Long Beach pays for Rachel's ruins while renters lose their homes

By Imani Sutton · Reporting from Atlanta · October 13, 2026

As Tropical Storm Rachel battered Long Beach, city leaders tapped emergency reserves to patch private bulkheads, leaving displaced renters and broken budgets to shoulder the cost of coastal collapse.

When the bulkhead breaks on a budget built on sand

The Pacific doesn't care about your municipal balance sheet. When Tropical Storm Rachel pushed ashore in northern Baja California on Saturday night, the storm brought dangerous surf that rattled windows. It took out the historic boardwalk in Long Beach, California, and smashed right through the concrete and timber holding up the Peninsula. By Monday, the fire department had red-tagged 13 structures along Seaside Walk. Homes teetered with sand washed completely away from beneath their foundations, leaving gaping voids where solid earth used to be.

This is what happens when you build a city on a barrier bar and pretend physics will not catch up to the zoning map. As resident Gabriella Holt put it to ABC7 Los Angeles, "Long Beach is on sand, right?" "We're built on sand." "If the ocean gets far enough into the structures where the sand sits, it sucks it out." "This is what happens." Dan Fox, president of the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California, explained to the same outlet that waves pulled soil away from foundations, undermining the buildings.

The physical mechanics match the failure of engineered coastal protection systems during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In both cases, the structural failure of a human-made barrier transformed a severe weather event into the structural collapse of a residential foundation. A levee in New Orleans or a bulkhead in Long Beach failed. You can build all the seawalls you want. But when water gets behind the retaining structure and the bulkhead fails, the earth beneath the floorboards simply goes back to the sea.

Mayor Rex Richardson called it right when he told reporters that "our infrastructure was not built for this" and that the impacts are unprecedented. But let's look at the ledger. Just weeks before the storm, Richardson and City Manager Tom Modica fought a bruising fiscal year 2027 budget battle. They moved to close a $58.2 million structural deficit through service cuts, parking fine hikes, and library hour reductions. When the waves hit, Long Beach didn't have a resilient capital fund waiting to deploy. Instead, the city raided more than $1 million from its Tidelands emergency reserves—money restricted strictly to coastal uses—just to pay for emergency timber beams and cranes.

The renters are left holding the sandbags while the city waits for state checks

City Spokesman Laath Martin said life safety remains the top priority, with the city seeking reimbursement from the governor's Office of Emergency Services. That is cold comfort to the people living in the buildings. Take Paris Henken, a US competitive sailor aiming for the Olympics who rented an oceanfront apartment on the Peninsula. Henken watched as storms undid the place that gave her stability. Folks assume every home here belongs to a millionaire, but her community was far from that. "We are renters and can get up and move," Henken told the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Free Malaysia Today, "but the sense of stability this apartment gave us was everything to me."

While tenants like Henken face sudden displacement, city crews scramble to patch the breach. Assistant Chief Jake Heflin watched from a control post in the Claremont parking lot as firefighters used drone footage to review cracking and shifting homes. Crews hauled in lumber beams and used a crane to place roughly 30 heavy-duty sandbags, each weighing about 3,000 pounds, on the Peninsula. Beyond the immediate shoring, the city is eyeing an $11.4 million dredging project to widen the beach.

Yet the city's official stance leaves long-term demolition and cleanup as the financial responsibility of private property owners, who must call their insurers. That is the American climate adaptation strategy in a nutshell. Socialize the emergency sandbagging, privatize the ruin, and tell the renters to pack a bag.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Hurricane Sandy overwhelmed coastal defenses and flooded low-lying urban infrastructure, forcing mass evacuations of renters and homeowners across the Mid-Atlantic. Tropical Storm Rachel proves that coastal settlements ride on borrowed time and brittle engineering. National Weather Service meteorologist Kristan Lund noted that Rachel moved faster than anticipated, riding high morning tides with water levels 1 to 1.8 feet above predicted tides. Those elevated levels were driven by El Niño-related thermal expansion and a Kelvin wave.

The strongest case for the status quo collapses under the next high tide

Municipal boosters and property advocates argue that these storms are merely statistical anomalies handled by routine beach replenishment. From this viewpoint, spending millions on dredging and bulkhead repairs is a sufficient response to a temporary act of God. They believe local governments should stick to patching infrastructure rather than questioning whether anyone should build densely on dynamic sandbars.

The evidence flatly demolishes that comforting fiction. When a structural deficit eats the general fund and forces a city to tap restricted reserves, that is no anomaly. When days of pounding surf leave 13 structures red-tagged in a single neighborhood, reality takes over. The National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service track these systems constantly. But no federal forecast can paper over the fact that Southern California's coastal frontage was engineered for a climate that no longer exists.

Long Beach will likely scrape together the funds for its dredging project, and the state will eventually kick in disaster relief. But Mayor Richardson and the City Council cannot tax their way out of a rising sea with parking fine hikes. Nor can they sandbag their way past the laws of coastal geomorphology. The water is coming back for the rest of the Peninsula next month, next year, and every time the El Niño cycle aligns with a high tide.

If the city wants to survive the decade, it cannot leave renters and property owners to pay for the ruin alone. Long Beach must stop treating shoreline collapse as a surprise emergency. It must treat the beachfront as a shared public commons and fund radical retreat and defense.

Long Beach pays for Rachel's ruins while renters lose their homes

When the bulkhead breaks on a budget built on sand

The renters are left holding the sandbags while the city waits for state checks

The strongest case for the status quo collapses under the next high tide

Sources