Hundreds of college students are moving back into apartments perched just feet from a crumbling ocean cliff, right as forecasters warn a powerful El Niño storm could send more of that cliff crashing into the sea.
Story Snapshot
- Santa Barbara County has a formal bluff policy covering the 80-odd buildings on Isla Vista’s Del Playa Drive
- Nine buildings sit within 15 feet of the crumbling edge, and three are already ruled unsafe to live in
- A February 2024 storm tore a deck off a building after the bluff underneath it crumbled
- The cliff erodes about six inches a year on average, but one single 2017 collapse tore away 10 feet at once
- Students moved back in this fall just as forecasters warned of a strong El Niño bringing heavy rain and surf
Cliffside Apartments Sit Feet From Collapse
University of California, Santa Barbara students are settling into rented homes along Del Playa Drive in Isla Vista, a strip of apartments built along an ocean bluff that keeps falling apart. Santa Barbara County officials have publicly said some of these buildings are already too dangerous to occupy. Planning and Development officials told reporters that three properties sit within five feet of the bluff edge and are “deemed unsafe to live in”.
This is not a new worry dreamed up by alarmists. County leaders adopted a formal bluff policy years ago because the danger was already obvious. That policy covers roughly 80 buildings along Del Playa Drive and lays out exactly how close a structure can get to the edge before officials step in. Yet students keep signing leases and moving in anyway, often with little sense of how close some homes sit to open air.
County’s Own Rules Show How Close the Danger Is
The county’s bluff policy spells out a step-by-step warning system. If any part of a building’s foundation sits within 20 feet of the edge, the county sends the owner a letter demanding a geotechnical study. Get within 15 feet, and it becomes a mandatory study backed by a formal violation notice. Once a foundation reaches 10 feet from the bluff face, the county orders people to vacate that part of the building.
That means the government already has a working map of which homes are closest to falling into the ocean. Nine buildings currently sit less than 15 feet from the edge. Local leaders are not guessing about the risk. They built an entire regulatory system around it, yet families and students still rent rooms in buildings sliding toward the same fate.
Storms Already Have Torn Buildings Apart
This is not a hypothetical future disaster. In February 2024, a storm chewed away at the bluff and ripped a deck clean off a Del Playa building. Four separate properties on that stretch, at 6741, 6743, 6745, and 6747 Del Playa Drive, all sat within 20 feet of the bluff face according to the county’s own erosion monitoring report from that same month. The ground gave way exactly where officials said it eventually would.
Erosion along this coastline averages about six inches a year, a pace that sounds slow until a single event undoes decades of gradual wear. In 2017, one collapse alone tore away 10 feet of cliff in a matter of moments, not years. The Santa Barbara Community College Board of Trustees called the pace of erosion urgent enough to pass a formal resolution backing safety upgrades for the bluffs.
Bureaucracy Moves Slow While the Ground Keeps Crumbling
Local reporting found that some at-risk Del Playa properties were left out of a storm evacuation alert in February 2024, meaning residents in genuine danger got no warning at all. A show tracking the bluffs found that 30 properties have already been cut back from the edge or are in the process of it, a tacit admission that the ground beneath these homes cannot be trusted.
California’s local government built a careful, multi-step system to track a well-documented hazard, then let landlords keep renting rooms to young people anyway. Families sending their kids to school deserve a straight answer about whether these homes are safe, not a bureaucratic point system that only forces action once a building is already teetering on the edge.
Sources:
independent.com, kcrw.com, content.civicplus.com, us.headtopics.com, sbcc.edu, dailynexus.com
