Home Care In Rancho Palos Verdes, CA

Irvine-based The Bascom Group, LLC has acquired Highridge Apartments, a 257-unit value-add apartment community in the coastal community of Ranchos Palos Verdes. The purchase price was $127 million or $494,163 per unit. Annie Rice and Jamie Kline of JLL Capital Markets arranged the debt financing for the acquisition, while AXA Investment Managers US Inc. provided the acquisition loan. The JLL Investment Sales team led by Blake Rogers and Kevin Sheehan represented the seller. AMC will provide property management services for the community, and SD-Cap will manage the planned property renovations.

Highridge Apartments is an institutionally owned, 1972-vintage property that has undergone significant upgrades over the years, including new in-unit washers and dryers and enhanced amenities. The spacious units average 1,157 square feet – 21% larger than the submarket average – and include 28 loft-style residences with soaring ceilings. The community boasts an attractive unit mix, ample parking and numerous amenities, including two pools and spas, two fitness centers, a tennis court and a clubhouse.

Bascom plans to further elevate the property by renovating unit interiors to a Class “A” standard and enhancing amenities to create a more resort-style living experience.

Julie Schoenbachler, senior vice president of operations for Bascom, stated, “Our focus is on making smart, strategic upgrades that will improve the resident experience while increasing the property’s long-term value. With these targeted improvements, we are ensuring Highridge remains a top choice for residents who want space, convenience and a modernized community.”

Highridge Apartments stands apart as one of only three multifamily communities with over 100 units in the coastal Rancho Palos Verdes enclave.

Chad Sanderson, senior principal at Bascom, added, “Highridge Apartments is located in a highly competitive market with one of the tightest vacancy rates in all of Los Angeles County. We are pleased to have brought this unique deal to a successful close.”

Bascom has been one of the most active apartment buyers in Southern California since its inception in 1996, partnering with institutional and private capital. To date, Bascom has acquired 96 multifamily properties and 15,948 units in Southern California, with 40 of those properties and 6,092 units located in Los Angeles County.

Joe Ferguson, acquisitions manager for Bascom, added, “Few opportunities of scale ever arise in coastal Southern California and nearly none in Rancho Palos Verdes. We are excited to convert on this truly generational opportunity.”

Rancho Palos Verdes is on track to spend as much as it takes to run the entire city for the year on continued efforts to shore up landslide movement that has rendered dozens of homes uninhabitable.

City leaders this week approved taking $2 million from other infrastructure projects and directing it toward operating and maintaining dewatering wells in the Portuguese Bend landslide area, as well as filling fissures in Altamira Canyon. That puts the total cost at $33 million, or close to the $39 million earmarked to run the whole city for a year, officials said.

There has been some progress. The dewatering wells, which pump water from the ground, coupled with recent dry weather spells have led to land movement slowing down. At one point last year, land was moving at the rate of 1 foot a week, leading to power and gas shutdowns for hundreds of residents and the relocation of the historic Wayfarers Chapel. City officials said the dewatering wells have helped pump out more than 120 million gallons of water since September.

Forecasters are warning of rain this weekend and land that has been parched for months — and in fire zones, stripped of vegetation that can help stave off mudflows or landslides.

Why it matters

Since the fiscal year began on July 1, 2024, the city has spent $33 million from its reserves toward managing the landslide. That includes the dewatering wells, the winterization programs, the city-run sewer system and repairs to Palos Verdes Drive South.

“We're very close to spending the same amount as our general fund for operating the entire city on responding to the landslide,” said Ara Mihranian, Rancho Palos Verdes’ city manager, at Tuesday’s meeting.

What’s next

City officials have until the next council meeting to look at giving a $5-million loan or grant to the Abalone Cove Landslide Abatement District, an agency that operates some of its own dewatering wells. The money can be used to install more wells that pump water from the ground.

Abatement districts, Mihranian said, are exempt from certain requirements, like aligning with California Environmental Quality Act guidelines, which frees them from the kind of red tape the city faces.

It's a problem six decades in the making.

Residents of a picturesque coastline located along Rancho Palos Verdes in California are caught in the middle of a slow-moving landslide. According to radar images, the town was slipping into the ocean at a rate of 4 inches per week at one point.

The news isn't surprising to those living in the area since the residential region has been experiencing the slow-motion catastrophe for decades.

Updated data from NASA may indicate that the rate of movement is picking up, putting some 100 homes in jeopardy of falling into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.

You can learn more about the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide below, including what experts say is behind the area's destruction.

Rancho Palos Verdes in California is slowly slipping into the ocean.

NASA has used data from four different flyovers using Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) to put together a map of the region of Rancho Palos Verdes. After reviewing the map, NASA researchers were able to determine that the peninsula located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean has been slipping into the water at a faster rate than previously, according to Newsweek.

The most alarming period occurred between Sept. 18, 2024, and Oct. 17, 2024, which is when it was moving at an average of 4 inches per week. This was around the same time that Newsweek says officials had told residents that more than 100 homes in the neighborhood were at risk of falling into the Pacific Ocean.

The emergency has been ongoing in the region, and a state of emergency was declared by California Governor Gavin Newsom as a result.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) even partnered with California officials to offer homeowners $42 million to sell their homes and evacuate. Newsweek notes that the homeowners were only offered a buyout that accounted for 75% of their home's value. The city received just 85 applications, which will likely result in only 23 buyout offers.

The news isn't all bad for Rancho Palos Verdes. According to Newsweek, the rate of the landslide has slowed since NASA's initial alarming figures were released. While it doesn't mean that conditions are improving, it does mean that they aren't deteriorating quite as quickly as they were just months before.

What's causing the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide?

A landslide is caused when areas prone to gravitational pull (think slopes or hillsides) are covered in a material that is not strong enough to resist that pull. Things like snowmelt, rain, erosion, earthquakes, and human disturbances can all contribute to a material's lack of resistance on a slope, making it more likely to slide, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A combination of heavy rainfall in 2023 and 2024 and other extreme weather patterns seem to be behind these landslides, though.

According to CNN, an atmospheric river was largely to blame for that first part. The second was attributed to the fact that California is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to the extreme shifts between the wet winters and the dry summers.

With Climate change causing unprecedented extremes in the weather, the state is in a precarious position of either being flooded by surprise rains in the dry season or by making the region vulnerable to droughts and wildfires in the wet season.

Unfortunately, with the world's continued reliance on fossil fuels, situations like the one in Rancho Palos Verdes aren't likely to improve on their own.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used airborne radar to measure activity of the slow-moving Palos Verdes Peninsula landslide, which showed movement by as much as 4 inches per week.

Data gathered from four weeks in the fall of 2024 showed the speed of the movement to be "more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk," Alexander Handwerger, JPL landslide scientist said.

The information was provided to California officials to support the state's response to the landslides. In September 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Rancho Palos Verdes, as utilities were cut off, and homes evacuated due to drastic movement.

The affected area on the Palos Verdes Peninsula is part of a decades-long, slow-moving landslide, and the deluge of rainfall from storms in 2023 and 2024 significantly accelerated land movement.

Earlier this week, the City of Rancho Palos Verdes said the average movement for the entire landslide complex has decelerated by about 3% since December 2024.

The city reported that "in general, it appears that the movement rates are reaching a steady state of significantly reduced movement ...," due to the dewatering wells, and dry conditions. A total of eleven dewatering wells have been installed since Sept. 2024, serving as underground drains to extract water that contributes to land movement. This week, the council approved eight to ten new deep dewatering wells.

Through the Federal Emergency Management Agency's $42 million Voluntary Property Buyout Program, the city anticipates being able to offer buyouts for 23 damaged properties within the landslide areas. Of these buyouts, 15 are expected for red-tagged properties, and eight for yellow-tagged properties.

The city council also extended by 60 days the local emergency declarations in the landslide area, prohibiting bicycles, motorcycles, and other similar wheeled vehicles along the approximate 2-mile stretch of Palos Verdes Drive South, from the site where Wayfarers Chapel was to Schooner Drive.

Julie Sharp

Julie Sharp is a digital producer at CBS Los Angeles. She is a South Bay native and majored in print journalism at Cal State University Long Beach.

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used data from an airborne radar to measure the movement of the slow-moving landslides on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County. The analysis determined that, during a period of four weeks in the fall of 2024, land in the residential area slid toward the ocean by as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) per week.

Portions of the peninsula, which juts into the Pacific Ocean just south of the city of Los Angeles, is part of an ancient complex of landslides and has been moving for at least the past six decades, affecting hundreds of buildings in local communities. The motion accelerated and the active area expanded following record-breaking rainfall in Southern California in 2023 and another heavy-precipitation winter in 2024.

To create this visualization, the Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team used data from four flights of NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) that took place between Sept. 18 and Oct. 17. The UAVSAR instrument was mounted to a Gulfstream III jet flown out of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, and the four flights were planned to estimate the speed and direction of the landslides in three dimensions.

In the image, colors indicate how fast parts of the landslide complex were moving in late September and October, with the darkest reds indicating the highest speeds. The arrows represent the direction of horizontal motion. The white solid lines are the boundaries of active landslide areas as defined in 2007 by the California Geological Survey.

The insights from the UAVSAR flights were part of a package of analyses by the ARIA team that also used data from ESA's (the European Space Agency's) Copernicus Sentinel-1A/B satellites. The analyses were provided to California officials to support the state's response to the landslides and made available to the public at NASA's Disaster Mapping Portal.

The ARIA mission is a collaboration between JPL and Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, to leverage radar and optical remote-sensing, GPS, and seismic observations for science as well as to aid in disaster response. The project investigates the processes and impacts of earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, fires, subsurface fluid movement, and other natural hazards.

UAVSAR has flown thousands of radar missions around the world since 2007 studying phenomena such as glaciers and ice sheets, vegetation in ecosystems, and natural hazards like earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides.