Long before beachfront real estate was sought after by lords, barons and the ultra-wealthy, shoreline property was among the most undesirable land on the North American continent.
But over the past century or so, that perception has flipped. Now many of the country’s most expensive zip codes are perched on the edge of rising seas.
Few places embody that tension more than Stinson Beach, where home values have surged faster than anywhere else in the Bay Area, even as the threat of sea-level rise grows more urgent. The typical Stinson home was valued at $3.7 million in 2024, more than five times its 2000 average of $688,000, according to Zillow.
Wedged between the Pacific Ocean and Bolinas Lagoon, the low-lying town of about 500 residents is considered the most vulnerable coastal community in Marin County. In the last 100 years, the Pacific has crept up four to eight inches along the Northern California coast. Depending on global carbon emissions, it could rise anywhere from 2.4 to 6.6 feet by 2100.
Last week, county officials unveiled a study by the Stinson Beach Adaptation and Resilience Collaboration, or ARC, a 56-page blueprint that lays out a $1.2 billion strategy to help the town withstand the encroaching ocean. It’s the most comprehensive sea-level rise adaptation plan developed for this stretch of California coast.
The roadmap proposes nearly two dozen adaptation measures, from elevating roads and retrofitting homes to restoring dunes, constructing protective bulkheads and transitioning from septic systems to a centralized wastewater facility. Each proposal includes projected costs and implementation timelines spread across five decades. Officials hope the plan will guide not only engineering and ecological decisions but a broader civic conversation about what kind of future is possible for Stinson Beach.
“This report lays out all the tools, identifies all the issues and gives the community a starting point,” said James Jackson, a hydrologist for Environmental Science Associates, the firm contracted to conduct the study.
The report’s projections are sobering. With a projected 3.3-foot sea-level rise by 2085, “nearly all development seaward of Shoreline Highway is within a permanent inundation and/or storm flooding hazard zone.” Winter beaches could vanish altogether in front of hardened shorelines and low-lying neighborhoods like Seadrift and the Calles. By 2060, without intervention, as much as $563 million worth of property could be lost to storm-related tidal flooding. By 2085, that figure is projected to increase to $1.3 billion.
In the event of an extreme storm surge, the report estimates that 96 percent of homes in town would sustain damage and 65 percent could be destroyed. Property loss due to sea-level rise could result in an estimated $12.3 million in lost annual tax revenue for Marin County.
To make the stakes tangible, the study includes a virtual reality simulation that shows Stinson under different sea-level rise scenarios. Users can toggle a 3.3-foot rise paired with a storm event. Familiar streets are all but erased. Homes are overtaken by water.
“A lot of the work is technical and can be harder to digest,” Mr. Jackson said. Virtual reality “helps translate that into something people can really understand—what their street, their home might look like.”
The adaptation strategies fall into four main categories: fortification, or building barriers to resist sea-level rise and floods; accommodation, or modifying existing development; retreat, or relocating existing infrastructure; and avoidance, or siting new development away from hazards.
The ARC report leans most heavily on the first two but also considers retreat through tools like land buyouts, easements and transfers of development rights. It evaluates avoidance strategies through zoning measures such as setbacks and buffers.
Funding remains a major question. The plan outlines possible sources, from state and federal grants to taxes and local assessment districts. But financing more than a billion dollars in adaptation work will take time and sustained political will.
Kathleen Kilgariff, a county planner involved with the study, emphasized that any effective adaptation strategy must be shaped from the ground up.
“At the end of the day, the most successful projects for sea-level rise adaptation come from the community,” she said. “They’re based on what residents want, what they value, and what they’re willing to invest in.”
But in an unincorporated town where only a fraction of homes are primary residences, some residents question whether a community-led process is even feasible.
“For the county to say, ‘Here’s a bunch of programs and how much they’ll cost—go for it,’ feels a little like a slap in the face,” said Jeff Loomans, a local resident who has worked on sea-level rise issues for more than a decade. “It’s the county’s responsibility. Stinson is an unincorporated village with no central political entity that could take the lead on this. Implementing this plan is a pipe dream.”
Mr. Loomans purchased a house in Seadrift, a gated community built on a sandy spit buttressed by a rock wall, almost two decades ago. Sea-level rise “wasn’t a major concern of mine at the time,” he said. “I think it became more of a concern after seeing things like the 2023 storm.” During those storms, Calle del Arroyo—the only road in and out of Seadrift—was submerged by floodwaters.
The Stinson Beach ARC is just one part of a broader climate planning effort underway in Marin. The county is developing a climate policy to comply with Senate Bill 272, a measure passed in 2023 that requires every coastal county in California to prepare a sea-level rise adaptation plan by 2034.
The remedies that ARC offers, Mr. Jackson acknowledges, are not curative but palliative. Instead of trying to fortify the shore forever, adapting to the rising tide often means eventually moving people and buildings out of harm’s way.
But so-called managed retreat is especially difficult to imagine in Stinson Beach, a town hemmed in by the ocean on one side and the protected slopes of Mount Tamalpais on the other.
“There’s no obvious site where the community could simply relocate,” Mr. Jackson said. “But it’s hard to envision the community remaining exactly where it is after several feet of sea-level rise. At some point, the realignment of infrastructure and relocation of structures will be inevitable.”
To read the report, visit www.marincounty.gov/departments/cda/planning/long-range-planning-initiatives/stinson-beach-adaptation-and-resilience-collaboration-arc