Two Clocks Are Running on the Palisades Bluff Right Now

Walk south along Paseo del Mar from White Point toward Point Fermin and you'll pass two fences within a mile of each other. The first, a corrugated steel barrier wrapping the old Sunken City ruins, has looked more or less the same since the 1980s. The second, a plywood and sound-barrier enclosure at Royal Palms Beach, wasn't there until last year and won't come down for at least another one. It's tempting to read both as the same story: the city finally getting around to the bluff. They aren't. One is a Los Angeles city proposal working through a coastal development permit. The other is a county sewer project that's been under construction since 2019 and is only now finishing its final stretch a few hundred yards from your morning walk.

That distinction matters if you live here, because the two projects run on completely different clocks, answer to completely different agencies, and will land on completely different timelines. Confuse them and you'll spend the next year expecting news that isn't coming from the source you think it is.

The Fence That Outlasted Every Proposal Before It

Sunken City has been off-limits since the ground beneath it started moving in 1929, dropping streets, sidewalks, and a handful of bungalows into the Pacific at a rate of eleven inches a day. Every few years since, someone has proposed opening it back up. In 2015, then-Councilman Joe Buscaino floated an automated gate that would lock itself at sunset. It never got built. The idea has resurfaced repeatedly, usually after a rescue call or a viral photo, and usually without funding attached.

This year is different in one specific way: there's actual money behind it. The Los Angeles City Council approved funding for environmental monitoring and safety upgrades to the upper section of the site, and Councilmember Tim McOsker's office has confirmed the work now includes designing a new fence, one that requires an actual coastal development permit rather than a maintenance patch. Communications director Sophie Gilchrist told reporters the office has no exact date for reopening but has told neighbors it may take another full year, adding that the project is actively moving forward.

That's a meaningful upgrade from a decade of proposals that stalled at the press release stage. It's still not a reopening. If you're waiting to hear that the fence has a working gate and daylight hours, the honest timeline points toward sometime in 2027, and even that's the agency's own estimate, not a firm date on a permit.

The Machine Digging Under Royal Palms

A few hundred yards south, the county has been quietly finishing something much larger and much less visible. The Clearwater Project is a seven-mile tunnel carrying treated water from the A.K. Warren Water Resource Facility in Carson to the existing ocean outfalls at Royal Palms Beach, replacing tunnels built in 1937 and 1958 that were never taken out of service because they can't be, and that nearly exceeded capacity during major storms in January 2017 and February 2024. The tunnel boring machine, nicknamed Rachel, passed the 5.9-mile mark in the summer of 2025. What's left is the connection work at the Royal Palms end, which is why the beach has had a temporary sound wall and limited parking since construction resumed there in March of this year.

The beach itself stays open. Restrooms have been relocated but remain in service. Parking is restricted to the areas north and south of the active work zone, which on a busy weekend means circling longer than you used to before finding a spot. The Sanitation Districts put the whole project's cost at roughly $700 million including design and management, funded through existing reserves and long-term financing rather than a new tax. For homeowners on the sewer system, the practical impact is a one-time increase of about five to seven dollars a year on top of a system-wide average service charge of $163, once existing debt on the old tunnels is paid off. It's not nothing, but it's not the kind of number that changes anyone's monthly budget.

The county's own timeline puts substantial completion at Royal Palms around 2027, the same rough window McOsker's office gave for the Sunken City fence. That overlap is a coincidence of scheduling, not coordination. Nobody at either agency is working from the other's calendar.

Two Agencies, Two Clocks

The overlap in the "roughly a year out" column is worth sitting with. If both estimates hold, this stretch of bluff could look meaningfully different by late 2027, but the two changes will arrive on their own schedules, driven by their own budgets, with no shared press release to announce either one.

What Doesn't Wait for Either Project

None of this touches the part of the bluff that runs on its own schedule regardless of fences or tunnels. The Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy keeps a recurring calendar at the White Point Nature Education Center at 1600 West Paseo del Mar, and it's been steady enough this year to set your watch by:

• A guided "Hidden Gems" nature walk on the third Saturday of most months, tracing the coastal sage scrub trail with a naturalist
• A free bird walk on the first Wednesday of the month, binoculars provided
• A native plant sale on the fourth Saturday, paired with a garden tour through the preserve's demonstration beds

The White Point Trail itself, a 1.3-mile loop through 102 acres of restored coastal sage scrub, stays open year-round and dog-friendly on a leash, climbing about 187 feet with ocean views toward Catalina the whole way. It was fenced off and unused for decades before a community restoration effort brought it back, which is its own reminder that not every long-closed piece of this coastline stays closed forever.

Walking the Bluff This Fall

If you're heading out this month, expect the fence at Sunken City to look exactly like it always has, expect tighter parking than usual if you're driving down to Royal Palms or White Point Beach, and expect the tide pools and the nature preserve to run exactly on schedule regardless of either project. The corner across from Point Fermin Park has anchored that stretch since 1946, one of the few fixtures on this bluff that predates every fence, tunnel, and reopening proposal discussed here.

What's actually new is that two agencies with no relationship to each other are both working toward rough 2027 finish lines on the same half-mile of coastline. Neither project is going to hand you a grand opening. Both are going to hand you incremental changes you'll only notice if you're paying attention to which fence belongs to which timeline.

If you've been watching this stretch of Paseo del Mar for a while and have questions about what any of it means for property nearby, or you just want to talk through what you're seeing on your next walk, the team at Randazzo Real Estate lives and works this coastline every day. Reach out anytime, no fence required.