… This week, the City Council for Rancho Palos Verdes, a small, upscale city along the coast, formally approved an ordinance that permanently bans new residential construction in an area known as the Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex. … Part of the issue, the city said, has (ironically for a drought-ridden state) been water. The area has been soaked with rain for much of the past half decade, which seeped into and destabilized the precarious hillside soil.