After the Fall, Still Paradise

It was just a dozen streets and a gas station jammed between the Pacific Ocean and a 600-foot hill.

But for Brad Lilley, La Conchita was the last affordable beach community on the Southern California coast and an opportunity to live a life he thought was obsolete.

It was the surf-shirt ideal of the ramshackle beach town, with banana trees, eccentrics and even a few “Woody” station wagons. Rincon’s famous point break was close by, and the monthly rent less than a weekend at a Santa Barbara hotel.

Those blessings, however, were inextricably tied to the big gamble looming over La Conchita: the hill. Its silty face had been slipping and crashing toward the ocean since prehistoric times. It was the reason, in fact, that paradise could be had on the cheap.

On Jan. 10, the hill collapsed for the second time in a decade, burying the heart of La Conchita in more than 400,000 tons of mud and killing 10 people, all of them friends of Lilley’s.

And yet today, Lilley, 41, is feverishly house hunting in La Conchita. After living here off and on for six years, he has realized that this is where he and his wife and children belong -- permanently. He wants to buy before people recalibrate their sense of risk and drive housing prices beyond his means.

“I don’t want to profit from tragedy,” said Lilley, a rock radio DJ in Santa Barbara and lifetime surfer. “Those were friends of mine who lost their lives. But if I’m going to get a place cheaper than [at] any other time -- and in a place I love more than anywhere else -- then so be it.”

Lilley is just one of scores of survivors, homeowners and newcomers who are more than willing to gamble again on this bad-luck patch of unincorporated Ventura County land near the Santa Barbara County line.

What may seem madness from a distance has its own stoic logic in La Conchita, where today’s spectacular sunset is outdone only by tomorrow’s.

Cross the border into California, and you’re a gambler by definition -- wagering that the long geological and meteorological cycles that bring earthquakes, floods, slides and fires don’t intersect with one lifetime, or a 30-year mortgage.

In La Conchita, the odds may be especially bad. But the payoff looks different when, like Lilley, you fall in love with a place.

Lilley landed there in 1999. With a slacker resume and a low-paying radio job, he could afford little else. He and his wife, Tara, split the rent with a couple of other guys at the salmon-colored surf shack at the entrance to town. It cost the couple $300 per month.

In a state enamored with planned and gated communities, La Conchita seemed gloriously unplanned. People built a few trophy homes, but their grandeur was checked by an abundance of double-wide trailers. There were abalone divers next to yuppies next to methamphetamine addicts.

Lilley even found the model for the gracefully aging surfer in his neighbor, Charly Womack.

Womack was not rich -- he was a contractor -- but he had found a way to live close to the ocean and raise a family there. He had discovered his big low-rent house a few years after the last landslide hit town, in 1995. It was abandoned to everyone but “rats and cats,” according to his daughter, Coriander Womack.

By the time Lilley came to town, Womack’s big house was open to family and friends. It was almost like a commune: Womack lived in a tepee in the yard, and parked nearby was a painted school bus. Lilley became part of the scene.

In 2004, when Lilley was trying to hold down jobs in California and Washington state, it was Womack who persuaded him that La Conchita was home.

“Move back here, man,” Womack told Lilley one night over beers in the tepee. “We all love you here.”

For Lilley, something clicked. “When Charly tells you something like that, you listen,” he said. “Because he’s raised kids that are good, honest kids. And because he sort of had everything that I wanted.”

A few days later, Lilley began house hunting in earnest.

He knew there were risks. A few of the houses damaged in the ’95 slide remained in the center of town. But the tendency to laugh it off was evident in a question spray-painted on one of the collapsed roofs: “What slide?”

“I used to look at it and laugh,” Lilley said. “I just think people became complacent with it. After the first slide, they were like, ‘Good. That chased all of the L.A. investors out.’ ”

For centuries, the steep cliffs along this stretch of coast have been pushed steadily upward from the seabed by the clash of tectonic plates below them. Today, that soft marine soil has a propensity to crumble in an earthquake -- or when it is saturated with water, said Jeffrey J. Hemphill, a geography graduate student at UC Santa Barbara who has studied the area.

In the late 19th century, frequent slides blocked wagon trains and prompted Southern Pacific Railroad to dig back the cliffs so slides wouldn’t reach the tracks it had laid in the 1880s.

In 1924, one of the areas that had been leveled by the railroad was subdivided into 377 lots. It was named La Conchita del Mar -- the little shell by the sea.

The first settlers were mostly farm and railroad workers. Later, people brought their camper trailers for weekend retreats. Over the years, many of them put down roots.

Generations beat the odds of disaster striking. In 1989, ground motion buckled a house. But that was one house. In 1995, officials warned residents for weeks about the possibility of a slide, and everyone was able to get out of the way when the hill collapsed. Nine homes were lost.

But the slide scared people. For a while, the real estate market cooled, and homes that had previously been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars went for a song.

Investor Roland Leonard snatched up a little house for $4,000. It was a squat cinderblock place on Vista del Rincon, the street closest to the skirt of the cliff. But it had orange trees and irises in the backyard, and one could clamber up the hill for a stunning view of the ocean. It wouldn’t be worth $4,000 forever, he thought.

When Lilley and his wife discovered that house in late 2004, Leonard offered it to them for $495,000. The couple loved the place. From the backyard, Lilley could check the surf at Rincon. They eyeballed the hill above and figured it looked pretty solid. They signed the papers in December, and the house was placed in escrow.

At 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 10, tons of mud broke free with a loud crack and surged to the heart of town in seconds, only a few blocks from the house. Charly Womack was buried in his tepee. Four other members of his household, including three little girls, were among the dead.

Lilley canceled the deal on the house. But a few days later, he offered Leonard $100,000 for the place, just to see what would happen. Leonard rejected the offer. He was pretty sure he could find other ways to make money with the house.

He found a taker in April who agreed to rent the place for $1,385 per month -- nearly $200 more than Leonard had been charging before the slide. The tenant, Diane Napoleone, had moved from Carpinteria, just up the coast. Like Lilley, she felt like she had found home.

“I’m a beach person,” she said a few weeks after moving in. “And it really has a sense of community here.”

For the next couple of months, Lilley looked at places in Ventura and Santa Barbara. He had a pre-approved loan and a budget of $500,000.

In Santa Barbara, that wouldn’t buy a shack. He could afford to buy in Ventura, but the houses were in neighborhoods that his agent called “transitional.” And Lilley didn’t like the sound of that.

So he turned his attention to La Conchita, where, since January, very little had changed.

The residents had formed a neighborhood group, the La Conchita Community Organization. But they were making no progress in their main objective -- fixing the hill.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to town and promised to “do everything we can to make it a safe area.” But later, his people said the state couldn’t help unless the county requested it.

Ventura County officials have no plans to do anything now. They are waiting to see if the residents sue them.

After the ’95 slide, residents filed two lawsuits against an orchard on top of the hill, claiming that crop irrigation had made it less stable. The orchard settled the first suit but successfully fought the second one.

As of mid-July, more than 125 claims had been filed against the county over the Jan. 10 slide. The claims are often precursors to lawsuits.

But even if there aren’t any lawsuits this time, the county may be reluctant to help.

Terracing the hill could cost $30 million or more, said Jack Phillips, the county building and safety director. And Ventura County might not have the legal right to help at all, because most of the slope is owned by the orchard.

Moreover, Phillips said, you can only fight geology so much.

“That entire hill is part of an ancient landslide,” he said. “So if you terrace a landslide, do you prevent it from sliding further?”

Some residents have heeded warnings and moved away. But many of the survivors remain. And newcomers like Napoleone are joining them. Today, 160 of the 171 inhabitable houses in town are occupied.

Lilley and his wife found a place to rent and have been moving in gradually over the last few days. It’s a four-bedroom house, on the opposite side of town from the hill. The couple and their three small children have been renting a cramped two-bedroom in Santa Barbara. It is expensive, and driving them crazy -- too small, too far from the beach.

The new place, with its ocean views, costs $1,500 a month. Lilley believes that it will be easier to continue the house search from there.

When Lilley walks through town these days he is amazed by how much has changed. Where Womack’s house stood are mounds of dirt from the slide. Other damaged homes are fenced off and smashed into funhouse angles.

The streets are full of familiar faces. But many have altered their lives to cope with the danger.

Lilley’s old landlord, Julio Varela, 55, who left La Conchita after the slide, has moved back with his girlfriend. The slide missed their house by a few dozen feet. As a precaution, they’ve moved their bed from a back room abutting the hill to a living room out front. Varela figures it will give them an extra few seconds to escape if another slide comes. “I’m not scared,” Varela said. “Call it whatever you want to call it -- a person without brains, whatever. But I’m too old to worry about it.”

Across town, Dan Alvis has made another strategic move. Though he is staying in his girlfriend’s house in the middle of town, he spends most nights in an RV parked near the 101 Freeway. He sleeps better out there -- at what he calls “the edge of the flytrap.”

Alvis lost his first house in the 1995 slide. The January slide crushed his second house and killed his brother. But like Lilley, he is a surfer. It is more than a hobby. This coast has defined him.

“I spent 40 years of my life here, and I don’t know where else to go,” said Alvis, a 58-year-old Vietnam veteran. “The California dream is to own beach property, to live by the beach. Most people today can’t realize that dream, but I did. I went to war, and I came back with that in mind.”

Meanwhile, Lilley’s former neighbor, Russ Brazelton, has been wondering if he should stay. Charly Womack lived across the street, and the two were like family.

Brazelton doesn’t feel safe. But he also feels like someone should tend to the dirt piles where Womack’s house once stood. The county won’t move them for fear of unsettling the hill. So Brazelton has spread 500 pounds of wildflower seeds there. In spring they bloomed.

Brazelton isn’t sure about the people like Lilley who are looking for a house here.

“If you’re not hooked in emotionally, I’d advise against it,” he said. “It is definitely a gamble.”

But Lilley is hooked, and so the house hunting continues. He knows he has to hurry: The forgetting has already begun.

In April, a two-bedroom house sold for $162,500. By mid-July, another two-bedroom was in escrow for about $500,000.

This, in a town with a huge county sign out front warning against so much as a visit.

And yet so many days since Jan. 10 have been perfectly calm. The ocean breeze blankets the town in cool, and the sun sets over the bay, scattering diamonds across the Pacific.

Sometimes it’s easy to believe that the forces of geology aren’t the only forces at work.

“I like to think I have good karma, that I’m a good person,” Lilley said. “That we’re a good family, and everything is going to work out.”