Ride a bike along the Linear Park stretch of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard this summer and you will pass a long section of caution tape between Adair Street and Osprey Street, right where the "Sunset Cliffs" sign draws every visitor's phone camera. Most people duck under it anyway, walking to the edge for a closer look at the crumbling bluff and the surf below. The official pedestrian path has been folded into the bike lane for months, which pushes cyclists into the car lane on a road that already gridlocks every evening around sunset.
Ask a Point Loma neighbor what is happening to this road and you will likely hear some version of the same rumor: Sunset Cliffs Boulevard is about to go one-way. It is not, at least not yet, and the reason people believe otherwise is that two separate city projects with overlapping goals have been folded together in conversation until they sound like one plan on the verge of breaking ground. They are not the same project, and neither one is close to construction.
Two Plans, Same Nickname
The city council adopted the Coastal Resilience Master Plan on September 9, 2025, a broader climate-adaptation framework covering six pilot sites across Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, Mission Beach and La Jolla. The Sunset Cliffs piece of that plan proposes converting a stretch of the boulevard to one-lane, one-way southbound traffic, removing west-side parking, and building a separated multi-use path for pedestrians and cyclists.
Running alongside it, and predating it, is the Sunset Cliffs Seawall Improvement Project. Engineering teams began evaluating the bluffs near Spalding Point back in 2022, well before the Coastal Resilience Master Plan existed. The city's own project page is explicit that these are two distinct efforts with different scopes, timelines and funding sources, even though residents and even some local coverage routinely blend them into a single story about a boulevard on the brink of transformation.
| Coastal Resilience Master Plan (road reconfiguration) | Seawall Improvement Project | |
|---|---|---|
| Adopted or started | Approved by council September 9, 2025 | Design work began 2022 |
| Status as of mid-2026 | Concept-level design, Phase 2 cost estimates due January 2027 | 60 percent design as of spring 2026 |
| Funding | Phase 2 grant-funded through the State Coastal Conservancy | Funded through planning only; construction dollars not yet secured |
| Earliest construction | No confirmed start date | Could start late winter 2027, with an 18 to 20 month build |
What Actually Happened in the Last Eight Months
In January 2026, a localized collapse along the bluffs near Spalding Point took out a section of protective railing that has not been replaced. That failure is part of what pushed the Seawall Improvement Project into public view this year. On May 12, the city held a community meeting at the Point Loma/Hervey Library on Voltaire Street, and the room was packed with roughly 50 residents who spent an hour and a half asking more than 30 questions of the project's engineers.
What they learned was not a construction start date. They learned the seawall design is still being finalized, that the project is funded only through the planning phase, and that if the design gets approved, the city has said it expects to find the roughly 32 million dollars needed to build it. Separately, the Coastal Resilience Master Plan's Phase 2 work, the concept designs and rough construction cost estimates for the Sunset Cliffs road changes, is slated to wrap by January 2027. That is a planning milestone, not a groundbreaking.
The Room Is Split, Not Just the Residents
The disagreement is not confined to residents versus the city. The Peninsula Community Planning Board formally opposed the one-lane conversion, citing safety concerns and the likelihood that traffic would simply shift onto residential streets like Cornish and Devonshire. The Ocean Beach Community Planning Group voted the opposite way, in favor of the plan.
Leon Scales, who chairs the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Council, has watched versions of this fight recur for years. Aaron Null, who owns Vervor Design & Shop on Voltaire Street, worried publicly that removing cliffside parking would just push visitors into neighborhood lots and side streets. Susan Winkie, who drives the boulevard regularly, made the more measured point that the worst congestion is concentrated right around sunset rather than spread across the day.
"The congestion is real, but it's concentrated around sunset and isn't an all-day problem."
That distinction matters. A plan built to solve an all-day traffic problem looks very different from one built to manage a 45-minute crunch at golden hour, and it is part of why the Peninsula Community Planning Board's letter to the district councilmember pushed back on a permanent lane conversion rather than a more targeted, peak-hour fix.
What's Actually Different for You Right Now
If you live along or near Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, here is what is true as of this summer, not what is rumored:
- The boulevard is still two-way, two-lane, exactly as it has been for decades.
- Street parking on both sides remains free and unmetered, no resident-only restrictions.
- The caution-taped section between Adair and Osprey is closed for safety, not for construction. The cliff edge there is actively unstable.
- The Ladera Street lot and the small dirt lots near Point Loma Nazarene University are open and functioning as usual.
- The Sunset Cliffs Auto Show, presented by Hodad's, is scheduled for September 12 and proceeding on the same stretch of road as every prior year.
- No funding has been committed to actually build either the one-way conversion or the seawall.
The Real Timeline, Not the Rumor
Strip away the anxiety and the actual sequence looks like this. The Seawall Improvement Project could start construction in late winter 2027 and take 18 to 20 months to finish, which puts a realistic completion date somewhere in mid to late 2028 at the earliest, and only if the roughly 32 million dollars in construction funding materializes on schedule. The road reconfiguration under the Coastal Resilience Master Plan has an even softer timeline, with only a design and cost-estimate milestone set for January 2027 and no construction date attached to it at all.
One longtime attendee at the May meeting compared the pace to Friars Road, a city infrastructure project some residents say has dragged on for the better part of a decade. That comparison is an opinion, not a city commitment, but it captures something true about how large coastal infrastructure work in San Diego tends to move. Design phases stretch. Funding gets assembled in pieces. Community meetings generate more questions than answers, and rightly so, because the stakes along an eroding bluff are real.
None of this means the concerns driving both projects are overblown. The January 2026 collapse near Spalding Point is a genuine reminder that the bluffs are moving, sometimes suddenly, and the caution tape near Adair and Osprey exists because that section of cliff has already lost its safety margin. The city's own assessment found as little as 12 feet separating the bluff edge from the roadway in places, which is why a seawall is even on the table as an option here at all.
What is overblown is the sense that the boulevard itself is about to change shape any month now. It is not. The design work is real, the debate is real, and the eventual outcome will matter to anyone who parks, walks, bikes or drives that stretch at sunset. But for this year, and very likely next, Sunset Cliffs Boulevard looks and behaves the way it always has.
If you already call this stretch of Point Loma home and want a straight read on how any of this might eventually intersect with property near the bluffs, once funding, not just design, is actually in place, Justin Halbert is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a Strategy Call.
