Condos Teeter on Sunset Cliffs as Owners Battle Time and Tide

In Casa de la Playa’s shrinking back yard, a trail down to the beach is now off limits. Ball playing is forbidden. So is badminton.

So is everything, for that matter, except sunbathing, reading and talking. And they could go next.

“We don’t want anything we do up here to shake the dirt out of the cliff,” explained Bob Conn, manager of the 24-unit condominium complex.

Casa de la Playa sits at the foot of Pescadero Avenue, on the front line of a seemingly endless battle between Sunset Cliffs and the sea.

The scenic Ocean Beach bluffs, in their slow but inexorable journey east by way of erosion, have swallowed cars, homes--even the lives of children and adults innocently enjoying the view or exploring the caves that extend inland from the sea beneath streets and houses.

Over the decades, the cliffs have cost property owners, the city of San Diego and the state millions of dollars in what has been at best a stalemate with the surf. And more than a few neighborly relationships have been strained or shattered by issues as grand as aesthetics and public beach access and as mundane as assessment price tags.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first proposed an extensive plan to shore up Sunset Cliffs in the 1960s, but red tape and community protests delayed implementation until after two natural disasters.

1,500 Tons of Dirt Rocked Away

The first, a 1968 earthquake, sucked 1,500 tons of dirt from a 200-foot section of the bluffs and left Sunset Cliffs Boulevard on the edge. The next year, waterlogged cliffs slid into the sea--taking 40 feet of Del Monte Avenue and a 12-unit apartment building with them.

Thus prodded, the $2.8-million cliff protection project--financed with city, state and federal money--got under way. The 1.1-mile defensive patchwork of concrete barriers, giant boulders and landscaping was finally completed in 1982, and state and local officials say the work has stemmed the tide’s wrath at all but a few locations.

In one spot the construction project missed, a stretch of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard between Adair and Ladera streets, the city has just replaced a guard rail twice punctured by rolling buses. The new railing, dotted with signs proclaiming “False Trail,” “Unstable Cliffs” and “Warning,” cedes new territory in several parking lots that have continued to crumble.

Elsewhere in the county, bluff slides have left public beach stairways dangling in midair in Encinitas and Leucadia, said Deborah Lee, assistant district director of the state Coastal Commission in San Diego. Many of North County’s beaches have lost ground to the sea--in part because rivers carrying sand have been dammed and in part, ironically, because walls and other defensive structures have prevented bluffs from deteriorating and adding sand to the beach.

Bluff dwellers in Solana Beach, Leucadia and Encinitas have been particularly troubled by erosion. But, in the past few years, Lee said, most of these have been successfully addressed with city-financed projects to control the seepage of ground water, which weakens the cliffs, and through the construction of property-length seawalls by individual homeowners.

“The sustaining walls are working fairly well,” Lee said.

But officials agree that the most serious gap in erosion protection anywhere in the county is at the foot of Pescadero Avenue in Ocean Beach.

“That’s a dicey situation,” City Engineer Robert Cain said of Casa de la Playa. “It’s getting worse and worse. That whole thing could go tomorrow or last another five years. I’d say five years is the maximum.”

Lee agreed and added that the severity of the erosion along the scenic stretch had been underestimated until recently.

“Now the city is having funding problems, and there isn’t money for (a restoration project),” she said.

Beset by Nature, Humans

As for Casa de la Playa, the $5-million condominium--which Cain calls the most precarious structure on San Diego’s coastline--is beset by human disagreements while nature steadily closes in.

“Something should be done right away, but no one wants to be the one to spend the money,” said Conn, the condominium’s manager. “The attitude is, ‘If we don’t think about it, maybe it will go away.’ It’s so bad, it makes me sick.”

Gordon Cornell, a retired Navy pilot who has lived in Casa de la Playa for four years, realizes what’s going on but says he is powerless to do anything about it.

“I don’t know what to do,” Cornell said. “We’ll probably break the law. Or I guess we could wait until something happens, and then sue the city for the cost of the land.”

Cornell, who until recently headed the Casa de la Playa homeowners association and who remains its point man on erosion, lists a handful of problems to illustrate the homeowners’ plight:

- The edge of the cliff is as little as 10 feet away from the building in one area, and the crumbly ledge has lost several feet in the past few years alone.

- The giant shoring-up project of 1982 stopped one block north of Pescadero.

- The city considers erosion a property owner’s problem and won’t pay for control measures.

- Groups like the Committee to Save Sunset Cliffs, which in the past has opposed many projects on aesthetic grounds, may fight a restoration project.

- Several government agencies must approve studies totaling about $30,000 before construction of protective structures could begin, a sum that many condominium owners are unwilling to pay without obtaining any immediate protection in return. The work itself could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Cain said the ceaseless battering of the surf, plus the natural forces of gravity, are teaming up against Sunset Cliffs, gradually eating away at the bluffs.

“Any time you have something vertical, the force of gravity is working to take that hillside down,” Cain said. “It doesn’t take a tremor of 7 on the Richter scale to bring it down. . . . Everything is working to bring it down, and one good storm could do irreparable damage.”

If cracks develop in the walls and floors, Cain said, “we might condemn it. . . . You can put in very expensive concrete beams and piles, and the building will still sink.”

Meanwhile, Pescadero Avenue itself is in full-fledged retreat, with the fence at its bluff-top dead-end moving uphill about a foot a year.

That’s a sore point with Cornell and his allies, including fellow condominium owner and real estate agent Mary Snell.

Cain “keeps moving the fence back and moving it back. It’s kind of touchy: the city has to do something about the street,” Snell said.

Trying to Get City’s Help

Cornell said he has been trying to get the city to shore up the cliff at the end of Pescadero for years. “I’m not asking for a free ride, I am asking the city to come and do something about the end of the street, and we’ll tack onto it ourselves,” Cornell said.

If the city starts building a seawall, Cornell said, he can talk the homeowners into expanding it along the beach by their condominiums.

“The street is part of the problem, and it’s public property, and the beach is public property, but I can’t get Cain to move,” Cornell said. “It’s like trying to move a bowling ball that’s been broken in half.”

Cain said the city would be willing to share costs for that part of a retaining wall that extends in front of the street. But, he says, it is the homeowners’ responsibility to come up with the construction plan.

‘Not a High Priority’

Pescadero Avenue is “about as dead-end as you can get,” he noted. “The only thing served is that apartment building. I’ve made the decision that it’s not a high priority for the city.”

In any case, before the first brick in any seawall gets laid, the condominium owners must commission a series of studies on the project for city as well as state and federal agencies that review construction along the shoreline.

Louis Lee, a consultant who has done several studies of the Sunset Cliffs erosion, said winning approval for construction projects there is perhaps tougher than on any other stretch of California coastline.

The city of San Diego is going to take over the issuing of coastal permits from the California Coastal Commission in October in order to streamline the process, but it really might slow everything down because of the city’s lack of staff and expertise, said Lee, vice president of Woodward-Clyde Consultants.

At least one regulatory agency, the coastal commission, has often been an obstacle to major cliffside work. Commission planner Adam Birnbaum said the agency attempts “to minimize shoring up along the coastline” because such structures can interfere with public beach access and are visually offensive to some.

“We have to decide whether it’s that extreme a situation,” Birnbaum said. “We have a priority to provide coastal access.”

Nonetheless, vertical seawalls are generally preferable to riprap, the large rocks placed at the foot of cliffs, and may be more likely to win the commission’s approval, state officials said. The perfect solution for all sides, they noted, would simply be having more sand on the beach. But logistics and cost make such an effort unlikely.

At this point, Cornell said he isn’t convinced that the studies are worth the money. “The people who live here don’t believe they should spend $1,000 each to tell the city what they should do about the end of their street.

“If I’m going to spend 30 grand, it’s going to be to put something in front of our property,” he said.

Cain suggested that Cornell could take a political approach to the problem by meeting with City Councilman Ron Roberts, whose district encompasses Sunset Cliffs. But Roberts said that he has not yet seen a reason to overrule Cain on the issue.

High as $500,000 Assuming all the studies pass muster with state and federal regulators, somebody still has to pay for the construction project. That tab could run as high as $500,000, Cain said, with surf walls costing $2,000 a foot.

“I don’t know how far the wall would have to go to be stable. It might have to go north beyond the building,” Cain said. “It could be double or even triple the length of the complex.”

Cornell said the homeowners will pay their share, when and if anything gets done. But, after four years of the runaround, everything remains at a standstill, he said.

Everything, that is, except Casa de la Playa’s $9,000 anti-erosion fund, which grows with $20 from each unit every month.

And the ocean. And the cliff.