Drive Sunset Cliffs Boulevard on a weekday morning and you will pass two work sites that have nothing to do with each other, or so it looks. Near Adair Street, orange cones ring a stretch of bluff where a city engineering team has been measuring, surveying, and presenting slides to a skeptical crowd. A few blocks south, past Osprey Street, a sign warns against cliff diving at a spot locals call Pappy's Point, and nobody stops for long enough to read it. Teenagers in wetsuits climb down anyway, phones already recording.
Both scenes are part of the same story. The rock underneath a $32 million seawall proposal is the same rock a viral cliff-jumping trend has turned into San Diego's most-filmed dare, and in 2026 that rock has made its instability impossible to ignore in either location.
The Cliffs Are Older Than the Debate About Them
Point Loma's bluffs formed roughly 75 million years ago, and San Diego State University geology professor Dr. Pat Abbott has spent years explaining what that timeline means in practice. After a bluff section near The Arch broke off on April 14, 2026, sending part of a popular jumping spot into the surf, Abbott told reporters the collapse was ordinary geology rather than a warning sign of something new. The rock fractures as the earth shifts and waves keep hitting it, the same process that shaped every arch and sea cave along this stretch of coast in the first place.
His timeline for the next collapse is honest in a way that resists the neat packaging of a news alert. He does not know if the next section goes in twenty years or twenty days, and he said as much when asked whether people should worry about standing near the edge.
"Doesn't mean it's going to come down today, it might be 20 years, but I don't want to be near it. I don't want it to be my day that it decides to come down."
That collapse near The Arch was not the only one this year. A separate localized failure in January 2026 took out a section of protective railing along the bluffs, according to city project engineer Kimberly Wender of Dokken Engineering, who presented the seawall proposal to residents at the Point Loma library in May. Two collapses in five months is not a pattern anyone tracked closely before this year. It is now the backdrop for everything else happening along the boulevard.
The Jump Spot Everyone Is Filming
Pappy's Point, located between Osprey and Froude Streets, has been an unofficial cliff-jumping spot for decades. What changed in 2026 is the audience. Footage of jumpers going off The Arch spread widely online, and the crowds that showed up to recreate it were larger than anything lifeguards had seen at that location before.
Fifteen-year-old Enzo Bledsoe drove in from Corona with his older brother Joe for what he described as his second visit in a matter of weeks. His read on the risk was straightforward: nothing bad happens on the smaller cliff, in his telling, unless someone tries something reckless alone. San Diego Fire-Rescue sees it differently. Public information officer Candace Hadley told reporters that the injuries logged in the weeks leading up to August were the kind that change a life permanently, not the kind you walk off. The department responded by adding lifeguard patrols and posting more warning signage, concentrated on the hours Hadley flagged as highest risk, which tend to fall later in the day when tides run higher.
None of this required new legislation. San Diego's municipal code already prohibits jumping or diving into the Pacific from any point connected to land that sits more than five feet above the water, which covers essentially all of Sunset Cliffs. The 2026 shift was enforcement and visibility, not the underlying rule.
The $32 Million Question at Spalding Point
Roughly a mile north, the city's answer to the same eroding bluffs looks nothing like a lifeguard truck. It looks like an engineering firm's slide deck.
The Sunset Cliffs Seawall Improvement Project would build a new concrete seawall on the west side of the boulevard, between Adair and Osprey Streets near Spalding Point, filling the gap between two existing seawalls. The scope extends beyond the wall itself:
- A new seawall section connecting the existing structures near Spalding Point
- Street resurfacing along the affected stretch of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard
- Curb ramp upgrades for accessibility
- Guardrail replacement following the January collapse
What has made the project contentious is less the scope than the price. Wender's team pegged the current design at approximately $32 million when they presented it to roughly fifty residents at the Point Loma Hervey Branch Library on May 12, 2026. Community members who had followed the project since it began two years earlier remembered a very different number.
| Project Stage | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|
| Original proposal, roughly two years earlier | Under $8 million |
| Current design, presented May 2026 | Approximately $32 million |
City staff attributed the increase to a fuller accounting of what protecting the roadway and public access actually requires as sea levels rise and storms intensify, a case Wender laid out in detail during the ninety-minute meeting. Not everyone in the room found that explanation sufficient.
What Residents Are Actually Arguing About
The pushback at the May meeting was not about whether the cliffs are eroding. Everyone in the room had already seen the railing that vanished in January. The disagreement was over whether a concrete seawall is the right answer inside a natural park.
Resident Nat Giraud pressed the point directly, asking city staff where the hardening stops if it starts here. Another resident raised a related question from the audience floor: had anyone modeled an artificial reef instead, since a reef structure can cut wave energy by 75 to 95 percent using a more natural approach than poured concrete. City staff acknowledged the question but did not present reef modeling as part of the current design. A separate question about whether the project would address the area's chronic parking shortage got a clear no. Parking infrastructure falls under the city's broader Coastal Resilience Master Plan, a different initiative on a different timeline.
Longtime Ocean Beach historian Kathy Blavatt raised a more technical concern about the coastline's geology itself, noting that the honeycomb of sea caves running beneath this stretch complicates any seawall design that assumes a uniform bluff face. Several attendees also flagged water runoff along the cliffs as an unresolved issue the current proposal does not fully address.
As of this fall, the project remains in the public input phase. No construction start date has been announced, and the design continues to move through community review.
Walking the Boulevard This Fall
For anyone who treats Sunset Cliffs as a regular stop on a dog walk, a sunset ritual, or the spot you take out-of-town family to see the arches, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Expect a visible lifeguard presence and more signage near Pappy's Point through the fall, particularly in the late afternoon hours Hadley identified as highest-risk. Expect the stretch near Adair and Osprey to keep showing up on city meeting agendas rather than construction schedules for the time being. And expect the ground itself to keep doing what it has done for 75 million years, on a timeline nobody, including the geologist most qualified to guess, is willing to pin down.
The two stories will likely keep running on separate tracks in the news. They are still, underneath, the same bluff.
For more on what is changing across the peninsula this year, our Point Loma neighborhood guide rounds up the rest of what residents have been tracking.
Whenever your own plans for the peninsula move from watching to deciding, Kris Gelbart is a phone call away. Start with a Request a Complimentary Home Valuation whenever the timing is right for you.
