Rancho Palos Verdes has moved forward with plans to permanently ban new construction across 715 acres of land that has been plagued by dramatic and destructive landslide movement over the last two years.
City councilmembers on Tuesday night voted unanimously to prohibit almost all new development, including home additions, throughout the landslide zone, which encompasses approximately 400 homes and 130 vacant, privately owned lots across three neighborhoods.
The change to the city’s building code would, however, permit repairs, restoration efforts and even the replacement of existing homes, so long as the updates don’t exceed the original, damaged home’s square footage. It also provides for a way for land owners to apply for an exception.
Tuesday’s vote is the first step to make permanent a moratorium that had been in place since land movement dramatically accelerated almost two years ago. The change will only take place after a final approval later this month. But with overwhelming support from city leaders, it appears likely to go into effect by the end of September.
Despite well-documented issues from the landslide since October 2023, the move faces opposition, especially from homeowners who live in areas that have recently stabilized. Criticism and concern have also come from landowners sitting on undeveloped lots, or from homeowners who were recently included in the designated landslide zone. That designation came after geologists confirmed that the recent movement had expanded past historic boundaries.
Many other homeowners, however, said they were in support of the ban.
City officials said the changes were about safety, and pointed to the last two years of unprecedented landslide movement. The movement has fractured homes, warped several roads and severed shut off electricity and gas service for hundreds. Though the area has long been known for recurring issues from a complex of ancient landslides that reemerged in the 1950s, the rate and scale of the movement since October 2023 has never before been recorded.
“We’re very sensitive about the land and the folks that are now included in this [prohibition] zone,” Mayor Pro Tem Paul Seo said at Tuesday’s city council meeting. “… But what it comes down to is public safety and well-being for the people on that land.”
The city had enacted a similar ban on development in the landslide zone decades ago, but it was repeatedly weakened by lawsuits and exceptions. City leaders on Tuesday said that some of the homes damaged in the recent movement were among a group that fought the initial construction ban, and won approval to build in the landslide zone through a lawsuit in the early 2000s. At least five recently applied for federal buyouts, city officials said.
