need a moratorium, per se, because its building code requirements are strict enough to prevent slide problems.” But just weeks before the project was set to open in June 1999, a massive landslide tore through the site. After a new developer spent more than $160 million on repairs, it succumbed to bankruptcy. The property was later acquired by Donald Trump and opened as Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in 2006. The courts further hollowed out the moratorium. In 2002, owners of sixteen vacant residential parcels filed suit in Monks v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes after the city denied them an exemption from the construction ban, arguing that the restrictions deprived them of any economically viable use of their property. The California Court of Appeal ruled in their favor, arguing that the city had failed to demonstrate sufficient imminent danger to justify the restrictions. Of the parcels allowed to be developed after the Monks ruling, three were red-tagged as unsafe following the 2023 landslides, while five Monks plaintiffs have applied for buyouts through FEMA’s $42 million voluntary program—which was launched in 2024 and is expected to buy out roughly twenty homes in Rancho Palos Verdes at 75 percent of their pre-disaster market value. Another $10 million arrived in February from FEMA. That initial outlay from the federal government for this program already exceeds the $31.79 million Los Angeles County has allocated to assist victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which displaced about 150,000 people (over three times the population of Rancho Palos Verdes) and caused between $95 billion and $164 billion in property and capital losses. For those displaced by the fires, aid is capped at $18,000 per household—while the buyout allocation for Rancho Palos Verdes works out to more than $2 million per home. (FEMA also distributed $154 million to over sixty-four thousand residents impacted by the fires.) In other words, homes that in many cases were knowingly built on hazardous land are now being bought out on the public’s dime. Meanwhile, in some areas, construction continues at a breakneck pace: Between 2018 and 2024, Rolling Hills Estates built more new housing per capita than any other jurisdiction in Los Angeles County, even as several townhomes in the area slipped into a canyon. Monks and other legal decisions since 1965 have left officials with few options. If the cities on the peninsula try to prevent development through building restrictions, property owners can argue that their land has been taken without compensation. But if the city allows development to proceed and additional homes are destroyed by landslides, legal precedent has been set that enables property owners to pursue inverse condemnation claims by arguing that municipal action or inaction contributed to the damage, allowing them to recover the market value of their homes. That is the legal argument now being made by sixteen homeowners whose properties were destroyed in the most recent landslides, including Connie and Derek Anderson, who bought their home in February 2023—only to have it red-tagged six months later. The suit, originally filed in 2024 against Rancho Palos Verdes, neighboring Rolling Hills, and other public agencies, argues that leaks, storm drains, and other infrastructure failures allowed excess water to seep into the hillside and accelerate the movement of the ancient landslide. In a press statement, attorney Terry Bailey said: The plaintiffs are demanding damages to be proven at trial. The premise here is that the disaster might have been avoided had those systems functioned better—but the notion that better drainage alone could have kept a geologically unstable hillside from becoming saturated during recent storms is difficult to take seriously. The case remains pending. The mounting costs of remediation, legal settlements, and buyouts on this waterfront tract of paradise reveal just how untenable the status quo has become. Beyond the federal government’s buyout program, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes has poured around $64 million into emergency response since early 2023, including dewatering wells ($4 million) and repairing part of Palos Verdes Drive South ($2.8 million)—a part of the road that’s costs between $700,000 to $2.5 million to maintain for the last five fiscal years. All of this has exceeded the city’s annual budget of around $40 million, with a significant share funded by dipping into reserves, drawing on federal Covid-19 relief funds, and deferring other planned capital projects like park improvements. By my estimate, total spending since 1985 has surpassed $200 million, though that figure is likely an undercount, as it does not account for the routine road repair, sewer fixes, monitoring, wells, or liability payouts. Councilmember David Bradley said last month the city had spent “well beyond [its] means,” after the council approved a $12.2 million match, more than a quarter of its annual budget, to compete for a recent $49 million federal grant. To fund the landslide remediation project, the city will need support from county, state, and federal grants. Officials are applying for every grant available, but accessing those funds requires significant local contributions. Mayor Paul Seo remains hopeful they will receive the needed support via grants, and he remains committed because, “the return that we’re going to get, if we do get it, is pretty large,” as he told the Daily Breeze. “It’s just doing the mental calculus of what we’re going to tighten in the next couple months, that’s going to be the brutal part. But I think we need to keep pursuing this and make sure that we put our foot on the gas to try to get some money back.” This comes after the city was awarded a $23 million federal grant in 2023 that was later reduced to $16 million. Meanwhile, the voluntary buyout dollars have yet to be allocated, and in 2024 the city applied for $37.8 million in federal funding that was denied on the grounds of “pre-existing instability,” rendering it ineligible. The local governments of the peninsula could—and probably should—mandate retreat through eminent domain, but the option is politically anathema. No politician has seriously proposed it, in part because doing so would be an acknowledgment that the area is no longer habitable, a message that runs counter to the interests of real estate developers, property owners, and officials seeking reelection. It would also theoretically require even bigger buyout programs at market rates that remain artificially high because the risks associated with building in hazardous landscapes have long been subsidized through disaster relief, infrastructure spending, and legal guarantees of compensation, effectively socializing the costs of risky private development decisions. In the end, whether the approach takes the form of managed retreat, unplanned retreat, or strict land-use regulation, the financial burden will inevitably fall on the public. Elsewhere, in communities facing climate disasters, insurance markets have played a decisive role in forcing retreat even without direct government intervention by raising premiums or pulling out of risky markets altogether. But here on the peninsula, insurance has no role to play. “Earth movement,” which includes landslides, has long been excluded from standard homeowner policies, meaning residents have long been living on land where the primary hazard has been uninsurable, producing a political economy of risk where there is an expectation that the state will step in. There are small signs of progress. In October 2023, local officials adopted an emergency moratorium banning new construction on vacant lots in the Portuguese Bend landslide area and made it permanent two years later, though how long such restrictions will survive ongoing legal challenges remains uncertain. As climate change intensifies storms and other extreme weather, we are forced to confront a difficult reality. The structure of U.S. property rights makes sensible climate policy extraordinarily difficult to carry out. Until that changes, our climate response will continue to effectively be a publicly funded safety net for some of the wealthiest property owners in the region, who frame their demands as requests for public assistance to protect homes, an argument that rings hollow in a county where more than seventy-two thousand people are unhoused, close to the all-time high. “There is light at the end of the tunnel,” the geologist Michael Phipps said in a 2024 interview, describing dewatering efforts that have only marginally slowed the slide. “We were going eighty-eight miles an hour on the freeway and now we’re decelerating and we’re only going eighty miles an hour now.” What ultimately binds the peninsula together is a deep-seated faith that prosperity makes possibility infinite, that with enough wealth and persistence and political leverage the limits of land, geology, and climate can be overcome. But faith is a slippery slope.

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