They lost their home in the Rancho Palos Verdes landslide. Now, they're fighting off foreclosure

Lisa Gladstone is stuck between (moving) rock and a hard place.

Her home in Rancho Palos Verdes started ripping apart in 2023 when heavy rains led to unprecedented land movement. So in a last-ditch effort to salvage what they could, she and her husband took out an $80,000 loan to have crews cut their house in half to keep the part on moving land from dragging the whole house with it.

Windows do not close in Lisa Gladstone's home in Rancho Palos Verdes because of land movement.

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Courtesy Lisa Gladstone

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Despite their efforts, it eventually was red-tagged as uninhabitable.

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So when a city-backed buyout program was announced for residents who lost their homes, they immediately applied. But there was a catch: To qualify, homes can’t be in foreclosure proceedings, and U.S. Bank had started knocking, telling the 72-year-old and her husband they needed to come up with $44,000 by Christmas Day to make the mortgage current.

“ When we get the FEMA funds, we would pay off the mortgage, and we would have enough money that we can live without additional stress,” Gladstone said. “I can't get anyone at U.S. Bank to have that conversation with. Every time I call, they tell me I have to fill out this mortgage assistance document, which is very scary, intrusive because it feels like I'm giving U.S. Bank access to our other remaining assets, which I cannot afford to do.”

But until the federal relief dollars trickle in — and the city has said that could take years — or U.S. Bank gives Gladstone a clear answer, the 72-year-old said they’re stuck in a “ circular, crazy, purposefully defeating system.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Bank said in a statement to LAist that "over the last year, we have been in regular communication with the client to help resolve their situation and continue to work with them directly on the matter. That said, we want to clarify that the property is not and has never been in foreclosure proceedings during that period of time. It sounded like the most recent communication was this week, and the team was going to reach back out to make sure next steps and where things stand were understood.”

Meanwhile, the couple remains stuck in a sort of limbo and has moved out to Moab, Utah, to await next steps.

How we got here

In 2011, Gladstone bought the home in the Portuguese Bend area of the city with her husband, Milton Owens, knowing about the history of land movement.

 ”We had an independent engineering report done on it, and everything checked out fine,” Gladstone said. “Things hadn't been moving and we lived there almost happily ever after as seniors in a community that was very safe and comfortable.”

Then the land movement started. First, they were lucky.

“ One of the fastest-moving houses in the neighborhood was next door to us, and we had no movement,” she said. “We were across the street from a cul-de-sac, where we had repeated water main breaks for months and months and months.”

Damages to the foundation of Lisa Gladstone's home in Rancho Palos Verdes.

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Courtesy Lisa Gladstone

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But when the heavy rains of 2022 and 2023 saturated the ground, their house no longer was spared. SoCalGas and Southern California Edison shut off utilities to their neighborhood, forcing them off the grid, as they watched their house slowly tear apart.

 ”We hired a structural engineer, and his advice was that we cut the home into two parts and try to have one part not pulling the other part into the slide,” Gladstone said.

So they took out the $80,000 loan and paid for the project, which ultimately failed to save the house.

“ We just did everything we could. We did experimental things, we did things that were intended at first to just prop the house up and keep it from sliding even more,” she said.

In the end, the couple just couldn’t take it anymore.

“ If you tried to turn on the microwave to heat up a cup of coffee, it would blow the light if you had them both on at the same time,” Gladstone said. “You couldn't run laundry, you couldn't turn the water heater on without turning everything else off, and it became the way of life as the whole house was falling in around us.”

Now, the couple hopes to stave off foreclosure proceedings until the federal buyout money comes in. Then, they plan to pay off the mortgage and use the remaining money to live out the peaceful retirement they envisioned when they moved into their Rancho Palos Verdes home.