If you've walked the bluff above Capitola Village lately, you already know the fence is still there. What you might not know is that the City Council made it permanent this spring, and the reasoning behind that decision tells you more about the future of Depot Hill's coastline than most people who pass the closed section ever stop to consider.
Here's the short version: the stretch of the Grand Avenue pathway between Oakland Avenue and Saxon Avenue partially collapsed into the ocean in February 2025, dropping about 80 feet into the water below. The city spent over a year and $13,000 studying whether to rebuild it. In April 2026, the council decided not to. Instead of a path, Depot Hill is getting benches and a few extra parking spots at the street ends.
That decision makes more sense once you understand the arithmetic behind it, and the geology that's been building toward it for decades.
A Bluff That Has Been Failing in Pieces Since 2018
The current closure isn't the first. Back in 2018, the block between Oakland Avenue and Hollister Avenue gave way and was shut to foot traffic. The city studied relocating that section farther inland, where about 10 feet of buildable space existed, and decided against it. That segment has stayed closed for eight years.
Then in February 2025, the adjacent block, from Oakland to Saxon, failed the same way. Combined, that's roughly two consecutive blocks of what was once a continuous bluff-top walk, gone in two separate collapses seven years apart.
UC Santa Cruz professor of earth and planetary sciences Gary Griggs has studied this exact stretch of coastline and calls Depot Hill's bluff the most rapidly eroding section of cliff in Santa Cruz County, with roughly a foot of bluff disappearing every year over the past century. He's walked the site an estimated 50 times over the years and says there's a new collapse nearly every visit. The pattern isn't random. It's what the rock does here.
What the Engineers Actually Found
After the February 2025 collapse, the city hired Pacific Crest Engineering to assess the site. Their finding was specific: the bluff is made of what they called fragile marine terrace deposits, a type of layered rock that looks solid but fractures easily and washes out fast once saturated by rain and runoff.
The firm split the remaining pathway into two distinct segments for planning purposes. The western stretch, from Oakland to Saxon, sits closer to the eroding edge and is losing ground faster. The eastern stretch, from Saxon to Central Avenue, has more setback from the bluff and is comparatively stable. That's the section still open to walkers today.
Even if the city rebuilt the western segment exactly as recommended, narrower, moved as far inland as possible, with a new drainage system to stop water from pooling near the edge, the engineers warned it could still fail again within a decade without a much larger project to stabilize the entire cliff face. That larger project would run into the tens of millions of dollars and take years to permit.
The Numbers the Council Actually Weighed
This is where the decision stops being about geology and starts being about spreadsheet math, and it's worth walking through because the numbers explain the vote better than any quote from a council meeting.
The construction estimate for relocating the collapsed segment came in around $220,000, and that figure doesn't include permitting, final design, or environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Add those in, along with the drainage work Pacific Crest recommended, and the full project range climbed to somewhere between $400,000 and $700,000. Because the site sits on the coast, any work involving erosion control on the cliff face would also trigger a mandatory review by the California Coastal Commission, adding more time before a shovel ever touched the ground.
The city didn't have that money sitting around. To fund even the $13,000 concept study in December 2025, the council pulled $10,800 from a sea level rise adaptation project at Esplanade Park and another $2,200 from the Monterey Park playground budget. Councilmember Melinda Orbach cast the lone no vote on that funding move, flagging both the trade-off with other capital projects and the likelihood of property disputes with homeowners whose fences and landscaping now sit right up against the only available inland route.
By the time the full cost estimate landed on the council's desk in April 2026, Orbach's position had become the majority view. Her reasoning, in her own words at the meeting: spending more than $200,000 to relocate a path that geotechnical reports suggest might last only another 10 years isn't a responsible use of city funds. Councilmember Susan Westman put it more plainly, saying she'd love to see the pathway rebuilt but that the council shouldn't keep putting projects in its capital improvement plan that aren't realistic given what the bluff keeps doing.
Why West Cliff Got Rebuilt and Grand Avenue Didn't
If you've watched the multi-year rehabilitation of West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, this decision might look inconsistent. Both are public coastal walkways losing ground to the same ocean. Griggs, who has been asked this question directly, points to two differences that explain the gap.
The first is elevation. West Cliff sits roughly 30 feet above the water. Grand Avenue's bluff is 80 to 90 feet up, which means any stabilization work is more difficult and more expensive per linear foot. The second is usage. West Cliff is a public road carrying far more foot and bike traffic than a residential pathway serving a few blocks of Depot Hill homes, which makes it a higher priority for the limited dollars the city and county have for coastal armoring.
Griggs has been direct about what that means going forward. As he told a local reporter, there's no long-term fix that holds back the Pacific, only band-aids with different price tags and different lifespans. The city's April vote is effectively an acknowledgment of that reality rather than a rejection of the neighborhood.
What Your Walk Actually Looks Like Right Now
If you're planning a bluff walk from the Village side, the path is open and stable from Central Avenue west to Saxon Avenue. From there, the fence starts. The entire stretch from Saxon back through Oakland to Hollister, roughly two blocks, has been closed since the two separate collapses in 2018 and 2025, and based on the council's April decision, it's staying that way.
The city has committed to exploring improvements at the street ends instead of rebuilding the through-path itself, things like additional benches and a bit more parking near Oakland and Saxon. That work hadn't broken ground as of this writing. If you're used to walking the full stretch as a loop, plan on treating it as two separate out-and-back segments for now, with the middle section accessible only by looking at the water from a bench rather than walking past it.
Residents raised money and floated their own stabilization ideas for this bluff as far back as 2018, when the Depot Hill Bluff citizens group first proposed filling eroded sections or building a seawall. Those ideas are still on the table if neighbors want to pursue private fundraising, since the council left that door open even as it declined to fund the work itself.
None of this changes what makes Depot Hill worth walking in the first place: the ocean views, the historic cottages, the quiet that comes from being a few blocks above the Village noise. It just means the shape of a daily walk here has changed, and probably will keep changing, one collapsed block at a time.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home on or near the bluff, from foundation considerations to how proximity to an eroding edge factors into a sale, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this stretch of coastline closely. The Lyng-Vidrine Team works this exact pocket of Capitola and can walk you through what it actually means for a property here, whether you're settled in for the long run or just starting to ask questions.
