Long Beach is a monument to failure, not a shield
By Elena Rossi · Reporting from Rome ·
There is a particular kind of cinematic irony in the image of a massive sinkhole opening beneath the home of Nicolas Cage.
# The Concrete Illusion: Southern California's Coastal Collapse
A hole as deep as a two-story house recently opened beneath the home of Nicolas Cage. The Los Angeles Times reported that the void swallowed a portion of Sea Level Drive in Malibu, forcing three dozen families to flee their homes. While it looks like a movie set, the reality for those on the Long Beach Peninsula is more brutal. The New York Post reported that waves higher than a basketball hoop smashed seawalls and turned streets into lakes in minutes, sweeping a fleet of cars into the surf as resident David Black watched from the shore.
Can Concrete Hold the Tide?
For decades, we treated the coastline as a fixed border, a line of concrete we could defend with enough cement. Engineers argue that seawalls protect public equity and that we must save the history of these neighborhoods. But the Pacific is no longer negotiating. In Long Beach, Jen Pieracci-Jensen watches her boardwalk snap as the sand vanishes from beneath the planks. When the beach erodes, the wall does not shield the home; it simply stands as a slab of gray stone over a void.
The pattern is global. In 2023, Libya's dams burst, turning residential streets into graveyards. A year later, floods in Rio Grande do Sul swept away luxury estates. Florida saw the same collapse in 2021 when the ground simply opened. Mayor Rex Richardson called this a "climate emergency," but the warning came late. The city is repeating old mistakes, slapping "red tags" on condemned doors only after the earth has disappeared.
The 1953 Blueprint
The most dangerous impulse today is the belief that we can simply pour more concrete to find stability. Long Beach Fire Batt. Chief Jake Heflin asked how the city can "build up," but building higher is a strategy for a world that no longer exists.
To find a way forward, we must look to the Great Flood of 1953. That catastrophe in the American Midwest revealed that local, piecemeal fixes fail during a crisis. It sparked the Ohio Conservancy Act of 1914, which moved the cost of flood defense from the individual homeowner to organized districts. The law emerged because a sudden loss of land and life proved that the old way of managing water was a fantasy.
Just as the Midwest disaster forced the state to rethink its waterways, Tropical Storm Marie and the recent "super" El Niño signal the end of the beachfront era. Like the power grids that collapsed after Hurricane Maria in 2017, the current devastation in Southern California proves we have spent too much of our natural buffer—the dunes and marshes that once absorbed the blow of the tide.
Why We Must Move Inland
Joseph Irvin of the City of Malibu said this is not an isolated event. He mentioned a timeline of one month to repair the roads, but that promise does not hold water for homeowners who believe their property value is still anchored in the earth. It is not.
The only pragmatic path is to move homes away from the surf. We must stop paying to maintain the edge. This requires aggressive buyouts and the courage to let the beach be a beach again, rather than a precarious parking lot for the wealthy. If we continue to patch the seawalls, we are not defending a community; we are financing a slower collapse. The ocean has already claimed the land; it is time for the institutions to accept the result.
Sources
- Los Angeles Times: Malibu residents evacuate after massive, expanding sinkhole opens at Nicolas Cage's house
- ABC7 Los Angeles: Residents along Long Beach Peninsula told to evacuate as community endures more waves, high tides
- New York Post: Monster waves destroy Long Beach community as homeowners share chaotic aftermath