Coming Home to a Flood-Prone California Landscape

In March 2023, the rain-swollen Pajaro River burst the seams of a levee, flooding the rural Northern Monterey County town of Pajaro in the dark of night and damaging hundreds of homes.

In the last season of Sold Out, we followed the story of the Escutia family as they set out to find a new place to call home. Now, a year later, we share their next chapter.

The family’s housing journey was anything but quick or easy. For a year and a half, they cycled through a shelter, group homes, and the homes of friends and family members as they searched for a permanent place they could afford.

They vowed never to return to the floodplain but came up against the reality that this part of coastal California is the most expensive rental market in the county, and the number of homes is limited.

In August, the family broke their vow and moved into a home in Pajaro, right across the street from the house they fled from when the levee burst. They are happy to be settled again but are nervous that their new home will meet a similar demise if winter rains prove too strong for the levee.

“I am scared the flooding might happen again, but I try to put it in the back of my head, telling myself it won’t happen for a few years and in a few years, we will probably not live here,” Carla Escutia said.

But there is good news for the Escutia and other Pajaro residents. The federal government recently broke ground on a massive levee revitalization project to withstand the storms of the future made worse by human-caused climate change.

Officials expect crews to finish widening the levee by 2031. Still, the area that crumbled won’t be completed for a few years, leaving residents whose homes were destroyed in fear they will succumb to floodwaters every year until the project is finished.

“If it floods again, where will we go when we just settled down? We’re taking that chance,” Denia Escutia said.