When the Good Life Crumbles : Real Estate: Coastal residents who see their homes slipping out from under them are using seawalls to fight the waves, but some officials warn that the structures are only making things worse.

When escrow closed in December, 1988, Wilbur Bootsma and Rick Allmain thought they had brokered a piece of the palm-laden California dream: a Leucadia home perched intimately on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Ninety feet above the crashing surf, they could gaze across the seemingly endless ocean expanse or walk down a private stairway to the beach below.

Then, less than a month after the pair moved in, the dream literally began to crumble beneath their feet.

The crashing waves, which often battered the shore like cannon blasts, and the underwater streams that honeycombed the sandstone below have combined to eat away large chunks of five hilltop properties in the coastal neighborhood.

Living in the Neptune Avenue home during the past year, Allmain said, was like sleeping on a fault line. Often the house would moan and shudder as the ground shifted beneath it.

Bathroom towel racks tore away from the walls. Plates slid from tables. By October, after the third major ground failure in less than 10 months, whole sections of their private stairway to the beach had collapsed.

The home, which once sat more than 10 feet from the edge of the bluff, hung precariously over a newly formed precipice, prompting city officials in Encinitas to declare both the property and the one next door a safety hazard.

In more than a decade on the job, one state Coastal Commission planner recently said, he has never seen a house come so close to toppling into the sea.

Last spring, in a frantic effort to save their investment, the five property owners began building a seawall--before seeking permits--to shore up the unstable bluff. Months later, after another major ground failure that damaged the fledgling project, the neighbors received the necessary emergency permit from the Coastal Commission.

The commission recently granted homeowners a permanent permit for the 90-foot-high structure, which officials say is the biggest of its kind in Encinitas, on the condition that the project also meet city environmental and construction standards.

Now the nervous property owners are awaiting the results of the city’s permit process--which includes a public hearing as well as geological and environmental surveys--dreading a decision that would force them to tear down their seawall, once again exposing their homes to the ocean’s whims.

For hundreds of North County coastal dwellers, the incident illustrates life on the edge, the daily gamble that their storybook life style on the doorstep of the sea will not suddenly bring about some violent and expensive consequences.

In recent years, property owners up and down the fragile coast have built makeshift seawalls--from piles of boulders and odd-looking wood contraptions to the fortress-like steel and concrete wall on Neptune Avenue--all in the hopes of shielding their homes from the restless and ruthless force of the Pacific.

Those efforts have escalated as the beaches that once served as a natural buffer between the cliffs and the sea have been stripped of sand. In many areas where the swells at one time crashed harmlessly hundreds of feet from the bluffs, the ocean now batters the land daily.

The pounding has undermined not only the foundation of the bluffs themselves, but also the properties that sit on top of them--often palatial homes that range anywhere in price from $850,000 to $2 million.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Encinitas Planning Director Craig Jones. “You’re talking about big investments here for some of the most highly coveted property in all of Southern California. But these properties are also fragile, subject to the constraints of natural conditions.

“The contrast makes for some very emotional issues with homeowners. And it puts cities like us in a weird position, because no matter how much money was paid for these very fragile properties, we have a legal obligation to protect the public health and safety.”

Most of the homes and condominiums atop the cliffs in North County were built from 1947 to 1977, a period marked by mostly benign storms and little erosion along the coast. Lulled into a false sense of security, developers hammered together homes near the edge of the bluffs, figuring they had a stable platform that would stand the test of time.

In recent years, however, coastal experts have come to believe that bluff erosion poses a profound threat to the high-priced homes stretching along the seaboard. During periods of heavy storms and high wave activity, they have seen undeveloped sections of bluff that eroded hundreds of feet inland in just a few days.

In the late 1970s, residences perched along the cliffs in Solana Beach, just south of Encinitas, were threatened by major ground failures. The immediate erosion was stemmed by concrete seawalls that now line much of the coast in the tiny community.

But the seawalls provide only a temporary solution, experts say. The flat-faced concrete also tends to heighten wave action and turbulence, increasing the chances that sand will be stripped from the beach. That can increase the scouring effect on adjacent, unprotected bluffs.

This month, the Coastal Commission will use a videotape recorded by a private resident in a study to determine exactly how many seawalls exist along the Encinitas shores and how they might be furthering coastal decay.

“One of our tasks will be to put together a comprehensive history of shoreline erosion there, to see how seawalls contributed to that decay,” coastal planner Paul Webb said. “By matching permits to what we actually find built on the coast, we also want to determine how many of those seawalls were constructed illegally.”

The fickle Encinitas coastline that prompted the study, planners say, has posed some disturbing surprises for homeowners who choose to brave such a life style. As Wilbur Bootsma and Rick Allmain discovered, the bluffs are kind to some, almost deadly to others.

Although properties on their block steadily fell away into the chilly Pacific, homes a short distance north and south of them stood as solid as the rock of Gibraltar.

In California, the coastal gamble contains another very serious element, planners say: earthquakes such as the one that shook most of Southern California last week could literally push some homeowners over the edge.

With the potential for such disaster, regulatory agencies such as the Coastal Commission have firmed up development requirements, prohibiting new homes within 40 feet of the cliff edges.

But, in particularly troubled spots such as Encinitas, more needs to be done, experts say.

“They need to develop a pro-active plan to protect against bluff erosion along their entire coastline,” Webb said. “They can’t get the job done by dealing with the problem on a narrow, case-by-case basis.”

Encinitas homeowners say they’re up to the task.

Recently, after the city last summer considered a beach protection ordinance that would have placed added constraints on bluff-top development, several groups of seaside homeowners formed a committee to discuss ways to stem the erosion.

Charlie Marvin, a member of the Seacoast Preservation Assn., which represents about 120 bluff-top homeowners in Encinitas, said the committee is also considering issues such as simplifying the emergency permit process for a seawall in the case of a bluff failure and allowing homeowners to rebuild if their homes collapse.

Part of the solution, homeowners say, lies in bringing sand back to the beach. Much of the southerly flow of sand along North County beaches has been cut off by the damming of rivers that once ran to the sea and the creation of a man-made harbor in Oceanside.

Homeowners hope the sand will eventually come from several planned projects to suck it from the floor of Oceanside harbor and Batiquitos Lagoon and deposit it back where it belongs, Marvin said.

Indeed, sand seems to be the only long-term way to save the fragile North County bluffs.

“The beaches in Encinitas used to be wide and beautiful, and they protected the bluffs,” Marvin said. “But more than 10 feet of beach has been lost from the beaches over the past 20 years. And that’s too much.”

Some local officials, meanwhile, maintain that many of the bluff-top homes never should have been built. They can’t understand why people persist in staying in them once disaster has struck.

Bill Weedman, an Encinitas city planner, said he gained a valuable insight into the gamble while walking with a city-contracted geologist along the bluffs near Neptune Avenue.

“I asked him if he’d ever own a house on the bluffs, and he said, ‘No way,’ and he didn’t know why anyone would,” Weedman said. “He said he’d buy on the other side of the street. That way he’d still be close enough to the ocean.

“And, with a second-story house, he might even have about the same view as the people perched on the bluffs.”

When they moved into the house at 710 Neptune Ave., Wilbur Bootsma and Rick Allmain bought more than an intimate ocean view. They bought what friends call the worst year of their lives--literally waiting for their home to teeter off its perch and into the surf.

Last spring, Allmain said, Neptune Avenue neighbors were told it would take months to receive an emergency permit to build a wall to steady the crumbling bluff. So they started building without one.

After part of the under-construction wall collapsed during a major ground shift in April, an emergency building permit was issued by Coastal Commission officials, who now say the seawall may well have contributed to the continued rapid demise of the bluff.

Allmain doesn’t buy that argument.

“We were so frustrated because we had no cooperation whatsoever from the city or the Coastal Commission,” he said. “We either had to build the wall or watch our home collapse.”

And, until the property can be shored up, selling the home is out of the question.

“When you have a home in that kind of peril, there’s no way to market it,” Allmain said. “The place is totally worthless until we can put it back together again.”

Some Encinitas city officials say the bluff-top gamblers will have to play the hand nature deals them.

“At some point in time, as those bluffs peel away, people are going to have to realize that some properties are just too fragile to build upon,” said Encinitas City Councilwoman Marjorie Gaines.

“But some people are just willing to take the risk. They’re willing to gamble with the ocean, which is a very powerful thing. And you can’t predict when that power will come to hurt you.”