In February, after yet another court decision stalling sorely needed housing development, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared that California’s landmark environmental law is “broken.”
The California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, is supposed to protect the environment by requiring governments to study and mitigate any harms of development before they approve it. But as Newsom noted, CEQA has been “weaponized” by “wealthy homeowners” (among others) to block housing — often in the urban and suburban areas where people have the least environmental impact.
And housing isn’t all that’s on the line. To meet the state’s greenhouse-gas emission targets — and secure its share of federal green-energy funding— California needs to quickly approve wind and solar energy projects, electricity transmission lines, car-charging networks and mass transit. To that end, in May, the governor unveiled an 11-bill infrastructure package to “assert a different paradigm.” No longer would we “screw it up” with “paralysis and process.” Going forward, the state would commit itself to “results.”
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Newsom’s bold rhetoric implied that big reforms were in the offing. But the package included only two incremental CEQA reforms, neither directed at housing.
One allows the governor to designate more “environmental leadership” projects for which the courts are supposed to wrap up any legal challenges within 270 days. If a case takes longer to resolve and remains stuck in legal limbo, however, the governor’s bill provides no legal remedy.
The other measure seeks to narrow the “administrative record” in CEQA cases. Often, compiling the administrative record — all the information involved in an environmental review that was available to the government and is germane to the court case — can result in extensive delays because it takes a long time to assemble all the required documents.
Newsom proposed to mitigate this problem by excluding from the administrative record “internal communications” within an agency that are not presented to the final decision-makers. This was a baby step.
And yet even this minor change elicited outrage from more than 100 organizations that call themselves environmentalist. They asserted, confusingly, that the governor’s reform would make it “prohibitively expensive and difficult to … assemble an administrative record, making judicial remedy something only the rich can afford.”
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“This is ridiculous!” Newsom vented. Then he caved.
The language about internal agency communications was stripped from his bill before he signed it into law last week, replaced with a symbolic carve-out for “meeting invitations and scheduling communications” — which are never relevant to a CEQA case.
In sum, Newsom’s big push to reform a “broken” law won him a statutory right to implore judges to speed up a few more cases — and little else.
If you want to see what real reform looks like, look north. Washington state legislators voted overwhelmingly this year to eliminate environmental review for everyurban housing project that conforms to a city’s general plan and zoning laws. Deep-green Oregon, meanwhile, never saw the need for a CEQA-like law. It adopted urban growth boundaries instead, preserving the countryside while allowing cities to approve new housing without the “paralysis” Newsom bemoaned.
Oregon and Washington, in other words, chose results.
Oddly, amid all the Sturm und Drang occasioned by the governor’s infrastructure package, Newsom has refrained from using his regulatory authority over CEQA. The law says the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and the state Natural Resources Agency may refine and clarify CEQA’s often-vague requirements by issuing “guidelines.” New guidelines could bolster exemptions for urban and suburban housing, make new exemptions for electricity transmission or create a statewide environmental zoning map and calibrate the intensity of reviews according to the sensitivity of a given zone.
Yes, Team Paralysis would throw conniptions and file lawsuits. And many moons ago, a court did strike down an effort to streamline CEQA through the guidelines. But the California Supreme Court later disapproved of that decision.
The field belongs to the governor. If nothing else, an overhaul of the guidelines would set the agenda for the Legislature and the courts. If CEQA is truly broken, it’s surely worth taking some legal and political risks to fix it.
Chris Elmendorf is a professor of law at the UC Davis School of Law.
In another milestone move to expand its reach, UCLA announced Thursday that it has purchased a landmark building in downtown Los Angeles for satellite classes, aiming to widen access at the nation’s most popular university and help revitalize the city’s historic core.
UCLA purchased the 11-story, Art Deco-style Trust Building on Spring Street and expects to begin classes in it later this year — initially through its large Extension program. But Chancellor Gene Block said in an interview that the university has “not precluded” eventually developing the site, renamed UCLA Downtown, to accommodate more undergraduate and graduate students with possible housing nearby.
The purchase comes nine months after UCLA bought two large properties owned by Marymount California University, a small Catholic institution in Rancho Palos Verdes that closed its doors last year. The $80-million purchase of Marymount’s 24.5-acre campus and an11-acre residential site in nearby San Pedro marked the university’s most significant expansion to help meet the burgeoning demand for seats.
UCLA, the most-applied-to university in the nation, drew nearly 150,000 first-year applications for about 6,500 spotsin fall 2022and nearly that many for fall 2023 — sparking angst among growing legions of rejected Californians and pressure from state legislators to reduce the number of out-of-state students.
But the university’s 419-acre Westwood footprint is the smallest among UC’s nine undergraduate campuses, leaving it no room to grow and prompting efforts to look for ways to meet its goal to add about 3,000 more undergraduates and 350 more graduate students by 2030.
Block said the 334,000-square-foot Trust Building, which will be renovated with classrooms, office space and more, can help accommodate additional students, anchor research projects, potentially host startup companies and serve the neighborhood.
“We believe deeply in Los Angeles and its future,” Block said. “We couldn’t be prouder to expand UCLA’s presence in the beating heart of downtown, which has been a vision of ours for a full decade. The sky’s the limit on what we can do.”
Block declined to disclose the sales price, but UCLA appears to have scored a significant deal. Real estate experts with knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak publicly, placed it at less than $40 million, a sharp discount from the building’s assessed value of nearly $88 million.
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The sellers, Rising Realty Partners and its financial partner Lionstone Investments, bought the building in 2016 for $80.4 million, according to real estate data provider CoStar. Rising Realty, which is headquartered in the building, performed an estimated $40-million makeover that brought it up to modern earthquake safety standards and restored original features such as gilded ceiling decorations that were painted over in late 20th century renovations.
“Downtown L.A.’s challenging commercial real estate market gave UCLA a great value for their investment,” said Hal Bastian, a real estate broker and longtime downtown advocate who lives near the Trust Building. “After lots of bad press for downtown L.A., this is proof that people still have confidence in our long-term success.”
Mayor Karen Bass hailed UCLA’s move. “It’s exciting to see institutions like UCLA expanding their presence in downtown Los Angeles and committing to its future as a vibrant urban hub that draws people from all over our City and around the world,” she said in a statement.
Once known as the “Queen of Spring Street,” the building was designed by legendary architects John and Donald Parkinson — who also created City Hall, Union Station and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — and is now designated a city Historic-Cultural Monument.
It was built in 1928 at the behest of Title Insurance and Trust Co., one of the city’s biggest financial institutions in an era when Spring Street was hailed as the Wall Street of the West. The firm used the building as its headquarters until 1977, when the city’s top white-collar firms were moving to newer office towers in downtown’s financial district and elsewhere as the historic core, the city’s original downtown, was going to seed.
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In recent years the imposing structure, designed to signal prestige and power with its finishes of marble, brass and black walnut, has been used primarily as a filming location for period pieces and fantasies such as “Batman.”
The Trust is nearly devoid of tenants amid a contracting downtown office leasing market. As in other parts of downtown L.A., the nearby streets have a significant homeless population that increased during the pandemic. In the evening hours, however, there are often crowds of people patronizing bars and restaurants as well as residents walking their dogs.
Real estate experts expressed hope that UCLA’s purchase will accelerate downtown renewal.
“After several years of nothing but negative news surrounding downtown Los Angeles, the UCLA acquisition of the Trust appears to be one of the first green shoots towards recovery,” said real estate broker Mike Condon Jr. of Cushman & Wakefield, who represented the seller in the transaction. ”Such a large and prominent institution like UCLA making a big bet in the market is a much-needed boost to the historic core.”
José Andrés, a celebrated chef known for both his culinary and his humanitarian work, has agreed to open a rooftop restaurant at the Trust Building. Last year Andrés and his hospitality group opened two restaurants, two cocktail bars and a poolside lounge in downtown’s Conrad hotel, with steakhouse Bazaar Meat projected to open in the second half of 2023 within the $1-billion Grand complex on Bunker Hill.
Andrés’ restaurant group will continue as tenants in the building, along with Rising Realty and KTGY Architecture + Planning.
Block said UCLA has wanted to expand in downtown L.A., where it already operates health clinics, some Extension courses and a labor center in nearby MacArthur Park, for the last decade. The Trust acquisition will pay off even more in 2027, when the Purple Line is set for completion and will connect nearby Pershing Square to the Westwood main campus.
The chancellor said he first saw the building this year and was “dazzled” by its grand architecture and elegant space.
Arizona State University also saw ripe educational opportunities in the area, opening a downtown Los Angeles center in 2021 in the renovated Herald Examiner building on 11th and Broadway. The expanded presence of both universities, along with USC, is higher education’s “very important statement on the confidence in the future of cities,” Block said, adding that he hoped “hundreds” of people would eventually occupy UCLA Downtown.
Other UC campuses also are expanding operations in their city cores. UC Davis is building Aggie Square, an “innovation hub” on its Sacramento campus that will include science and technology buildings and student housing. The campus estimates a few hundred undergraduates can spend a quarter there.
Last year, UC San Diego opened a four-story, 66,750-square-foot structure downtown just steps from the Blue Line Trolley at the corner of Park Boulevard and Market Street. The building is designed as a cultural, educational and business hub to showcase creative ventures, boost economic activity and deepen ties across the border, university officials say.
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“We’re all coming to the same conclusion that we have cities that need to be protected and helped to thrive,” Block said. “So I think we’re all seeing the need to be downtown.”
The Palos Verdes Peninsula — a land of rolling hills, jagged cliffs and sweeping views of the city and ocean — boasts some of the most beautiful terrain in Southern California.
It’s also long proven to be some of the most dangerous.
For hundreds of thousands of years, the peninsula has been plagued by an ancient landslide complex that slowly reshapes the topography. The earth lurches and warps, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, destroying homes and infrastructure along the way.
The latest damage was dealt to Rolling Hills Estates, where a major ground shift led to 12 homes being evacuated after a fissure snaked its way through the neighborhood. Foundations cracked, walls collapsed and some homes were visibly leaning as the hillside upon which they were perched slowly descended into a canyon.
Land movement is a stubborn, if periodic reality for much of California, particularly the coastal hills of the South Bay and Orange County.
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Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel and San Clemente have dealt with destructive slides. In the 1920s, a handful of homes in San Pedro slid into the ocean, creating what’s now known as the Sunken City. A mile south of Rolling Hills Estates, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes is hatching plans to avoid a similar fate.
“This remains an active situation,” said Rolling Hills Estates Mayor Britt Huff at a city council meeting on Tuesday, adding that due to a break in a sewer main, five additional houses were ordered to evacuate earlier that day.
At the meeting, the council declared a state of emergency in order to access broader resources from state and federal agencies.
“No one expected this. Landslides don’t really happen in this area,” said resident Lisa Zhang.
A landslide-prone peninsula
The peninsula’s bout with landslides is well-documented in the geological record, stretching back millenniums but coming to a head 67 years ago when an L.A. County road crew accidentally reactivated an ancient slide complex while building an extension of Crenshaw Boulevard in Rancho Palos Verdes.
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The crew dug up and shifted thousands of tons of dirt, throwing things off balance enough to send the land in the Portuguese Bend into a super-slow-motion descent and activating a landslide.
That’s just one ancient landslide complex. According to El Hachemi Bouali, assistant professor of geosciences at Nevada State University who co-authored a report on the Portuguese Bend landslide complex, there are areas all across the peninsula at similar risk.
Due to precipitation and geology, the hills are uniquely susceptible to movement. Layers of clay — bentonite and montmorillonite, to be specific — are found beneath the ground, interspersed between layers of bedrock. When water absorbs into the earth, it expands and lubricates the clay until it’s slippery enough for the land to ride downward with the force of gravity. Even thick layers of bedrock will slip.
Water infiltrating the earth is the most common cause of landslides, according to Brian Collins, a research civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey. In California, these types of landslides are typically triggered during a big rainy season.
But there is another factor at play. The Palos Verdes Peninsula — like Laguna Beach and San Clemente — is packed with people. Those people have sprinklers, gutters, irrigation systems and leaky pipes that all add water to the earth.
Inland, an area as hilly and craggy as the Palos Verdes Peninsula might not be expected to house roughly 65,000 people. But anywhere with a view of the ocean, with secluded canyons to hike and ride horses in, will always be attractive — especially right next to L.A.’s flat sprawl.
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What caused the slide?
There’s no official diagnosis on what caused the landslide. According to city officials, a geologist will study the site and draw a conclusion from there, reviewing both the history of the area and any recent changes to the land.
But geologists and structural experts have suggested a few likely culprits: land grading, rainfall or something as simple as a broken pipe.
The townhomes destroyed in the landslide were built in the 1970s, and according to Kyle Tourje, a structural assessor with Alpha Structural, much of the land was graded and reshaped to make room for buildable lots starting in the 1950s.
So even though lots might be relatively flat, if land was moved in order to make it flat, the soil might not be as compact as it should be. When soil is looser, it’s more susceptible to water.
Tourje said the record rainfall of winter and spring didn’t help, but he thinks the slide was likely caused by a concentrated water source such as a broken pipe or sewer drain.
“On a big graded tract like this, one line that feeds one sink of one single house can affect the soil,” he said. “Next month, your water bill is extremely high. Next thing you know, your house is at the bottom of the canyon.”
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Tourje works on landslide damage every week but only comes across slides of this magnitude a few times per year.
“This is a total loss. These homes will have to be completely demolished,” he said.
Bouali, on the other hand, says unless a smoking gun appears, such as a burst pipe or a resident’s $1,500 water bill for June, he’s leaning toward rainfall as the primary culprit.
“My guess is that there has been a slow decrease of the slope’s resisting forces due to infiltration of precipitation into the clay layers,” Bouali said, adding that even though the rain fell in the spring, it might take until July for the water to flow through the layers of clay.
He points to California’s Landslide Susceptibility map, which shows almost the entire peninsula as highly susceptible. Given the area’s geological makeup, as well as the roughly 20-degree downward slope upon which the homes were perched, the landslide didn’t necessarily come as a surprise.
Since the ‘70s, regulations have become stricter with limits on how steep builders can grade lots and requirements for more subsurface drainage systems and more compact soil.
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But those measures might not help if the slippery layer is 60 feet underneath all the grading and maybe several strata of bedrock, according to Tony Lee, a local geologist who has worked in the area for 30 years.
Lee said most of his clients come from other areas of the peninsula where slides are more prevalent, but he’s already received multiple calls from homeowners in Rolling Hills Estates wanting to get their properties checked.
The allure of living in a landslide zone
Common sense might suggest that the land is uninhabitable — that building homes on terrain prone to landslides will inevitably lead to disaster.
But California is a beautiful place, and Californians love looking at it. It’s the same reason that hillside homes are perched on stilts in a region that deals with devastating earthquakes. The same reason buyers flock to the fire-prone hills of Malibu or the Western Sierra or cram beach houses onto the sand as ocean levels rise.
“I’ll be here until I can’t be here anymore. I’ll slide away with the land,” said Claudia Gutierrez, a longtime resident of Portuguese Bend, an area about a mile southeast of the slide site that has been dealing with landslide issues of its own.
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If the Rolling Hills Estates landslide is the hare, moving quickly and aggressively, then the Portuguese Bend landslide is the tortoise, with the land slowly shifting roughly eight feet per year for the last 15 years.
It has caused chaos in the community, with houses sliding across property lines and roads warping into roller coasters. But according to Gutierrez, that hasn’t kept people away.
“We had homes in the middle of the active landslide zone that sold for more than $2 million last year,” she said. “I’m amazed.”
For newcomers, the peninsula offers not only great views but stellar schools, cool coastal weather, larger lots and a more relaxed, rural feel compared to the bustling cities surrounding it. And for longtime residents, even though they’d be able to sell their houses, the peninsula has become home — even if that home is slowly slipping out from under them.
According to local real estate agents, the landslides have never been a major concern to residents of Rolling Hills Estates.
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“People think this was an isolated incident,” said Mingli Wang, a longtime real estate agent in the area. “People believe their homes are safe. They don’t think it’ll happen to them.”
She noted that during home sales in the city, sellers disclose natural hazards such as the area being high-risk for fires or a dormant earthquake zone. But landslides are not part of the disclosure.
Wang is a resident herself, and she’s not concerned about the community’s safety going forward.
Steve Watts of Vista Sotheby’s International Realty said that landslides are never part of the conversation during a sale in the city.
“If your house is hanging off the edge of a cliff, they’ll sometimes get a soil report to check how deep the bedrock is. But it’s very minor,” he said.
Watts said the gated neighborhood where the homes slid into the canyon might see a slow market in the short-term, but sales will be back to normal before long.
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Zillow puts the median home value in Rolling Hills Estates at $1.918 million, nearly double the $1.067-million mark set in 2015. Many homes in the city face Torrance, missing many of the ocean views featured elsewhere on the peninsula, but still fetch prices north of $5 million. The cheapest single-family home currently on the market is offered at $1.8 million.
When Bouali, the geologist, leads classroom discussions about hazardous areas, the conversation inevitably leads to the question, “Why do people even live there?”
He said it often comes down to the cost of moving. And Southern California has an additional factor: most of the region deals with some sort of natural disaster risk, whether it’s a landslide, flood, wildfire or earthquake. Pick your poison.
That said, he added that he wouldn’t personally live on the peninsula.
When State Farm, California’s top home insurer, said it would no longer write new policies in the state in late May, homeowners began flocking to Farmers Insurance, the second-largest company in the field.
Now Farmers Insurance is signaling that it has no plans to fill the gap in the market. After seeing a surge in demand last month, Farmers said it has capped the number of new policies it will write in the state each month.
The Los Angeles-based insurer said that it was limiting new policies in California “to a level consistent with the volume we projected to write each month before recent market changes,” effective July 3, and is continuing to renew its existing policies.
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In other words, Farmers is pursuing business as usual — but in an insurance market that has gotten more than a little unusual in the last few months.
State Farm announced at the end of May that it was hitting pause on writing new homeowners policies in the state, while also committing to renewing its existing policies. Allstate, sixth in the rankings, hit pause late last year.
Business as usual for Farmers means adding about 7,000 new homeowners policies a month, said California Department of Insurance spokesperson Michael Soller. “We do not expect their footprint in the state to change significantly one way or another,” he said in a statement.
In 2022, Farmers policies made up a little under 15% of the $12-billion California market for homeowners insurance. State Farm, which had been on a five-year sprint to expand its market share in California before hitting pause, has more than 21% of the market.
Farmers said that “record-breaking inflation, severe weather events and reconstruction costs continuing to climb” were behind its decision, in a statement from spokesperson Luis Sahagun.
Rising construction and labor costs mean that repairing or rebuilding homes has become more expensive for insurers, and California’s recent periods of flood and fire have led to some years of major losses for home insurers.
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Farmers’ decision not to pick up the slack left by State Farm and Allstate is also driven by a basic insurance concept: Don’t insure every house on the block. Companies like to spread their risk across as wide an area as possible, so that if disaster strikes in one place, they aren’t left on the hook for too much of the damage on their own.
Although Farmers mentioned only inflation and severe weather, State Farm was more explicit when it announced its move, adding fire risk and the volatile reinsurance market — which has driven up costs for insurers to insure themselves in case of disasters — to its list of reasons to stop growing in the California market.
Insurance industry advocates have said that California’s insurance department, headed by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, has been too slow to approve necessary rate increases to keep pace with inflation and growing risk. The industry would also like to pass along reinsurance costs and use forward-looking fire risk models to set premium prices.
The insurance department, in turn, has encouraged companies to ask for all the rate increases they need at once, rather than parceling out requests over time. The department is also hosting a workshop later this week to discuss the forward-looking wildfire models that insurance companies would like to use when setting rates.
Gia Gray seems like a dream client for any bank: a well-off family doctor living in an exclusive Bay Area town, in a 5,000-square-foot mansion with a master bath bigger than my office.
With a credit score topping 800, she expected little drama when she and her husband decided to refinance their Danville home and two other investment properties in 2020 to capture some of the lowest interest rates in recent history — remember when 3% loans were a thing?
But after endless excuses and delays in her applications, “I started feeling Black,” Gray told me. Her bank, Wells Fargo, flat out turned her down on the investment properties, she said, and slow-rolled the application on her residence, coming up with new requirements as the process dragged on.
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“At the visceral level, I felt that something was not right,” she said.
Across the country, other borrowers have had similar experiences. Earlier this year, a federal court in Northern California, where Wells Fargo is headquartered, consolidated the claims of Gray and seven other Black plaintiffs into one case that may be certified as a class-action suit in coming months.
The lead attorney in the case, Los Angeles-based Dennis S. Ellis, says up to 750,000 minority customers nationwide — Black, Asian and Latino — could have been affected by what he sees as a pattern of discriminatory lending that left qualified borrowers denied or pushed into higher interest rates and more expensive loans.
It’s a form of modern-day economic redlining, he told me, that if proven true inflicted pain that resonated beyond the borrowers, many of whom lost out on a chance to save hundreds or thousands off their loans each month. It also hurt Black and minority communities as a whole, because it took away an exceptional chance to build generational wealth through affordable homeownership.
“Realizing the American dream of owning your own home is not just about having a safe place to live,” Ellis pointed out. “It’s about securing the future of generations that follow because of the incredible financial stability that homeownership provides.”
Ellis contends that the problem developed in part because Wells Fargo was short-staffed during the pandemic and relied on flawed algorithms and an automated system that may have had discrimination baked into it.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Wells Fargo was found to have discriminated. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice won a $175-million settlement against the bank, the second-largest fair-lending settlement in the department’s history, over allegations that Wells Fargo engaged in a pattern or practice of “discrimination against qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers in its mortgage lending from 2004 through 2009.”
The cities of Oakland and Philadelphia have also sued Wells Fargo for discriminatory lending practices; Philly settled its case for $10 million in 2019.
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Wells Fargo has been accused of holding fake job interviews with minority candidates for posts that had already been promised to other applicants, low-balling home appraisals and ignoring issues of discrimination that, as they come to light, may be harming the bank’s bottom line.
Wells Fargo has denied all of the allegations, including those made in this lawsuit. In a statement, the company said it was confident it was following all required guidelines and that its underwriting practices are consistently applied regardless of a customer’s race or ethnicity.
“These allegations against Wells Fargo stand in stark contrast to the company’s significant and long-term commitment to closing the minority home ownership gap,” the statement read.
It’s not just owning a home, though. It’s owning it on good terms.
Google tells me that a $500,000 30-year loan at 3% interest costs about $900 less a month than a loan at 6% interest — about $324,000 over its lifetime. For the folks who weren’t able to refinance, that’s money lining corporate pockets instead of paying for college or retirement or funding other investments.
The lawsuit alleges that in 2020, “at a time when millions of white Americans were able to take advantage of historically low-interest rates for home loans,” Wells Fargo approved 47% of refinancing applications from Black homeowners, 53% from Hispanic and/or Latino homeowners, and 67% from Asian American applicants. That compares with 71%, 79% and 85%, respectively, for these same groups across all other lenders, according to the lawsuit.
That same year, Wells Fargo approved 71% of residential refinancing applications from white borrowers.
Ouch, Wells Fargo. Those are some dismal numbers.
The lawsuit also alleges that federal data show Wells Fargo was more likely to approve refinancing applications from low-earning white borrowers than high-earning Black borrowers. Analyzing data from 8 million refinancing applications filed in 2020, Ellis and his team found white applicants earning less than $63,000 a year were “more likely to have their refinancing application approved by Wells Fargo than Black refinancing applicants earning between $120,000 and $168,000 a year,” according to the lawsuit.
The insidiousness of financial discrimination lies in how hard it is to prove on an individual basis — and in how hard it is to even believe it’s happening. The loan process can be so remote and impersonal — even more so during the isolation of the pandemic — that Gray and her co-plaintiffs were at first unsure if what they felt was really taking place.
Last week, Gray met two of those other borrowers in person at a news conference in San Francisco. I spoke with the three of them in a coffee shop afterward, but mostly I just listened, because there was a tremendous sense of relief and camaraderie as they shared how similar their experiences had been.
Until the lawsuit, Aaron Braxton, a Los Angeles homeowner, had been left wondering, “Are they doing this to everybody, or are they only doing this to Black folks?” he said.
Braxton was one of the first to file a complaint in 2020. A noted screenwriter, playwright and teacher, Braxton had owned his home in a historically Black neighborhood near USC for about 18 years and owed a fraction of what it was worth when he went to refinance his Wells Fargo mortgage. Like Gray, it was one thing after another, despite never missing a payment and having good credit. By the time Wells Fargo approved his loan, the interest rate had climbed and so had his frustration.
“I told them, ‘I am going to sue you. I don’t know how I’m going to sue you, but I am going to sue you, because I know I am not the only one,’” he said.
Gray was scrolling through her phone during the pandemic lockdown and came across a story about Braxton. “It was like a bright bulb,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this happened to someone else.’”
Christopher Williams flew in from Georgia, where he owns a home and rental properties. He worked in the financial industry for decades, so when Wells Fargo offered him a loan at 3 points higher than he expected, he asked why. Williams said the bank couldn’t give him clear answers, and he too began to suspect it was about the color of his skin.
Now, Williams said he wonders how many people there are who accepted loans at higher rates or with higher costs without knowing it. “How many of those loans and lines of credit are on the books of Wells Fargo right now?” he asked.
Ellis will be in federal court in San Francisco for the lawsuit on Thursday, the anniversary of the death of George Floyd. He says like the movement Floyd’s death set off to address issues of social justice, he hopes this case can raise awareness of financial injustice and its toll — which he considers the “21st century battleground of civil rights.”
“Just as we’ve cried out against policing practices that kill Black lives, so we denounce Wells Fargo’s racially motivated banking practices that kill Black opportunity,” said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is also involved in the case.
Interest rates are not as compelling as the tragedy we witnessed with Floyd, but Crump and Ellis make an important point.
This is a capitalist joint.
Until we all have the same opportunities to create wealth, we’re left with the oppressed and the oppressors, who too often get away with strangling equity under the cover of paperwork and algorithms.
Apartment hunting in Southern California is notoriously difficult. In the last two years, the search turned particularly nightmarish.
In part for pandemic-related reasons, the number of units available to lease fell to historical lows. Rent soared.
Some apartments even had bidding wars — an unwelcome reality typically limited to the for-sale market.
But now, a little bit of sanity is returning.
If you’re looking for a new rental, don’t expect a deal, but you may find the search less maddening.
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What exactly is happening?
Simply put, there are more apartments for people to move into. Across the region, vacancy rates are rising after falling to decades-long lows in 2022 and 2021.
In Los Angeles Countyearly last year, only 3.7% of apartments were vacant and available, the lowest level since 2001, according to real estate data firm CoStar. Now that measure is up to 4.4%.
It was even worse in both the Inland Empire and Orange County, where the vacancy level fell to about 2% in 2021. In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, that set a record in a data set that goes back to 1982; in Orange County it was essentially equal to a record set in 1984.
Vacancy has now doubled in both areas, up to 5.4% in the Inland Empire and 4.1% in Orange County.
In Ventura and San Diego counties, vacancy similarly fell below 3% in 2021 and is now 3.8% in San Diego and 5.4% in Ventura.
Rob Warnock, a researcher with the rental website Apartment List, said vacancy fell so low because many people moved out of shared living situations with family or roommates in 2021 and 2022. They wanted a place of their own and essentially created a wave of new households that gobbled up available rentals.
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A rebounding economy, stimulus payments and a desire to no longer be cooped up with others like early in the pandemic probably helped drive the surge, Warnock said.
Now, the switch is flipped.
As consumers worry about inflation and the direction of the overall economy, they’re forming fewer households as new apartments continue to open up.
“Unemployment still looks good, but there is that uncertainty,” said Ryan Patap, an analyst with CoStar. “That makes people more cautious in spending up, committing to a new lease, moving out of their parents’ house — all of those dynamics.”
Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, said another factor may be at play.
“The mystery [was] people are leaving California — how come vacancies weren’t rising?” he said. “Maybe it’s starting to show up.”
What does that mean for me?
To be clear, vacancies are still far lower here than many markets around the country, which economists attribute to the difficulty of building housing in California. But if you are out there searching for a place, you may have an easier time than this time last year.
Michael Lucarelli is chief executive of RentSpree, a Sherman Oaks-based company that provides application and rent collection services for 41,000 leasing agents, property management firms and individual landlords in California.
With the rise in vacancy, he said renters are less likely to have to make snap decisions on whether a place is right for them, and he hears less and less about bidding wars at his client’s properties.
“It’s creating a little bit more leverage on the side of the renter,” Lucarelli.
What about rent?
By most measures, rent is still rising, butnot as fast as it was.
Rising vacancy levels have not only made it harder for landlords to charge more, but after years of sharp increases some tenants are tapped out.
According to data from real estate firm RealPage, average asking rent for a vacant L.A. County apartment during the first quarter of 2022 was up 17% from the same period a year earlier.
But by the first three months of this year, rent growth had slowed, with prices rising 6% from 2022 levels.
A similar slowdown was seen in the Inland Empire, as well as Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties.
Data from Apartment List and CoStar indicate a more favorable environment for renters.
According to CoStar, average rent is still positive in all Southern California counties, but rising less than RealPage data show.
According to Apartment List, the median rent for a vacant unit has turned slightly negative in the Inland Empire, Orange County and Ventura County, dropping by less than 2% in April from the previous year.
In L.A. County, median rent was up just 0.21%.
Warnock says he expects rent across L.A. County to also turn negative in coming months, but he doesn’t expect rent there and elsewhere in Southern California to see a sustained, or meaningful drop, because too few rentals are being built.
“A 1% annual rent decrease is not going to bring much comfort to someone who is out there searching,” he said, particularly when Apartment List data show rent in L.A. County is 11% higher than the start of the pandemic and 33% higher in the Inland Empire.
What if I can’t afford the housing that is listed for rent?
That’s not uncommon in expensive Southern California.
One option you have is Section 8, a federal program run by local authorities. If you meet the income qualifications and receive one of the coveted vouchers, you can find housing with a private landlord on the open market and you’ll pay roughly a third of your income toward rent with the government paying the rest.
However, there aren’t enough vouchers for everyone who could qualify.
You can check with your local government to see whether it is accepting applications, but it may not be. The city of Los Angeles opened its wait list last fall for the first time in five years, but it is now closed.
Another option you have is to apply to apartments reserved specifically for people of lower incomes. This can be government-owned public housing or housing built by nonprofits.
At times, for-profit developers include a handful of low-income units in their new projects as a condition of the project’s approval.
You can find more information on how to apply for these various apartments and subsidies in the following guides from The Times.
If I don’t want to move, will my rent to go up?
Potentially.
Landlords say their costs to manage and maintain buildings have risen along with overall inflation, meaning unless they cut back on those expenses, they’ll need to raise rent if they want to keep earning the same amount.
At the same time, rising vacancies can be a threat to a property owner’s bottom line, and many landlords are likely to be “more amenable to doing what it takes to keep you there,” Warnock said.
Some landlords have different financial motivations, however.
For example, one popular investment strategy in the real estate industry is to purchase buildings that have rent well below the typical going rate, then increase rents rapidly to what is considered market.
According to RealPage, whose data cover mostly large complexes, the average renewal increase for L.A. County tenants was 5.5% in the first quarter of 2023, down from from nearly 8% in the second quarter of 2022.
Is there any law that limits how high my rent can increase?
In most cases, yes.
In California, landlords of non-income restricted units can charge whatever they can get for vacant units but usually face some sort of limit on rent increases for existing tenants.
If you live in an apartment building built more than 15 years ago, a state rent cap law limits your annual rent increase to no more than 5%, plus inflation, with a maximum of a 10% increase. Since inflation is so high, the current cap is set at that 10% level.
Some cities have stricter rules often referred to as rent control or rent stabilization.
In the city of Los Angeles, buildings built on or before Oct. 1. 1978 — and even some new buildings — fall under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.
In the years before the pandemic, the law limited annual rent increases for existing tenants in those buildings to 3% or 4%.
Currently, city law prohibits any rent increases for existing tenants in rent stabilized buildings. The ban, passed in the early days of the pandemic, is scheduled to expire in 2024.
In most cases, if you live in a building built within the last 15 years, there are no legal limits to how much your rent can increase in both Los Angeles and statewide.
However, during declared states of emergencies — like during the recent storms — anti-price gouging rules come into effect and bar rent increases above 10%.
As of May 1, according the website for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, those anti-gouging rules currently apply only to Riverside, San Diego, Contra Costa and Yola counties. They are set to expire May 20.
More information on how to tell whether your building falls under some of these limits can be found here.
Are there any other tips I should know when looking for a new place?
Yes. Though vacancy is increasing, it is still tight and you may need to apply to multiple places before finding a home. With each landlord typically charging an application fee, those costs can add up.
If you want to limit fees, check to see whether the landlord does, or will, accept applications from companies like Zillow or RentSpree that allow you to apply to multiple properties for a flat rate
For more tips, check out The Times’ overall guide to renting in Southern California.
For the first time, San Diego has surpassed San Francisco for average rental rates, making the All-American City the nation’s third most expensive rental market, according to a Zillow report.
San Diego’s typical monthly rental rate in June was $3,175, exceeding San Francisco’s rent of $3,168. The rates represent a significant jump since February when San Francisco’s rents were 29% higher than San Diego’s, according to the online real estate site Zillow.
Still, San Diego and San Francisco rents were not the highest.
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San Jose had the nation’s highest monthly rent with $3,411, followed by New York City’s at $3,405. Zillow’s monthly rental report for June includes single-family homes, apartments, condominiums and townhouses.
Three other California cities were among the country’s 10 most expensive rental markets: Los Angeles had a typical rent of $2,983, while Riverside had a monthly rent of $2,573 and Sacramento’s was $2,319.
Rents across the country increased 0.6% from May to June, according to the Zillow Observed Rent Index, bringing the nationwide average rent to $2,054 — 4.1% higher than a year ago.
Rent in California is becoming increasingly difficult to afford, and low-rent units are harder to find. Sophia Wedeen, a research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, wrote in a blog post that the supply of rental units in California that are priced below $1,400 per month has gone down between 2011 and 2021.
During that decade, California lost 152,000 units that rented for less than $600. It also lost 633,000 units renting for between $600 and $1,000 and 677,000 units renting for between $1,000 and $1,399 per month.
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The percentage of Californians paying more than 30% of their income for housing — known as rent burden — has increased in recent years.
According to Harvard University’s 2023 State of the Nation’s Housing report, 54% of renter households were rent-burdened in 2019. In 2021, 57% of renter households in Los Angeles were rent-burdened.
In San Francisco, 43% of rental households were rent-burdened in 2019. That rate increased to 49% in 2021.
Librarian Miki Goral has lived in the massive Westside residential complex Barrington Plaza for more than three decades. She swims in the large heated pool nearly every day and, from her one-bedroom apartment on the 10th floor, she has a view of the ocean. The building is a 15-minute bus ride from her job at UCLA and it’s rent-controlled, allowing her to retain some certainty over housing costs even as rents in the neighborhood have skyrocketed.
Like many of the Plaza’s long-term tenants, Goral had planned to stay for many more years.
This month, she learned that she and each of the residents of the complex’s 577 occupied units were being evicted so that the owner could install fire sprinklers and other safety upgrades. Most were given four months to leave, though Goral and others who are at least 62 or disabled can take up to one year. But Goral can’t imagine leaving.
“I don’t want to move,” she said. “I’ve been here for 34 years. It’s my home.”
Three months after the end of pandemic-era protections limiting the ability of landlords to evict tenants,the owner of Barrington Plaza has initiated one of the largest mass evictions in L.A. in recent years, pushing hundreds of Westside tenants out of their homes at the same time that the city grapples with a housing crisis.
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Landlord Douglas Emmett Inc. says the move is necessary to install the sprinklers and other safety equipment in a complex with a history of dangerous fires. It has invoked the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict rent-stabilized tenants to remove units from the rental market.
Some tenants are already in the process of leaving, facing a significant jump in rent and the potential cruel irony that their own evictions — hundreds of Barrington residents dumped into the market at once — might drive up prices even more.
But Goral and others believe the company is improperly applying the law and that it can make the safety upgrades without permanently displacing them. They say they will fight to stay.
“In a period where we’re dealing with homelessness throughout the city and county, it’s a major issue that this company would suddenly put almost 600 people on the housing market to compete for housing,” Goral said. “It’s not a sensible thing to do.”
Housing officials say the city has little discretion once a property owner says they are taking a property off the rental market under the Ellis Act but that they are working to help residents relocate. City rules require landlords to pay tenants relocation assistance, amounts that range from about $9,000 to about $23,000, depending on how long they have lived in the apartment, their age, income and other factors.
“The impact of this is profound,” said Greg Good, senior advisor on policy and external affairs for the Los Angeles Housing Department. “There’s no way around that. It’s 577 units, and it will create significant disruption.”
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When it opened in 1962, Barrington Plaza was celebrated as the tallest residential complex west of Chicago and the biggest urban renewal project ever insured by the Federal Housing Administration. There were extensive gardens, a nine-hole putting green and a unique intercom system that allowed residents to dial two digits to call down for maids, sitters and caterers.
Over the decades, the apartments would change ownership multiple times and residentswould raise repeated safetyconcerns at the complex, which was exempted from laws requiring fire sprinklers because of when it was built.
On New Year’s Day in 1971, a Christmas tree caught fire, causing the building to be evacuated and the elevators to be removed from service for several days. In 2013, another fire injured several people, including a toddler, and displaced the residents of dozens of units. And in January 2020, another fire left a 19-year-old exchange student dead and several others injured. News stories featured images of a man clinging to the outside of the building several stories up as he tried to escape the blaze.
After that fire, eight floors in the complex’s tallest building were red-tagged, and they have remained vacant since.
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Eric Rose, a public relations executive working for Douglas Emmett, said in written responses to questions that when the company submitted plans to rebuild the damaged floors, the city conditioned its approval on the installation of sprinklers and other safety equipment throughout Barrington Plaza’s three towers.
Those changes cannot be done without vacating the three towersat the same time, Rose said, because building systems are shared among them and “structural changes, including changes to ceilings and walls, need to be made in order to carry the weight of the sprinkler system.”
This month, the company notified the city that it would withdraw the complex from the rental market under the Ellis Act, a 1985 state law that allows landlords to evict tenants in rent-stabilized apartments if, for instance, they are taking the building off the rental market to convert the units to condos.
Under city rules, owners invoking the Ellis Act must seek “in good faith” to remove it “permanently from rental housing use.”
Tenants and advocates say they believe the long-term plan is to rent the apartments once again. Because of that, they say, the evictions would be an improper use of the law.
“They want to renovate it. And they clearly want to re-rent it, and that’s not what the Ellis Act is about,” said tenant rights advocate Larry Gross, of the Coalition for Economic Survival.
He said the company should have used the city’s Tenant Habitability Program, under which landlords doing major renovations can temporarily relocate residents to comparable units until the work is done.
Rose says the Tenant Habitability Program is typically used for renovations that last days or months, not years.
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“At this time, the owners of Barrington Plaza are removing the units from the market and have options as to how those units will change, be rehabilitated through new life-safety measures or become something different,” Rose said.
He suggested that the apartments could eventually return to the rental market under rules laid out by the city.
Any rehabilitation of the complex will take years, he said, and “after that time, if the units were brought back onto the rental market, the owner would follow the obligations relative to former tenants as provided in those state and local rules.”
There are no plans to build new condominiums on the site, Rose said.
Residents have struggled to make sense of the lack of clarity about the building’s future.
Attorney Nima Farahani, who has conducted legal clinics and met with several of the Barrington tenants, said that under the Ellis Act, “if you really, in good faith, can’t be a landlord, you can stop being a landlord.”
But, he said, “you’ve got to go out of the rental business. End of story.”
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Under the law, if within two years a landlord rents an apartment vacated under the Ellis Act, they can be liable to former tenants for damages.
But after that, the consequences are less severe. If they rent within five years of the evictions, they must offer tenants a right of return with the same rent that they were paying when they were evicted, plus certain approved increases.
If the company rents again between five and 10 years, it must offer a right of return but can charge a market rate rent.
Advocates say that after two years, most residents will have resettled and be unlikely to return.
Residents have formed a tenants association, and many are preparing for fight the eviction. Some see it as part of a larger effort to protect affordable housing in Los Angeles.
A majority of the building’s tenants — who include a mix of retirees, working-class and white-collar workers and students — moved into the building in recent years. But more than 100 residents have lived at the Plaza for five or more years, according to city records. The median length of residency among those long-term tenants was 12 years. Some have lived there since the 1960s.
But even among those who have moved in more recently, there are residents who don’t want to go. Many say they chose the building because it was rent-stabilized, and that finding something similar will be next to impossible.
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Jacqui Fournier, 56, moved in to Barrington Plaza during the pandemic, in August 2020. She pays $1,595 for a studio on the 10th floor, a rate she believes was lower than it might have been under normal circumstances.
“We want to stay in our homes,” she said. “We cannot get, on the Westside, a comparable apartment at what we are paying now.”
The going rate for a studio apartment in the vicinity of Barrington Plaza is about $2,600, said Ryan Patap, senior director of market analytics with CoStar, which tracks real estate data.
The median rent paid by tenants at Barrington is $2,295, according to city data. That amount includes studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments.
Patap said it is possible that the large-scale evictions themselves could cause moderate rent increases in the surrounding neighborhood.
“This many renters probably would push up the rents. But to what extent, it’s hard to quantify,” he said.
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At the same time, it’s likely that many tenants won’t be able to remain in the neighborhood at all, because they wont be able to afford it, he said.
Chuck Martinez, a driver for Uber Eats, moved into Barrington Plaza in 2021. He knew it was the right place when he learned it was rent stabilized.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to need this,’ ” he said. “Looking back, I was happy I made the decision because now we’re dealing with inflation. The price of everything has gone up.”
He pays $1,850 a month for his studio on the 12th floor. From the windows that wrap around the corner unit, he can see Griffith Observatory and the Getty Center on a clear day.
“It’s a million-dollar view for $1,850,” he said.
For the last couple of weeks, when he’s not working he’s been meeting with other tenants, lawyers and advocates, trying to figure out if there is a way for him and others to avoid leaving.
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“I’m trying to save myself from losing my rent-stabilized apartment,” he said. “It’s the only way to try to keep something livable.”
Over the weekend, 12 houses on Peartree Lane in a gated subdivision of Rolling Hills Estates began to slide into the canyon that ran below their back patios. In the days since, several of the houses fell all the way in.
The owners of these homes are unlikely to get any financial assistance from their home insurers, at least under their normal homeowners policies.
The typical policy covers things like burst pipes, storm damage from wind, trees falling onto the house, liability for people who get injured on the property, and fire damage. But once big chunks of terrain get moving, the standard policy no longer applies — which could lead to financial ruin for homeowners in California, a state that logged more than 700 reported landslides in just the last year.
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Landslides, mudslides, sinkholes and other dislocations of the dirt are considered “earth movements” by the insurance industry, which fall outside the realm of usual home insurance.
If the dirt in question becomes very wet and rises up from the ground, that might turn into a mudflow, technically speaking, and be covered by flood insurance, something few Californians buy.
If the dirt is moved by one of California’s many tectonic faults, homeowners’ supplementary earthquake insurance steps into the picture, if they’ve ponied up for that. But a surface-based landslide does not fall under earthquake coverage.
And if earth movement is the cause of the damage, there isn’t much wiggle room on a typical policy, according to Janet Ruiz, director of strategic communication at the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group.
“If you put a claim in on your homeowners and it looks like it’s earth movement, they would probably deny the claim,” Ruiz said.
But there is a way out, for those willing to pay. Homeowners can get “difference in conditions” insurance through specialty insurers to cover all sorts of unfortunate happenings: earth movement, earthquakes, floods and the like.
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“For people with expensive homes on the hillsides, that could be an important type of coverage,” Ruiz said.
Even if your own home insurance doesn’t cover the damage, there are some scenarios in which other parties could be on the hook. If poorly maintained infrastructure is to blame for damage, homeowners could sue neighbors or local authorities to cover the costs of repair.
In some instances, California courts and insurance regulators have also decided that a normal homeowners policy will cover damage from earth movement — but only if the homeowner can prove that a mudslide stemmed from recent wildfire damage, after rains hit a hillside where all the vegetation burned down. Homeowners policies do cover fire damage, so if fire can be proved to be the “proximate cause” of a wave of mud hitting a house, then the insurance company could still be on the hook.
That doesn’t help the homeowners on Peartree Lane. There haven’t been any recent fires, and Ruiz noted that the canyon looks fairly dry.
“People use mudslide and landslide interchangeably, but I don’t think this one is a mudslide,” Ruiz said. “More of a drought slide,” though geologists on site could determine that the canyon walls were weakened by rains earlier this year, as one Rolling Hills Estates officialtold The Times.
State officials have announced that the homeowners are, however, eligible for property tax relief for their houses that now sit at the bottom of a ravine.
On Saturday night, David Zee and his family had only 20 minutes to get out of their home in a gated community in Rolling Hills Estates after the ground shifted and threatened to send it and other homes down a canyon.
Since then, the slide has gotten worse.
“It’s just amazing how quickly this all happened,” Zee, 52, said Monday morning after he returned to his street on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
“The ground is still moving,” he said. His home is “still standing, but I don’t know.”
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A dozen houses were evacuated because of a major ground shift.
Here is what we know:
What do we know about the cause?
Officials say they are still investigating.
Pete Goodrich, a Rolling Hills Estates building official, said geologists will inspect the site and decide what can be done.
The land movement “could be due to the extensive rains that we’ve had … but we don’t know,” Goodrich said.
Rolling Hills Estates Mayor Britt Huff said officials were surprised by the destruction.
“This neighborhood was built in 1978, and it’s been solid for 45 years,” Huff said. “So we’re very much in shock by what is happening here.”
Officials said they are monitoring other homes in the neighborhood for movement.
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What causes landslides?
In areas where the bedrock is very deep, rainwater can seep deep underground during multiple rainstorms. During a series of repeated heavy storms, water can eventually start to accumulate and build up pressure, The Times reported in 2017.
The pressure can destabilize an entire chunk of land, causing it to collapse downhill. Landslides can happen slowly and show warning signs, such as cracking or subtle movements, that allow people time to escape. But they also can strike rapidly with no warning, even on a rainless day months after the end of the rainy season.
Deep-seated landslides, which involve slides greater than 15 feet deep, often strike in areas with a history of wet winters. The U.S. Geological Survey has warned that such slides can become active many months after such events.
One such example occurred nearly two decades ago in Bluebird Canyon in Laguna Beach. On a foggy morning in June 2005, 17 homes were destroyed and 11 seriously damaged by a landslide that struck seemingly out of nowhere. Heavy rains had fallen from the previous December through February of that year, but no rainfall occurred just before or during the landslide.
It is still unclear whether rain was a factor in the Rolling Hills Estates slide.
What are the slide risks?
The Palos Verdes Peninsula has long been prone to landslides. A dormantlandslide complex has shaped the area for hundreds of thousands of years. It was reactivated 67 years ago and is threatening to destroy homes and infrastructure.
In 1997, workers from 18 small businesses evacuated two buildings in a Rolling Hills Estates office park as the walls began to warp, windows cracked and sidewalks buckled.
In the 1980s, land movement in the Flying Triangle — a sloping, sea-view area of Rolling Hills — destroyed several expensive homes.
The most dramatic slide currently in the peninsula is affecting Portuguese Bend, an area on the south side named after a whaling operation, now known for its natural beauty and native vegetation.
The geological phenomenon has hit a 240-acre area particularly hard over the last seven decades, causing fissures to open in the earth and homes to strain, buckle and drift, sometimes onto adjacent properties.
City officials are planning to mitigate the landslide before it’s too late.
“Something catastrophic is imminent,” Ara Mihranian, a city planner, told The Times in March. Since being named city manager in 2019, he has made slowing the landslide a primary focus.
The Portuguese Bend landslide was triggered in summer 1956 — nearly two decades before Rancho Palos Verdes became a city — when a Los Angeles County road crew was constructing an extension of Crenshaw Boulevard that would run from Crest Road to Palos Verdes Drive South.
The crew dug up thousands of tons of dirt for the project and dropped it on top of the ancient landslide zone, which hadn’t moved in 4,800 years. The extension was never completed, but the weight and movement of the dirt shifted the balance of the earth enough to reactivate the slide, sending the land into a slow-motion descent toward thesea.
In recent years, the landslide’s harm has been more incremental than the initial destruction in 1956 that tore up a community clubhouse and 130 area homes. City officials said the land moves sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically. Sometimes inches, sometimes feet.
Officials said it moves at a pace of roughly 8 feet, in a southwesterly direction, per year. Over the last 15 years, sections of land have moved from 100 to 225 feet horizontally and dropped 8 to 18 feet vertically.
The most noticeable damage is to Palos Verdes Drive South — the road that winds along the coastal cliffs — warping itinto a crooked, hilly mess with dips that make your stomach jump. The city has to send maintenance crews once a month to fill cracks, which costs roughly $1 million each year.
How are things in Rolling Hills Estates?
For the record:
12:32 p.m. July 11, 2023A previous version of this story said the Rolling Hills Estates neighborhood affected by the slides is on the northern side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It is in the southwestern part of the peninsula.
The homes affected by the ground shift were red-tagged after firefighters and investigators found them visibly leaning Saturday afternoon. The community is on the southwestern side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
The homes are continuing their gradual decline down the hillside, Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Sheila Kelliher said Monday morning.
“Things are still shifting there,” Kelliher said. “The hillside is still moving. We don’t know the extent of that movement, but geographical engineers are on their way to the site to further assess the situation.”
Times staff writers Jack Fleming and Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report.