Dean and Denise Wenner were sweet on the Cape Cod-style home from the moment they found it in 2019. It had five bedrooms spread over three levels, with decks that hung over Santa Monica Bay.
When the tide was up, you felt almost like you were on an ocean liner, with views that swept from Palos Verdes to Point Dume.
Now the Wenners are among more than 300 families along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu who lost their homes in the January firestorms, all of them facing even greater hurdles than their inland neighbors in trying to rebuild homes that most never planned to leave.
The reason for extra anxiety along Pacific Coast Highway? The very qualities that made the houses so special — their precarious toehold on the Pacific coast — will now make them particularly challenging to rebuild.
Already burned by a fire that came from the north and east, the owners are being required to rebuild their homes to ward off ever-rising seas and fiercer storms coming from the south and west.
That will mean not just incorporating the fireproofing measures now required of homes throughout California’s fire zones but propping the homes many feet higher and constructing sturdier seawalls — measures meant to protect the homes and their septic systems from ocean encroachment that grows ever greater as the Earth’s climate warms.
Reconstruction along the Malibu coast underscores a truth repeated many times in inland communities: While the laws of nature cry out that this is inhospitable ground, the politics of tragedy and the laws of private property demand that the Renners and their neighbors have a chance to rebuild.
“Right now it would be political suicide for anyone in public office to talk about not rebuilding everything and anything, after the fires,” said one longtime observer of coastal development, who asked not to be named to avoid alienating Malibu homeowners. “This is not a time that invites the most thoughtful policy discussion.”
That means no one in political leadership — from Malibu City Hall to the governor’s mansion — has been willing to raise another alternative, favored by some academics and climate policy analysts: removing homes along the shoreline to accommodate the advancing ocean.
“I think we suffer from what I call a short disaster memory. We want to get in there and build and rebuild as fast as we can,” said Gary Griggs, a UC Santa Cruz oceanographer and coastal geologist who wrote “California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State.” But the impermanence of coastal construction ”is not something most people are interested in hearing about.”
It’s not hard to understand how broad public policy concerns like climate change and coastal erosion get overwhelmed by the urgent grief of families that lost homes and possessions in the Palisades fire.
Many of the homeowners along the eastern Malibu coast inherited homes and have most of their wealth invested in the properties. The fire victims say they only want what other victims of the January fires want — a chance to put their homes and their lives back together.
Wenner, a 57-year-old engineer, blamed the early January fire’s advance on the failure of officials to deploy firefighters before the blaze sprang up in Palisades Highlands.
“The reality is, the fire should have never made it over here,” he said. “Somebody took something from us. That never should have happened. And now we just want it back.”
Said Julie Sutton Bacino, whose 90-something parents lost the home on Big Rock Beach where they had lived since the 1950s: “To us, Malibu is in our bones, especially the ocean. We just want to rebuild what we had.”
Unlike other stretches of the disaster zone, the ocean’s presence has meant that damage has continued to slowly unfurl in the months since the fire tore up the coast, incinerating the vast majority of the homes from Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Carbon Canyon.
With little dry sand or protective shore along that stretch, the tide and waves have continued to wash charred debris from burned homes into Santa Monica Bay. With homes and their seawalls now heavily damaged, there’s a fear that the already vulnerable Highway 1 will be more exposed to erosion.
And hundreds of individual septic systems that collected human waste at each of the houses remain buried under debris. That means most of the tanks have been unexamined, and unpumped, for more than two months, raising fear that waste could leak into the ocean.
“It’s really top of mind, because it’s Malibu and protecting the environment is part of our mission statement,” Malibu Mayor Doug Stewart said in an interview. “And every day that goes by, it just hurts us a little bit more.”
Engineers say they can’t examine the waste systems until the fire debris on top of them is trucked away. The Army Corps of Engineers has begun that work along La Costa Beach, but many of the lots down the coast are steeper and will require more finesse to minimize further damage to septic systems.
The requirement to restore and possibly replace on-site wastewater treatment systems has provoked particular anxiety among Malibu homeowners. Many of them will be required to install bigger tanks and better protective devices, potentially driving costs to $250,000 or more.
Fearing such a price tag, some residents say the city should consider building a sewer. Such a proposal has been anathema in Malibu for decades, with the community’s cityhood in 1991 partly tied to a desire to prevent Los Angeles County from installing sewers, out of fear that would spark unbridled development.
Stewart said his bigger concern today is that it would take too long to build a consensus, and then to engineer and build the system.
“We want to get people back in their houses, and with the sewer system there are major hurdles,” Stewart said. “Let’s not kid ourselves and think we can wait three or four or five years to get a sewer system and then start rebuilding homes.”
The city has been staging a series of hearings to help residents understand what will be required to rebuild.
Some homeowners have banded together to try to share some of their expenses, proposing, for example, to build common seawalls to protect adjoining properties. But that’s not possible for everyone, and some dread the price of the coastal “armoring,” which can include new concrete pilings and foundations.
“For all of that, a homeowner might have spent millions before they have spent even one dollar on the house itself,” said Doug Burdge, an architect who has worked in Malibu for decades. “It’s easy to require all this, but who is paying for it?”
Some of the burden on the owners appeared to be reduced when Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the waiver of the California Environmental Quality Act and the state Coastal Act. Builders have protested in the past that satisfying the requirements of the two laws can take years and add enormously to costs.
The Coastal Commission has frowned on seawalls, which have been shown to increase erosion overall and to prevent the “recharging” of beaches that naturally occurs when the surf gobbles up dry land.
But resistance to seawalls appears tabled after the action by Newsom.
Many coastal homeowners also wanted it known that they do not fit the rich-and-famous Malibu stereotype, since they inherited their properties and live on relatively modest incomes.
Regardless of their wealth, most of the fire victims are also trying to figure out how to rebuild with insurance adjusters still assessing the damage and eventual payouts not expected, in most cases, to cover all their costs.
Wenner said that with reconstruction costs spiraling to $1,000 a square foot or more, he doesn’t expect his policy to cover it all, even if he collects the maximum $3-million coverage allowed under the California Fair Plan.
Wenner said he feels it’s urgent to get things moving because “the longer it takes you to rebuild the more it’s going to cost everyone. It just mounts and the whole challenge becomes steeper.”
Many of the homes along this stretch of PCH date back to the 1940s, some even earlier, a time before anyone talked about climate change, rising ocean levels and before the 1976 Coastal Act enforced the public’s right to access the shore.
Scientists predict the challenges along the entire coast will only grow with time, with some projections putting sea level rise at up to 9 feet by the end of this century. But it’s extreme weather, and bigger and more energetic waves connected to the warming climate, that could be the bigger threat to coastal structures, said Griggs, the UC Santa Cruz scientist.
Despite the political sentiment pushing rebuilding ahead, others who have not actively engaged in the public debate over rebuilding say they wish local and state governments would pause and reflect on the unique nature of the beach properties. Many lots along the eastern Malibu shore reach over the mean tide line — the boundary between private property and land that belongs to the public.
“The public has a portfolio with the public land along this stretch,“ said Wade Graham, a historian who taught urban and environmental policy at Pepperdine University in Malibu. “I think it’s really problematic to allow those houses to be rebuilt on that stretch of highway, where they probably shouldn’t be in the 21st century.”
Environmental advocates have encouraged a strategy of “managed retreat” for particularly vulnerable properties — essentially removing human-made structures that impede the erosion that typically would occur along the shore.
A stretch of Highway 1 near Hearst Castle was relocated to accommodate the rising ocean, as was a parking lot in Ventura. After Superstorm Sandy, some homeowners in Staten Island were only too happy to move away from the advancing ocean. The government paid $120 million to buy out 300 of them.
In 2021, state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) won approval for a bill that would have provided low-interest loans to allow local governments to buy up properties at risk of falling into the ocean. Allen’s plan then would have leased out the homes at market rents, to help repay the loans.
Once the ocean could no longer be held at bay, the Allen bill envisioned demolishing buildings and converting the land to open space or public parkland. “Studies show that society as a whole saves $6 in avoided costs for every $1 spent to acquire or demolish flood-prone buildings before disaster hits,” an argument for the bill said.
Newsom vetoed the bill, saying that it might have been worthy but “should be considered within a comprehensive lens that evaluates properties to be included in a statewide plan.”
Michael Wellborn, board president of the California Watershed Network, wondered if there might be a land trust or other nonprofit that could purchase some of the burned Malibu properties, opening up ocean views that haven’t been seen in a century.
“We have no interest in an aggressive, take-the-land approach,” Wellborn said. “But there are some people who will feel it’s too risky to stay in place. So it might be prime time for [a nongovernmental organization] to acquire some of that land for open space and preservation.”
Wenner and many others in Malibu insist that time for retreat has not arrived. He said he is working closely with many of his neighbors, hoping that their concerted plans will mean an earlier lot cleanup by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Wenners, who relocated from Texas, recalled how intimately they got to feel their home’s precarious perch in the winter of 2019. A big storm sent waves crashing into their seawall, through their deck and into their first-floor windows.
“The house was rattling so much it scared the hell out of us,” he recalled. But he also remembered the many mornings sitting on his deck, with his coffee, watching seals lolling on the nearby rocks.
“When you’re out on the deck or down on the beach, everything just disappears,” he said. “It’s the best.”
Wenner recently told his business partners he would need more time to focus on getting his house back.
“I need to be out there full time,” he said. “I’m going to take care of my house and I’m gonna help everybody else I can. … We’ve just got to get somebody to listen and let us help.”