Your photo is a stone's throw from the well-known "Sunken City" in San Pedro (a neighborhood of LA). If you go two photographs northward, you can see a nice view of the remains of a sudden subsidence event in 1929.

There are still remains of roads, sidewalks, and other infrastructure. It's now a pretty well-known hiking spot, although you're formally not supposed to go there:

http://www.welikela.com/sunken-city-san-pedro-hidden-l-a-adv...

The land was moving as much as 11 inches per day, but most houses were able to be moved before they were destroyed.

So many of the houses along the Pacific coast were built before the geologic truth was known/admitted.

That's mountain/cliff/etc housing everywhere. Some people like literally living on the edge. Daly City's got a similar area where the cliffsides are actively crumbling during earthquakes and el ninos http://www.californiacoastline.org/cgi-bin/maplocate.cgi?1,2...

The blue house with the white roof of the far left closest to the cliff looks like the most precarious... that's scary!