MOBILE HOMES : Owners of about 30 Portuguese Bend homes find they must ‘adjust’ them for tilting every few years. Some have moved hundreds of feet.
The garage of Esther Tucker’s home on the Palos Verdes Peninsula leans to one side ever so gently. The slant is just enough to give one a slightly woozy feeling.
“Sometimes I feel a little tilted and dizzy when I go in here,” the retired schoolteacher said cheerfully.
Inside her home, in the hillside neighborhood of Portuguese Bend, Tucker pushed her toe at a new ripple in the floor under her bedroom carpet. “There’s some kind of buckling here,” she said nonchalantly.
Down the hallway, she pointed up to a bulging crack over the door of her den. “I didn’t notice this place out in the hall probably for two weeks,” she said. “It’s gotten worse.”
This kind of nasty surprise would send most homeowners into a tizzy but Tucker takes it in stride.
It is just more evidence that her house continues its long and relentless slide downhill. In the 35 years she has lived in the home it has traveled more than 400 feet from its original location.
Welcome to Portuguese Bend, where houses, gardens, trees, telephone poles and streets are on the move, atop what has been called a slowly creeping land glacier.
And the residents don’t mind it a bit.
One homeowner, for example, bought a house because of a handsome pine tree gracing the front door. But now the house is running into the tree and his wife won’t let him cut it down. “I’ll just have to move the house back,” he said with a grin.
Tucker and 29 neighbors live on a slope several hundred yards west of the most active part of the landslide. Still, their homes are slowly moving downhill.
In what may be the record, two houses have slid 600 feet from their original locations. And Palos Verdes Drive, a main peninsula thoroughfare, once ran south of the two houses, but when the movement of the land dangerously distorted the roadway, the city realigned it north of the homes several years ago.
And, like so many other lots, these properties, which were once flat, now undulate in a series of mounds and moguls that, if snow covered, would challenge the most accomplished skier. Elsewhere there are even more dramatic examples of where the plastic earth crust has backed up over protrusions of hard bedrock and been lifted 20 feet. In other spots, it has slumped into swimming pool-size depressions.
Dr. Perry Ehlig, the unpaid geologist of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, in which the neighborhood is located, said the area was already unstable when, in 1956, Los Angeles County began to complete the southern end of Crenshaw Boulevard nearby. The construction triggered the landslide.
As Esther Tucker remembered, “We were sitting at lunch and we heard this big noise that sounded like a waterfall of dirt and we saw a big puff of dust.”
The torrent of earth was followed by a chorus of complaints from homeowners living downhill from the construction site. They began to notice the concrete foundations of their homes gradually cracking.
Then they watched helplessly as the framework of their homes began to pull apart.
Eventually, about half of the 60 homes in the immediate area were either bulldozed or moved out of the landslide zone, which covers about 300 acres.
“(The whole experience) was emotionally draining. We were in a state of shock,” recalled resident Donald Fraser. “We thought we had completely lost our home.”
Several years later he joined a number of his neighbors who sued the county and won 90% of the 1956 value of their property. Most homeowners took the money and moved elsewhere. Others, such as Fraser, chose to stay.
What remains today is a feisty, independent community that has banded together to maintain their homes on slowly sinking ground.
The first thing the remaining homeowners did was to detach their houses from their foundations. Then, just as when a home is moved, the houses were placed on horizontal steel I beams that rest on railroad tie cribbing.
Every few years, as the earth gradually sinks and these supports shift, they must be jacked up and additional ties are inserted to level the homes once again. The residents call this process “adjusting the house.”
Resident Daphne Clarke conservatively estimated that this would have cost $100,000 through the years, if done by professional house movers, but like so many of her neighbors she and her husband did the work themselves using a tractor and a winch.
“Anybody can do it,” Clarke said gleefully in a brisk English accent. “It’s just believing you can do it.
“If you have a problem with your house,” she added, “everyone has equipment. If you need to borrow welding tools, somebody has them and will help you.
“When the man next door bought his house, it was too close to the edge of a cliff,” Clarke said, illustrating the can-do spirit of the neighborhood. “So one weekend all of us got together and using a truck and a winch we moved the house back on rollers. It took just one weekend to move the house at very little cost.”
By now, looking around for inexpensive used steel, tools and fittings has become second nature for Clarke. “Like I picked up a washer and bolt beside the road the other day,” she said, “I thought that it would come in useful. Or you see a great steel place in Wilmington and you tell your neighbors.”
Everyone has his own variation on the basic house support system, but Bob MacJones has perhaps devised the most ambitious one.
A delightful garden surrounds the front of the charming wood-frame structure. Inside, a tasteful selection of antique and modern furniture is displayed on polished wood floors dotted with Persian-style rugs. Outside, the flat roof is capped with a quirky glass cupola topped with a lead wind vane in the shape of an old-fashioned biplane.
The house appears normal until you look under it. On a site that has been scooped from the side of a slope, the home rests atop three 40-foot-long shipping containers welded together corner to corner to form a triangular base. These containers, which double as both foundation and a “basement” used for storage and a hobby electronics lab, delicately rest on three sets of railroad tie cribbing.
“If the house sits on three points, it won’t wobble,” MacJones, an engineer, explained confidently.
When he bought the property in 1976 it was in a shambles. The first thing he did was “cut loose” the garage, which has since drifted three feet from the main house. Then he rehabbed the structure from floor to ceiling, a job that took 1 1/2 years.
“When I was rebuilding the place, people thought I had lost my marbles,” recalled the tall, patrician resident who recently turned 70. “But I love to build things and weld. It was a total joy.”
“Bob likes challenges,” said his wife, Norma Jean, looking up from some note writing at her dining room table. “He’s not happy unless he’s building something. This was his cup of tea.”
MacJones last “adjusted” his house seven years ago and it is due for another realignment. The home is now about four inches off the vertical, although there is no noticeable tilt.
Said Daphne Clarke: “You know it’s time to adjust the house when one end of a full tub is deeper than the other; when a cake I’m baking is thicker on one side, when I drop something and it rolls to one side of the room.”
Donald Fraser, who lives near MacJones, takes the slipping and sliding as a matter of course. “The best way to describe this place,” he said in his soft South Carolina drawl, “is funky, what with the landslide and all.”
The retired insurance executive said people either love the neighborhood or hate it. There are no tepid reactions to it.
Fraser has two jagged, angry-looking cracks in the plaster of his living room walls that he blithely ignores. He has confidence in his support system: the two-bedroom home is daringly cantilevered atop two massive adobe “blocks” that are 6 feet high and 20 feet long.
“This house is a big mobile home,” Fraser chuckled. “I didn’t plan it to be one but that’s how it turned out.”
Because of the earth movement, real estate activity in the neighborhood is very slow.
Sharon Hegetschweiler, a broker with Palos Verdes Remax who specializes in the area, recently closed escrow on the first house to be sold there in five years.
The 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom house on Limetree Lane was sold for $225,000 to tenants who had lived in the home for several years.
Hegetschweiler said the house is on steel supports but is structurally sound. She added that aside from minor repairs to the plaster around some of the windows and updating the kitchen and two bathrooms of the 40-year-old house, it needs no major renovation.
Since some homes in the area have shifted several hundred feet since the landslide began more than 35 years ago, Hegetschweiler said that property surveys are a waste of time. She said the buyers know “approximately” what they are getting and the “operative word here is approximate,” she said. “Only when the landslide stops is it worth hiring a surveyor. And when the property stops moving they’ll have to accept where it ends up.”
But Hegetschweiler said another part of Portuguese Bend called Abalone Cove has not moved in eight years and the city geologist does not expect it to slide any farther. Because of the neighborhood’s current geologic stability, home prices there hover in the “high six figures.”
Ehlig, the city geologist, is confident that the landslide can be stopped. It has been dramatically slowed by the removal of tons of earth at the head of the slide.
In addition, more than two dozen wells have been placed in the area to remove the ground water that liquefies a mineral called bentonite that when moist “lubricates” the slide.
The city also plans to install above-ground sewer lines to replace the septic systems of area homes, which local officials believe add to the underground water table.
But residents like Bob MacJones, who wishes the city “would get off our backs,” contends the sewer lines would be difficult to maintain and, at $3 million, they are too expensive to build. He and others favor the installation of additional dewatering wells, which he says are effective and less costly.
Meanwhile, neighborhood residents go on with their day-to-day lives, enjoying what one called “a poor man’s paradise,” an island of ordinary, middle-class life in a sea of Palos Verdes Peninsula wealth.
“We’re not glitzy people,” observed Nancy Biele, another resident. “We’re just the types who throw on a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and sit on the porch and drink lemonade.”
“If you want to flaunt your money you’ll have to go somewhere else,” added her husband Mike, who sells doors and windows.
Still, it takes a certain kind of person to live there. One must be flexible and comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. Don Fraser said it takes someone with a sense of adventure, and Daphne Clarke added one must be an independent, self-reliant soul to live there.
It also helps to be an engineer. Clarke, who is married to one, said it is not a coincidence that so many live in the neighborhood. “If something is broken, most people would say, ‘What a pity,’ ” she said, “but an engineer would say, ‘It would only take such and such to fix it.’ ”
Above all, Clarke relishes the tranquillity of the place. “It’s like an English country village,” said the 16-year resident.
“It’s so quiet here you can hear a leaf fall,” said Tucker, the retired schoolteacher, quipping, “I’d rather have six cracks in my house than six neighbors.”
Like Tucker, the residents take their property problems with good humor.
Said Clarke: “A lot of people ask me if I worry about my house when I go away on the weekend, and I say I tie it to the nearest tree and expect it to be there when I get back.”
