12 Palos Verdes Homes Slid Into a Canyon — The Hill Isn't Done

On Saturday, July 8, 2023, the ground under Peartree Lane in Rolling Hills Estates, on California's Palos Verdes Peninsula, began to slide. Twelve families got about twenty minutes to pack, and within three days their houses had split apart and slid into the canyon below. A few miles south, in Rancho Palos Verdes, an ancient landslide woke up under hundreds of homes: by July 2024 the Portuguese Bend landslide was moving about eleven inches a week, the gas and power were cut off, and the famous glass Wayfarers Chapel had to be taken apart piece by piece. This is the story of a peninsula built on tilted volcanic clay: the Sunken City at Point Fermin that slid into the sea in 1929, the 1956 road project that reactivated Portuguese Bend and cost about 140 homes, the Abalone Cove slide of 1974 that moved up to forty feet a year, the stretch of Paseo del Mar that dropped toward the ocean in 2011, a new rocky shoreline pushed up out of the Pacific, a slide almost twice as deep as engineers had modeled, eleven wells pumping the hill dry, the bluff that tore away four backyards in September 2025, and a city that has spent $61.5 million trying to stop the ground. Because on this coast, water gets into the clay, and the hill starts sliding toward the sea — and an El Niño winter is coming. 🌊 Would you buy a house with an ocean view on the Palos Verdes Peninsula today, knowing the ground under it has moved before? Or should some of these hills be left to slide the way they always have? Let me know in the comments. Subscribe for more deep looks at what happens when the coast decides to move — and the most expensive homes are in the way. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Twelve Houses in Three Days 1:14 An Island Joined to the Land 2:12 Clay Like Soap 3:12 The Sunken City 4:14 A Road Wakes the Slide 5:09 One Hundred Forty Homes 6:02 Abalone Cove 7:14 A Road Into the Sea 8:09 Peartree Lane 9:09 The Wet Winters 10:02 The Glass Church 11:11 A Foot a Week 12:15 Lights Out 13:23 Living on a Moving Floor 14:26 Pumping the Hill Dry 15:27 September Twenty-Seventh, 2025 16:30 A Wet Winter 17:42 Less Than an Inch 18:45 El Niño 19:40 The Hill Always Moves #LastTideEstates #PalosVerdes #Landslide #RanchoPalosVerdes #PortugueseBend #RollingHillsEstates #California #Documentary