Santa Cruz’s Waterfront Promenade Reaches an Inflection Point

No decisions, or even proposals, have been made yet, but the future of West Cliff has dominated chitchat around Santa Cruz lately, said Fran Grayson, who owns Steamer Lane Supply, a cafe on West Cliff Drive overlooking the water.

“People are talking about it and stressing about it,” Grayson told me. That’s especially true among the surfers who treasure the breaks off West Cliff that helped make Santa Cruz a worldwide surfing destination.

The damage from the recent storms to West Cliff Drive will cost $13 million to repair, the city manager, Matt Huffaker, said, and without additional steps, the Santa Cruz coastline could sustain as much as $1 billion in erosion and other climate-related damage by the end of the century. “We can’t simply build back in the same way,” he said.

As I walked along West Cliff Drive recently, savoring the salty air, pedestrians peered over plastic barriers to get a better look at a spot where the asphalt had crumbled into the sea.

Gretchen Bach, who lives on a stretch of West Cliff that was among the hardest hit by the storms, said the impacts had not been all bad. True, closing one lane of the road has meant fewer parking options for her and her neighbors, but also less car traffic and more breathing room for people on foot.

“People stop and talk to each other, there’s just more space — it’s like our community meeting place,” Bach, who works as a real estate agent, told me. “I’d trade that for parking any day.”

Debates similar to the one around West Cliff Drive are likely to play out across California in the coming decades as the effects of climate change take their toll. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, some 200,000 Californians and almost $17 billion in residential and commercial buildings are at risk from coastal flooding alone. Without intervention, many highways, airports and recreational beaches will be damaged or destroyed.