In my formative years, my family would go on brief spring excursions along the California coast. Up to Ventura, down to Torrance, maybe San Diego if we were lucky. We would bask in the gentle sea breeze, marvel at sweeping views of tumbling bluffs and cliffs that kiss the waves at their bases, then lounge in ephemeral sandy coves accessible only at low tide. The Pacific was a sensory respite from the aesthetic sterility of the sprawling Los Ángeles suburb that we would eventually return to. But Southern Californians are compelled by stereotype to make the long trek up north at least once to see how The Other Half lives. So, it was of little surprise to me that year when my mom announced to us that our annual adventure would be the inevitable road trip to the Bay Area. Like many Southern Californian tourists, we wound up in Pacifica because we were too cheap to afford Bay prices. Pacifica, a small town of 30,000 built on a series of steep coastal bluffs a few miles south of San Francisco, is one of the last affordable places on the California coast. It’s the kind of place that dedicates prime oceanfront real estate to Taco Bells, mobile home parks, and, luckily for my family, budget motels. We stayed just one night at an unassuming Best Western, sheltered from the churn of the ocean only by a short seawall at the end of the block. That night happened to be my ninth birthday. As my mom prepared to light the candles on a storebought cake, there was a sudden commotion from outside. We opened the door and craned our necks around the corner towards the oceanfront, just in time for the sound and its source to arrive again.

BOOM!

A two-story wall of water slammed into the seawall, spraying us with mist and submerging the abutting street. The sea rapidly receded, only to return with greater force.

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

Every few seconds, firing at the shoreline like a cannon aimed at a longtime enemy. When we realized we were out of range, we hastily retreated inside to continue the birthday celebrations. But as I lay down to sleep that night, my thoughts couldn’t help but return to the ceaseless pounding of the waves just outside our door, in awe of the violence unleashed by the same ocean I had once seen as stoic.

What I experienced that night was the Pacific Ocean under the influence of king tides. Mythologized by surfers searching for the next big wave and demonized by landlords cowering at the potential property damage, the king tide is a rare phenomenon that haunts coastal communities for a few days once or twice a year. For king tides to return, the sun and moon must be in alignment during the moon’s new or full phases, and the moon needs to be at the closest point to the Earth in its orbit. When both happen at the same time, watch out. In California, king tides can produce waves up to twenty feet tall. The onslaught of high-impact waves chews away at once-stable cliffs, sandy beaches, and human infrastructure alike, threatening the communities that rely upon their stability. A few years after my visit to Pacifica, another king tide attack caused the same seawall near my hotel to collapse, costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. In 2016, a 30-foot sinkhole opened by king tide-induced erosion sealed off access to a popular beach there for months, and several homes were evacuated as the bluff they sat on began to crumble. In 2021, the municipal pier was closed indefinitely following a king tide event, as city engineers could no longer ensure its stability. King tides have cost millions in damages in Pacifica alone, not to mention the rest of the California coast. But to residents and officials alike, the cost is merely part of the price of living by the ocean. To maintain their way of life, their task is Sisyphean: they build and rebuild coastal infrastructure, infrastructure that will inevitably be eroded and rebuilt once more. The king tides won’t return for a while, after all. And when they do, we’ll hold out once more, they reason.

While king tides are an immutable presence on the California coast, their effects on coastal erosion are receiving new attention from scientists and policymakers alike. Experts reason that king tides serve as a good proxy for what sea level rise will do to the coast. As the climate warms, oceanic water levels will rise at an accelerating rate as glaciers at the Earth’s poles continue to melt and as increasing sea surface temperatures cause greater thermal expansion. How much seas will rise depends primarily on our ability to curb fossil fuel emissions, in addition to a host of other climatic variables. But even under the most optimistic climate change scenarios, in which emissions immediately and rapidly decline, Pacifica and its coastal California peers will experience at least one to three feet of sea level rise before 2100 according to the IPCC. In addition to their characteristic twenty-foot waves, king tides also cause ocean levels to rise up to 18 inches higher than normal conditions on average. Within the next generation, everyday low tides might have the effects of today’s rare king tides. One can only imagine the havoc that future king tides might wreak under these conditions.

The consequences of sea level rise for towns like Pacifica cannot be overstated. In 2018, the city government released a “Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment” to measure the risk that climate change poses to Pacifica under a worst-case scenario of 5.7 feet of sea level rise by 2100. Across the city’s coastal neighborhoods, 1,115 parcels of land would be vulnerable to erosion, flooding, wave damage, or all the above. Many of these are single-family homes, but also include schools, healthcare facilities, and commercial buildings. The assessment found that sea level rise would threaten government-owned infrastructure such as wastewater management facilities, parks, gas pipelines, landfills, and Pacific Coast Highway, which serves as the town’s main connection to the outside world. Facing the equivalent of king tides every day of the year would overwhelm the town’s existing defenses, making the cycle of building and rebuilding infrastructure impossible to maintain. The struggle with sea level rise would be a losing battle against civic extinction. With little other choice, Pacifica will have to adapt.

When faced with the threat of sea level rise, coastal planners often pick from a toolbox of four adaptive strategies. The first, shoreline armoring, closely resembles what Pacifica does to protect itself now. Shoreline armoring places physical structures like seawalls or rock piles in the path of oncoming waves to protect landward human structures. Far from a novel strategy, California cities have undertaken armoring projects to protect against king tides since the early twentieth century. As of 2018, 13.9% of the state’s 5,515 kilometers of coastline were armored, including 8.2 kilometers of armoring in Pacifica’s San Mateo County. But building new armoring or upgrading existing structures along California’s coast is contentious; it raises fundamental questions about who and what new seawalls serve. According to Gary Griggs, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “coastal armoring … protects what is behind the armor, at the cost of the fronting beach … It is only a matter of time before beaches in front of hard armoring structures will disappear with a rising sea level” (emphasis added). To allow developers to build new seawalls would sacrifice public beaches to save private properties. For this reason, new seawalls are difficult to build under the California Coastal Act of 1976, which mandates that armoring projects must not interfere with public beach access. As for the structures already in place, the city admits that most existing armoring may crumble under as little as one foot of sea-level rise, and the cash-strapped city government does not have the funds to conduct even routine maintenance on them. A recent proposal would have the city borrow tens of millions of dollars to reconstruct existing seawalls, sending Pacifica towards bankruptcy while addressing sea level rise in only a piecemeal fashion.

Another of the common adaptive strategies is referred to as beach nourishment. It’s a straight-forward solution to a complex problem: simply add more sand to a beach, and the beach will erode more slowly, creating a buffer between beachfront properties and the rising sea. Unlike seawalls, beach nourishment projects would both support beach recreation and protect Pacifica, at least in theory. In practice, however, beach nourishment simply does not work as intended. For example, between 2001 and 2012, San Diego County added 2.6 million cubic meters of sand to its beaches at an estimated cost of $36 million dollars. Like in Pacifica, the county’s goal was to protect steep coastal bluffs from erosion. Just six months after their project was completed, over 90 percent of their sand had disappeared. Coastal scientists now agree that most California beaches have a natural equilibrium size that is the product of wave energy, geographic configuration, and sand drift. Bluffs like those in Pacifica naturally face high energy waves and therefore lack wide protective beaches. Artificially creating wider beaches in Pacifica would be just as useless as in San Diego.

The high energy waves that buffet the Pacifica coast also help defeat the third common adaptive strategy, natural shoreline defense. This typically involves the restoration of natural habitats such as salt marshes, mangroves, or coral reefs, which naturally reduce shoreline erosion while resurrecting native ecosystems. For example, a natural shorelines project in the San Francisco Bay that restored the habitats of eelgrass and oyster reefs also reduced beach erosion by over 30 percent. But while the San Francisco Bay offers marine ecosystems sheltered waters, few species useful for erosion reduction are native to Pacifica’s coast, as they cannot survive the exposed environment of the bluff shoreline. Marine scientist Griggs concurs, writing that “there are no vegetative solutions … for the bluffs and cliffs that make up about 1264 km or 72% of the state’s outer coast.”

This leaves one adaptive strategy remaining in the toolbox: managed retreat.

Managed retreat means planning for a future in which it is no longer safe or beneficial for humans to be living so close to a rising ocean.

It means demolishing or abandoning nonessential infrastructure, homes, businesses, and schools, and moving essential structures inland. It means allowing the waves to claim what was once ours. It means living to fight another day, not fighting an endless battle against the sea. It means, essentially, giving up.

Humans have a long history of “unmanaged retreat”: battling the sea, losing badly, and fleeing the area. Over the last 2000 years, twenty-eight towns on the English coast have disappeared as sea levels rose. Even in the shorter history of the development of the California coast, examples are bountiful. At Big Lagoon in Humboldt County, fifteen blufftop cottages were demolished between 1931 and 1941 as over twenty meters of bluff tumbled into the sea. Inexplicably, developers rebuilt new homes on the same bluff in 1962, which were inevitably evacuated and demolished just twenty years later. At Gleason Beach in Sonoma County, twenty-one homes were built in the 1930s on a narrow cliff ledge between a major highway and the open ocean. The development happened to be directly on top of the infamous San Andreas Fault. Today, a collapsed sea wall and rubble from the foundations remain the only evidence that people once lived there. On the Bolinas peninsula, an entire subdivision’s worth of homes were lost to gradual erosion between 1882 and 2005. And so on, up and down California’s rugged coast.

Pacifica itself has already experienced defeat. Between 1941 and 1970, over ten meters of bluff eroded into the sea. As bluff erosion increased in pace in the following years, it forced the movement of twenty-three mobile homes in 1983, the condemnation of eleven homes in 1998, and the demolition of a ten-story apartment building in 2010. As the rate of bluff erosion continues to increase from sea level rise, it is almost inevitable that human settlements will continue to face threats in Pacifica. It seems a logical choice to plan for managed retreat, so that Pacifica is not forced to repeatedly take emergency actions as shoreline developments find themselves under threat. But seemingly no one in Pacifica wants to hear it.

Friends and detractors alike describe former Pacifica mayor John Keener as a kindly grandfather figure. A humble, soft-spoken bespectacled retiree, his politics are driven more by civic responsibility than ideology. He’s famous for reading every word of every document that comes before the city council. To call mild-mannered John Keener a controversial figure seems almost laughable. Which made the smear campaign against his 2018 reelection bid so unexpected. Just a few months before election day, anti-Keener propaganda suddenly appeared across Pacifica. Posters in shop windows. Lawn signs strewn across street medians and neighborhood sidewalks. Daily op-eds and editorials in the local newspapers. A van plastered in banners that cruised the main streets every weekend. All with variants of the same message.

“Pacifica can’t afford managed retreat and Pacifica can’t afford John Keener.”

From the start, the scheduled hearings were contentious. The rumor of managed retreat spread like wildfire through the community, twisting and exaggerating with every retelling like a child’s game of telephone. To many, the idea of even considering managed retreat was a disturbing betrayal of their community and an absurd government overreach.

The victory over Keener was temporary at best. With or without John Keener at the helm, the threat of sea level rise wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was the California Coastal Commission. Five years after his ouster, the city of Pacifica and the Commission are still at odds over the Local Coastal Program. The Commission continues to recommend retreat, and the city continues to reject it. Without an approved plan, the Commission has found the city in violation of the California Coastal Act, imposing hefty fines every year until the discrepancy is resolved. From the Coastal Commission’s perspective, the problem for Pacifica is that the Commission has sound evidence on their side of the argument, and Pacifica does not. Both the city and the Commission know that sea level rise will endanger the city’s blufftop homes through rapid erosion, accelerating and normalizing the damage that king tides bring. They both know that the city cannot build new seawalls under the Coastal Act, and that they don’t have the money to repair current structures. They both know that beach nourishment would be a temporary solution at best, and that natural shoreline defense won’t work on Pacifica’s exposed coast. Like the growing number of cities across California that have rejected retreat with no viable alternative, Pacifica has stuck its head in the sand, and it’s up to the Commission to pull it out.

To many in the Coastal Commission, including Pat Veesart, Peter Douglas was the messiah of the California coast. An attorney with a background in environmental and social activism, Douglas made it his personal mission to fight for the preservation of the coastal environment, drafting a 1972 ballot proposition to create a state agency tasked with planning and regulating the entire coast. Despite being outspent over 100 to 1 by oil and development interests, coastal supporters successfully passed Douglas’ Proposition 20, which came to be known as “The People’s Law,” in November of 1972. Four years later, Douglas helped write the monumental 1976 California Coastal Act, which enshrined the California Coastal Commission into the state constitution and gave it broad authority over regulating coastal development to protect public beach access and endangered habitats. Douglas would be named Executive Director of the Commission in 1985, a position he held until his death from cancer in 2011.

Peter Douglas never uttered the words “managed retreat.” The Coastal Commission’s sea level rise guidance wasn’t drafted until 2015, four years after his passing. But his legacy of unshakeable faith to the Coastal Act is invoked every time managed retreat is insisted upon. From the perspective of the Coastal Act, the complexities of sea level rise belie a simple calculus. As seas rise, beaches migrate inland, bluffs erode. These are natural responses to a changing coastline. The Coastal Act is designed to protect natural habitats and ensure there remains a beach for the public to access. So, the beach must be allowed to retreat. Anything in its path, a seawall, a house, an apartment, a street, must be prepared to retreat with it. Otherwise: no beach, no habitats, no access. The Commission has a legal responsibility to the people of California to make sure that doesn’t happen. Its staff, all Douglas disciples, are going to fight to make sure that doesn’t happen. If it means steamrolling the wishes of somewhere like Pacifica, so be it. Says Veesart, “If we don’t have a good relationship with the local government, we simply will step in and make things right.”

The problem, of course, is that the California Coastal Commission can’t step in and do anything.

It is a planning agency. It can advise, it can review, it can approve or reject, it can issue fines and incentivize certain behaviors, but at the end of the day it cannot enact policy change without working in partnership with local coastal governments. So as Pacifica sticks its head further into the sand, the Commission can do little but dig in its heels and pull harder. Both sides are caught in their respective commitments: Pacifica to its voters, who worry more about property values and government overreach than the inevitability of climate change, and the Coastal Commission to its legal responsibility and fervent ideological underpinning. But something will eventually have to give, and odds are in favor of Pacifica giving first. The state has the advantage of both time and money, to wait out the city as their situation becomes more dire. The Commission’s fines might overwhelm the city’s feeble budget, or the Commission might sue the city, or public opinion might change as more homes fall into the sea. But even when the two sides finally reconcile their differences, there remains an enormously important unanswered question: how does one actually manage retreat?

The political mechanisms for managing retreat in California remain in the speculative realm. Some experts, like marine scientist Gary Griggs, have advocated for a state-run voluntary program that would compensate homeowners for giving up their endangered houses, paying them market rate prices or more. Environmentalists have pushed back, arguing that the program would incentivize the public to continue to purchase threatened coastal properties with the promise of a buyout acting as insurance. And since California coastal properties are notoriously expensive, enacting this plan statewide would likely consume billions in state funding, an expense difficult for the non-coastal taxpayer to stomach. In San Mateo County, where Pacifica is located, the median waterfront home sale price is $1.5 million. And Pacifica is known as the affordable part of the coast.

In each of the last two legislative sessions, the state legislature passed a bill that would have created a program for the state to purchase properties and rent them back to the original owners. Governor Newsom vetoed it both times, citing the cost of the program. In his budget for 2023, the Governor proposed a cut of more than $700 million from a state coastal resiliency fund used to pay for retreat. Newsom, too, seems to want to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. But continued state inaction costs local governments. In 2010, when Pacifica demolished three apartment buildings as part of an emergency retreat from unstable bluffs, the town was footed with a $16 million dollar bill for cleanup and millions more for a massive legal battle over eminent domain. A government as cash strapped as Pacifica’s can’t afford that kind of expense on a regular basis.

If a solution cannot be found at the local or state levels, perhaps the federal government may be of some assistance. In fact, the federal government has been quietly funding managed retreat for decades. Following major disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers homeowners with damaged or destroyed properties buyouts equivalent to the pre-disaster value of their homes to move to safer ground. Aiming to reduce the costs of further disasters before they happen, eligibility for the more than 43,000 buyouts offered since 1989 has been primarily determined by a property’s vulnerability to future climate impacts. But the program assumes a definition of climate impact that is fundamentally different than what is occurring in Pacifica. It kicks in after an event severe enough to receive a presidential disaster declaration, like a major flood, hurricane, or tornado, has passed through a region. The gradual creep of coastal erosion under sea level rise has no foreseeable after, and it will not pass through Pacifica so much as chew away at it over the course of decades. Absent a separate disaster like an earthquake or wildfire, therefore, Pacifica has no way of tapping into federal funding for managed retreat. With a relatively simple policy change, the program could be expanded to address slow-onset sea level rise by redefining what types of “disasters” it is applicable to. Providing federal assistance to retreat from Pacifica’s crumbling bluffs would save the city and state governments from their own inaction and would set a precedent for addressing sea level rise that could be expanded nationwide. A change in FEMA policy would require an act of Congress, however, and there is no current political momentum for it given the unwillingness of some members of Congress to even admit the existence of climate change.

All told, managed retreat might be politically divisive, incredibly expensive, and sluggishly implemented. But it also might be the only way to save California coastal communities from themselves. For even as real estate interests and Pacifica residents protest the very thought of it, even as elected officials are ousted for tacitly supporting it, even as the Coastal Commission digs in its heels about it, even as Pacifica’s new administration holds out on it, even as environmentalists wince at its cost, even as the state legislature and governor kick it around like a political football, even as Congress continues to ignore it, the booming king tides of Pacifica remind us of its salience. Every day, the ocean inches a little bit further up the beach, chews a little bit more away from the base of the bluff. Soon there won’t be anything left between the rising sea and the next line of coastal developments. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen more frequently now. Fighting over the politics of managed retreat is a privilege with an expiration date, and each return of the king tides reminds us just how close that expiration date is.

All told, managed retreat might be politically divisive, incredibly expensive, and sluggishly implemented. But it also might be the only way to save California coastal communities from themselves. For even as real estate interests and Pacifica residents protest the very thought of it, even as elected officials are ousted for tacitly supporting it, even as the Coastal Commission digs in its heels about it, even as Pacifica’s new administration holds out on it, even as environmentalists wince at its cost, even as the state legislature and governor kick it around like a political football, even as Congress continues to ignore it, the booming king tides of Pacifica remind us of its salience. Every day, the ocean inches a little bit further up the beach, chews a little bit more away from the base of the bluff. Soon there won’t be anything left between the rising sea and the next line of coastal developments. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen more frequently now. Fighting over the politics of managed retreat is a privilege with an expiration date, and each return of the king tides reminds us just how close that expiration date is.