A sinkhole swallowed Nicolas Cage’s driveway. Yours might be next.

There is a kind of terror-tinged embarrassment that comes from dozing off on your beach towel on the sand, only to find a rising tide intrude upon your mid-nap bliss, lapping at your toes and sweeping away your sunglasses.

It is a truth I relearn every June, one that arrives like the season’s first sunburn: The ocean is inevitable, and Poseidon always reclaims his own. Actor Nicolas Cage learned a far more serious — or more expensive, certainly — version of that lesson earlier this month, when a furious high surf siphoned the ground beneath his Malibu, California, mansion, collapsing his driveway and front porch into a gigantic 30-foot-by-30-foot sinkhole. The cave-in ruptured a gas main, swallowed an access road, and forced dozens of locals to evacuate. In the process, it put into stark, cinematic relief the unyielding threat of coastal erosion in every community in the nation with a view of the sea.

It’s impossible not to imagine Cage standing on the edge of that yawning pit as he might in one of his films, bombastic in his bafflement, every outsize gesture a pantomime of confusion. But no one should have been surprised. As far back as 1976, the California Coastal Commission denied a proposal to build a home on the lot where Cage’s Malibu home now teeters over the void, citing “concerns over wave hazards.” In 1986, the same commission rejected another residential proposal on the land, deeming it an “extremely hazardous area” threatened by waves and erosion. 

So why, just a few years later, was a home built there anyway, one that would eventually come to be owned by a certain Hollywood eccentric? A few years after their initial rejections, the waterfront lot’s original owners were able to convince the commission that with enough clever engineering, including a sea wall and concrete stilts, the home, its septic system, driveway, and access road could be protected from the sea god’s wrath. But much like Odysseus before him, Cage has found the hard way that the lord of waves does not easily forget his due. “What is the Grail but Earth itself?” he once told the New York Times, characteristically mythologizing his real estate acquisitions. “The divine object is Earth.”

In this case, at least, Cage chose the wrong cup. But Cage is hardly alone in laying out his home atop the wrong stretch of sand. Nearly all of the nation’s coastal communities — from ritzy enclaves like Malibu to working-class quarters of the Rockaways in New York — rely on coastal engineering to remain inhabitable, dumping sand or erecting sea walls to put off a perpetually and increasingly rising tide. 

To put this into perspective, almost one-third of Americans live along a coastline, and while few of us have the kind of luxury oceanfront views that Cage and his neighbors enjoy, our beachside apartment complexes, utility lines, and coastal highways suffer from the same risks his driveway does. Most of us, however, lack the benefit of a second home or a private island to flee to if something goes catastrophically wrong. 

When a sinkhole opens underneath a celebrity’s driveway, or a stilted home collapses into the sea, it is a reminder that we have built huge swaths of our beloved coastal communities on land that was never meant to sit still. If we want them to survive, we will need to learn to embrace new ways of packing our beach towns up and wheeling them further upshore. Logistically implausible as it may sound — difficult as, say, stealing the Declaration of Independence — it’s a process that several American communities have become much better at in recent years. 

“This is not a problem that is unique to Malibu, which just so happens to be some of the most spectacularly beautiful and spectacularly expensive real estate in America,” said Kara Murphy Schlichting, an environmental historian at Queens College in NYC. “This is a question that is coming for all of America’s coastal communities.”

Say it ain’t sinkhole

The void that swallowed Cage’s driveway with the gusto of the actor chewing scenery in one of his films was no ordinary sinkhole. In fact, if you asked a geologist, they would tell you that it was not, technically speaking, a true sinkhole at all. 

“It’s not what I typically would consider a sinkhole,” Michael Sukop, a hydrogeology professor at Florida International University, told me. That’s because most sinkholes form when rainwater or a leaky pipe slowly seeps into the porous bedrock beneath our highways, homes, and soccer fields, creating a cavern that screeches open during a heavy downpour or when the infrastructure above it becomes too heavy to bear. 

There is no accurate accounting of every sinkhole in the US, but geologists widely believe that they have become more frequent globally, driven by extreme weather linked to climate change, aging infrastructure, and what Sukop calls “people moving into sinkhole country,” meaning places like Florida where the bedrock is highly soluble. Some of the worst places for sinkholes in the country are in landlocked states like Missouri, whose unique landscape boasts upward of 16,000 sinkholes, which often open after heavy rainfall.   

But Cage’s sinkhole was formed not from hidden cavities in the bedrock, but from a high surf strong enough to slip under his sea wall and wash away the soggy soil beneath his asphalt and, presumably, his Rolls-Royce Phantoms. It was spurred not by rainfall or a leaky pipe but by a tidal force akin to the one that can put a damper on — or literally dampen, anyway — a beach spot that seemed perfectly sandy when the surf was low. 

But while I can learn to lug my sodden towel and cooler a little further upshore, the same cannot easily be said for Cage’s $10.5 million abode, built — like much of Malibu — atop a constantly shifting coastline. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try.

“It’s a fiction that we can keep a coast in a single place,” said Murphy Schlitchting. And it is a fiction upheld by hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on temporary solutions meant to hold the ocean still, and protect the luxury homes and boardwalks we’ve built along it. 

The pristine, sandy beaches that most of us think of when we think of the word “beach” are often heavily manufactured for our pleasure, much like an urban park might be seeded with carefully cultivated trees and brush. In fact, the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to dump sand atop eroded coastlines, a process known as beach renourishment, in addition to many more billions spent on sea walls and other structures that can keep a coastline in place for a little while. 

“The most endangered species on the coast is not a turtle or a piping plover; it’s an unengineered beach,” said Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, who has been tracking beach renourishment projects since the 1980s. “And it’s unsustainable because as sea level continues to rise, we are having to pump that sand more and more frequently.”

How to save coastal neighborhoods

Earlier this year, Malibu released a long-awaited Coastal Vulnerability Assessment that twice called out the acute dangers that erosion poses for Sea Level Drive, a small stretch of private road, upon which a gaping crater now sits where Nicolas Cage’s driveway used to be. As this year’s goliath El Niño gets into full swing, his misfortune is unlikely to be the city’s last. 

Already, the spectacular seafront Pacific Coast Highway faces a gauntlet of exigencies, among them landslides, wildfires, and, of course, a coastline that simply won’t sit still, creeping further and further inland each year. Just this weekend, officials in Malibu issued a warning about hazardous conditions at local beaches, with “severe beach erosion” exposing steel and concrete debris sticking across the coastline.  

“Nature itself does not destroy the coast. It moves the coast,” said Young, but if infrastructure like the Pacific Coast Highway lies in the way of that movement, then there is only so much that building a sea wall or dumping 300,000 cubic yards of sand every five years will do. “No matter where you are, whether you are in California or South Carolina or New Jersey, we are still building in dumb places.”

Much like laying a log in front of your beach towel won’t hold the tide back for very long, these measures are often only a temporary balm. But there is another way, one that involves moving the proverbial towel — or permanent infrastructure — away from the shore, a process known as managed retreat.

As implausible as it may sound, when you take into account just how much money has gone into keeping the coast still, lugging a few celebrity mansions, a beachside school, or a sliver of highway across town might be a Herculean labor worth attempting. 

“It’s totally doable,” said Young. “We can move just about everything.” On the coast of North Carolina, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, one of the tallest brick lighthouses in the world, was moved in 1999, a feat that Young helped pull off. At the time, he said, locals  “wanted to shoot us over” the effort, sure that the centuries-old structure would fall down. “And you know what? It’s safe now,” he said, noting that just down the beach in Buxton and in nearby Rodanthe, dozens of homes have collapsed into the ocean since 2020.

But even in places where such coastal relocations were once commonplace, it’s still not an easy sell for most coastal policymakers and their constituents, especially in places like Malibu, whose density and geography make it all but impossible to move things nearby. But sooner or later, they might not have a choice. 

“I can’t tell you how many coastal elected officials have said to me, ‘Rob, you know, retreat is not an option from this place.’ And I’m like, well, actually, you are retreating here, here, here, and here,” Young told me. “It’s just you’re doing it in the worst way possible. You’ve got septic tanks rolling around in the sea. That is not a great Chamber of Commerce moment.”