If you\u2019d like to live near the water along the spectacular California coast at some point in your life, you have a number of options.<\/p>\n
You can settle in, say, Culver City, which is several miles inland, and wait for rising tides to arrive.<\/p>\n
Or, if you just can\u2019t wait that long, I saw a listing you might be interested in<\/a>. It\u2019s in Capitola, near Santa Cruz, right next to the wharf. The three bedroom, two bath, 1,850-square-foot condo, one of a string of Venetian, pastel beachfront homes, is listed for $3,995,000.<\/p>\n \u201cThe beach is your backyard, the cool ocean is your pool,\u201d says the promo.<\/p>\n Given what\u2019s happening right now along the California coast, you might not have to leave that condo to go for a swim. But UC Santa Cruz oceanographer and geologist Gary Griggs,<\/a> who has seen the thrashing of that row of homes in previous years, is not going to make an offer.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve got a number of photos,\u201d he said, \u201cthat show waves breaking over the top.\u201d<\/p>\n Someone will buy the place, eventually, despite the chance of it becoming a fish tank. California is flush with dumb money and bad judgment, and an insatiable romance with an epic 1,200-mile shoreline.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s time to rethink the relationship.<\/p>\n Last weekend in Long Beach I said a few words at the 50th anniversary of the California Coastal Act,<\/a> which has kept our shoreline from looking like Atlantic City or Miami Beach by balancing sensible development with conservation and public access.<\/p>\n \u201cThe coast is never saved, it\u2019s always being saved,\u201d I said at the 50th, borrowing as I often do from the late Peter Douglas<\/a>, hammering home the need for constant stewardship, from one generation to the next.<\/p>\n But in an ironic twist, part of the parking lot was underwater, a tractor had raised a berm to hold back the ocean, and just to the south, homes were being thrashed by waves. The coast wasn\u2019t being saved, it was being reclaimed by the sea.<\/a><\/p>\n From there I headed south for a friend\u2019s planned birthday party on the sand in Newport Beach, but city streets had been flooded and beaches were closed. The party was moved indoors.<\/p>\n We have not seen the worst of it, with a fall forecast that includes the possibility of an epic Super El Ni\u00f1o that could coincide with king tides, Kelvin waves and a peak lunar nodal cycle, all of which my colleague Rosanna Xia laid out<\/a> a couple of days ago.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not going to rain hammerheads and sea horses, I don\u2019t think, but coastal destruction could be dramatic.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re likely going to break a number of water level records,\u201d said Timu Gallien of the UCLA Coastal Flood Lab<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s not implausible to see some of the piers wiped out, or breakwaters or jetties.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a glimpse of our future,\u201d said former California Coastal Commission Director Jack Ainsworth<\/a>. \u201cThis is it. It\u2019s here.\u201d<\/p>\n Some low-lying communities have been warned for years to prepare for rising sea levels, Ainsworth said, but have put off the inevitable.<\/p>\n In some areas, the only sane maneuver is what\u2019s called \u201cmanaged retreat,\u201d meaning relocation of structures farther inland. But that is fraught with legal and political challenges and resistance.<\/p>\n Look, if you want to live on the sand and can afford to do so, good for you. But the general public should not be on the hook for your losses. Along the entire coast, public infrastructure that we all benefit from is under threat, including roadways, parks and railroad tracks, and that\u2019s where any public investment ought to go.<\/p>\n Among the tools available are sand berms, cobble berms (sand on top of small stones), jetties, dredging and relocating sand, and below-surface breakwaters. Living shorelines, such as those along the Orange and San Diego county coasts, involve piling sand atop boulders or smaller stones and covering the berms with vegetation.<\/p>\n But these projects don\u2019t happen overnight, Gallien said. \u201cRight now we\u2019re seeing reactive responses. OK, let\u2019s throw up some sandbags and plywood.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelsey Ducklow, coastal resilience director for the Coastal Commission, said the agency has awarded millions in grants for local planners to study the threat to their communities and come up with plans. Some locales are further along than others, Ducklow said, but there\u2019s no single strategy that will work everywhere, and one typical response is, \u201cYeah, we know we need to do something. But where\u2019s the money to do it?\u201d<\/p>\n The three choices we have are mitigation, adaptation and suffering, Griggs said. We\u2019re likely to do some of each, but on the mitigation end of things, sea walls, rock revetments and armored cliffs are temporary fixes.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the long run, there\u2019s nothing we can do to hold back the Pacific Ocean,\u201d said Griggs, 83, who has been teaching for 59 years. \u201cEverything we do is a Band-Aid, and comes with different price tags and lifespans.\u201d<\/p>\n Griggs was featured<\/a> in Xia\u2019s award-winning book \u201cCalifornia Against the Sea<\/a>: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline,\u201d which explores the impact of sea level rise and community responses that range from denial to respectful intervention.<\/p>\n Precious ecosystems are under threat, Xia wrote, \u201ctrapped between rising water on one side, pavement on the other.\u201d And multiple Southern California beaches that are \u201cso deeply tied to the state\u2019s heart and soul\u201d could be lost.<\/p>\n I asked Xia what she thought about the rising threat this year.<\/p>\n \u201cSo many people think about the coast as a place \u2014 a place that doesn\u2019t move,\u201d she said. \u201cBut the coast in reality is a living dynamic process that changes every time a wave crashes ashore. That\u2019s the heart of the issue \u2014 we\u2019re fundamentally trying to impose permanence onto a space that is meant to be constantly changing.\u201d<\/p>\n We haven\u2019t been the best stewards of the planet, and maybe what\u2019s happening now is a bit of a reckoning. From the first time I saw the California coast as a young lad on vacation from the hot interior, I think I understood that the truest way to love the sea was to fear and respect it.<\/p>\n I now have more fear and more respect.<\/p>\n And maybe, too, a deeper love.<\/p>\n steve.lopez@latimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019d like to live near the water along the spectacular California coast at some point in your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[174,193738,1595,9350,193740,131,133,132,212,32811,55417,39499,34800,193741,11431,315,18060,193739],"class_list":["post-499243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-beach","tag-berm","tag-california-coast","tag-coast","tag-griggs","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-number","tag-previous-year","tag-sand","tag-sea","tag-shoreline","tag-small-stone","tag-threat","tag-time","tag-wave","tag-xia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}