I grew up around Geologists so I know all too well that the people who allow stuff like this to be zoned are almost always given more than enough warning about how it's going to end up, but they almost never listen. Land use planning must be one of the most frustrating careers.

nobody

Same was the case for the community that was destroyed in the Oso Landslide in 2014.

Also this is like a chapter from Rings of Saturn.

Haha, just kidding. The owners of these are going to make out like bandits on the insurance.

If it's anything like Hurricane Katrina, the insurance companies will find ways to screw you six ways from Sunday.

My parents went through 13 adjusters, 12 of whom approved their insurance claims until the 13th finally did what AIG wanted and denied it. They ended up taking AIG to court and finally ended up with a 5K settlement on a 5K house because AIG threatened to drag it through the court for years and my parents had already lost everything.

Fuck insurance companies.

And those really don't look like two million dollar vacation condos.

I think they're apartments. Probably very expensive ones. Anyone sticking around is in serious denial

I assumes they were tenements.

That building was very cheaply / hastily constructed.

Its 2 storey (good balance of cheap to build but good return on the floor area you can sell)
Flat bitumastic (cheap) roof with poor drainage (see the water pooling on it), no gutters (!??). Roof is very thin (ie. not very strong and with poor insulation) exposed roof structure at the front and back (which would cause cold bridging).
Its general structure is that of a bunch of cheap concrete block tubes with windows stuck on either end, resulting in poor ventilation and light for the interior rooms.

Seriously you could throw that up for buttons, totally not built to last, or even perform its function well.

I remember sometime in the 90s Portland got drenched with something like 80 days of straight rain. It wasn't even as heavy as the rain we had this year, but it was consistent enough to bring these houses up in the wealthy West Hills down, not because they were on a hill, but because they were on stilts on a hill. It was a disaster and whole houses went careening down the hill in the mudslides. I don't think anybody was killed or seriously hurt, but lesson learned, right? Don't build houses on a hill with stilts as a foundation, right?

Nope! They just rebuilt the houses as they were on what was left of the hill, like this kind of thing would never happen again. Same thing will happen here.

Tenements on the edge of a cliff with an ocean view = luxury apartments.

There is no way insurance is going to cover this.

There's enough information and convenient street view tags to pinpoint the actual addresses of these properties. Some financials are a matter of public record, and real estate broker sites will give it to you for free.

The two buildings on the end sold for M each in 2002, probably to the same management company. The median value is estimated .5M, if the cliff wasn't crumbling from underneath them that is.

Those two complexes are listed as "20 bedroom, 2 bath", which I assume means they each have 20 units and is some kind of typo.

They're not as luxury as I first thought, but at 5,000 per 1 bedroom unit, they're hardly budget.

Going by the info and the news stories that have popped up, this has been a known thing for years and the value is almost certainly being heavily affected by it.

FYI, a 4 bedroom duplex unit literally across the street will run you ~.5M, which is almost certainly being inflated due to the buildings blocking their view will soon either fall off the cliff or be demolished by the city.

I never understood why anybody would want beach front property: a common thing I hear said about the Pacific Northwest and living in a city is that "skiing is one hour that way and surfing's one hour the other way." If you're already there, then that makes skiing or surfing 3 hours away. It's like having pinball machines in your kitchen, living like that. The journey's just as important as the destination, and other stuff and things.

What if we just like mountains and an ocean?

I don't know, I've had to live with the constant threat of flooding and storm surge my entire life. We don't have basements here because of it and we generally bury people above ground.

Having lived through one life-destroying Hurricane, however, I'm in no mood to walk right into a second natural disaster in my life.

My dad, however, has lived through three life-destroying hurricanes in his 75 years.

TL;DR I'm not moving to Iowa or Idaho and I find it weird to live more than a few minutes from water. It's always been a constant presence in my life except for a brief time living in Texas and Arizona and then college.

IZ:

There's way safer places to live on the beach than perched on a sandstone cliff, especially in the PNW. Around here, there's plenty of solid rock you could live on top of that will be there in 50,000 years instead of just 50.

Not everyone aspires to live in an area where it's always clear and 70 degrees. I'm totally one of those people who would prefer to live on a cliff next to the pacific... but here, not in California. I used to stay in a oceanside clifftop condo between Lincoln City and Depoe Bay pretty regularly, and the whole vibe of that stretch of coast is awesome.

When I win the lottery or inherit millions from an uncle I never knew I had, I'm packing up my shit moving there forever.