If you have walked or biked the stretch of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard between Adair and Osprey Streets this year, you have probably noticed the caution tape. Sections of the cliffside path near the Sunset Cliffs sign have been closed off, and most people do what people do with caution tape near a great view: they duck under it anyway. The bigger disruption is what happens next. With the pedestrian route blocked, walkers and joggers get pushed into the bike lane, which pushes cyclists closer to car traffic on a boulevard that was already tight at sunset.
Ask around Point Loma why this is happening and you will get two different answers, often from two different neighbors standing on the same sidewalk. One will tell you the city is finally building a seawall. The other will tell you the city is about to make the whole boulevard one-way and rip out half the parking. Both are talking about real city projects. Neither is talking about the same one. That confusion is not a side detail here. It is the actual story, and understanding which project does what is the difference between knowing what to expect this fall and being surprised by it.
Two City Projects, One Stretch of Road
The first project is the Sunset Cliffs Seawall Improvement Project, a targeted engineering fix for one eroding section of coastline. The second is the Coastal Resilience Master Plan, a broader climate adaptation plan the City Council adopted in September 2025 that covers pilot sites in Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, and La Jolla in addition to Sunset Cliffs. The city has been explicit that these are separate efforts with separate scopes, purposes, and timelines. On the ground, they overlap almost exactly, both physically, since they cover the same short run of road, and conceptually, since both exist because the bluffs are eroding faster than expected.
The seawall project traces back further. City documents date the formal capital project to 2022, though residents who attended the May community meeting came away with the understanding that planning had actually started in 2018 and expanded from there. That is a small discrepancy, but it says something real: by the time most Point Loma residents heard anything official, a lot of the groundwork had already been laid without them.
The Coastal Resilience Master Plan is the newer and, for daily life on the boulevard, potentially more disruptive of the two. Its Phase 2 work, funded through a State Coastal Conservancy grant, covers four sites: Tourmaline Beach in Pacific Beach, Dog Beach and the beachfront in Ocean Beach, and Sunset Cliffs. For Sunset Cliffs specifically, the plan on the table includes a separated pedestrian path, removal of parking on the west side of the boulevard, and converting the stretch south of Monaco Street to one southbound lane only. A city spokesperson has said this planning phase, which includes pricing out construction costs, is expected to wrap up by January 2027. That is a design and cost-estimate milestone, not a groundbreaking date, which matters if you are trying to figure out how soon anything actually changes on your street.
A Meeting That Arrived After Most of the Decisions Were Made
The city held its first public meeting on the seawall project on May 12, 2026, at the Haas Community Room inside the Point Loma/Hervey Branch Library on Voltaire Street. Roughly 50 people showed up for a session that ran an hour and a half and fielded more than 30 questions. Kimberly Wender, senior project engineer with Dokken Engineering, walked the room through design options, permitting, cost estimates, and next steps, with city program manager Elizabeth Schroth-Nichols handling follow-up questions.
By the time that meeting happened, the seawall design was already 60 percent complete. For a lot of residents, that timing was the real news of the evening, more than the wall itself. A room full of people who live along or near the boulevard were being asked for feedback on a project that was, by the city's own account, more than half designed already.
What $32 Million Actually Buys
The number attached to the seawall project is roughly $32.59 million, and it is worth sitting with what that pays for. The project covers 335 lineal feet, split between a 205-foot tieback wall and a 130-foot secant wall, filling the gap between two existing concrete seawalls near Spalding Point. Do the math and you land close to $100,000 per foot. For scale, 335 feet is shorter than an American football field including its end zones. That is the size of the physical footprint carrying an eight-figure price tag, and it does not include the broader Coastal Resilience Master Plan work happening around it.
The reason the number is that high traces back to what the city's own erosion assessment found: in some spots along this stretch, as little as 12 feet separates the edge of the bluff from the roadway. A localized collapse in January 2026 took out protective railing that has not been replaced. Engineers describe caves already undercutting the bluffs closer to the road than anyone would like. That is the case for building something. It is also why residents keep asking why, if the situation is that urgent, the city needed until 2026 to hold its first public meeting.
The Design Is Almost Done. The Money Isn't There.
Here is the part that tends to surprise people who assume a fully designed project is a project that is actually happening. As of spring 2026, the seawall design sits at roughly 60 percent, with final design and permitting targeted for completion by summer 2027. Reporting from June 2026 put a possible construction start in late winter 2027, with permitting and funding expected to take around 20 months from that point. But there is currently no money allocated for construction. The design work is grant-funded and moving forward. The build itself is not funded yet.
That gap between "almost designed" and "not funded" is the honest answer to the question everyone along the boulevard eventually asks: when does this actually get fixed? Right now, nobody can say with certainty, and anyone who tells you a firm construction date is ahead of what the city itself has confirmed.
The Fight Nobody Asked For: One-Way Traffic
If the seawall project is mostly a funding and permitting story, the Coastal Resilience Master Plan's parking and traffic proposal is where the actual neighborhood disagreement lives. Leon Scales, who chairs the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Council, has watched this argument resurface before and said as much when the one-way idea came back up this year. Homeowners along the boulevard, he has noted, tend to oppose converting it to one-way traffic regardless of how the proposal is packaged.
The objections are specific and come from people who use the road daily. Susan Winkie, a resident, has pointed out that the worst congestion is concentrated around sunset and is not really an all-day problem, and that a permanent one-way conversion would likely push traffic into residential streets like Cornish and Devonshire instead of solving anything. Sally Bixler, a Point Loma native, has said plainly that she does not see eliminating the northbound lane as part of the actual solution to erosion. Aaron Null, who owns Vervor Design & Shop on Voltaire Street, has a more mixed take: he worries a one-way conversion would send frustrated drivers hunting for street parking in the surrounding neighborhoods instead of the designated lots, even as he likes the idea of a wider, calmer pedestrian and bike path along the cliffs if people can adjust over time.
"Homeowners on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard seem to be generally opposed to any conversion to one-way traffic."
That is Scales, and it captures where things actually stand. Nobody disputes that the bluffs are eroding. The disagreement is over which fix creates a new problem worse than the one it solves.
What To Actually Expect Through the Rest of This Year and Into 2027
For anyone walking, biking, or driving this stretch between now and next year, here is the practical read on where things stand:
- The caution-taped sections of the linear park between Adair and Osprey are likely to remain in place through the rest of this design phase. Expect pedestrians and cyclists to keep sharing space in the bike lane in the meantime.
- The seawall's design and permitting work is expected to finish around summer 2027, but construction has no confirmed funding yet, so a groundbreaking could slip past whatever date gets floated informally.
- Nothing physical is changing on the parking or traffic side yet. The Coastal Resilience Master Plan's Phase 2 work, including construction cost estimates for the one-way and parking proposals, is expected to wrap by January 2027. That is a pricing and planning milestone, not a lane closure.
- The most reliable way to track what happens next is through the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Council, chaired by Leon Scales, which has been the main forum where the competing views on parking and traffic actually get argued out in public.
None of this changes what makes this stretch of coastline worth living near. It does mean that if you hear a neighbor say the seawall is basically done, or that the boulevard is about to become one-way any day now, you now know enough to ask which project they actually mean.
If you are curious how infrastructure decisions like these tend to factor into property values along the coast, or you simply want a local read on what is happening in Point Loma before making a decision about your own home, L. Russell Gray is a resource worth having in your corner.
