If your house fell off a cliff, would you leave?

On a stormy day in the spring of 2021, the seawall washed away on the beach below Lucy Ansbro’s clifftop home in Thorpeness, England. Then the end of her garden plunged into the North Sea.

Watching the plants tumble over the edge, she feared her home in this coastal town 110 miles northeast of London might be next.

“We lost ten feet of land,” Ms. Ansbro, a 54-year-old television producer, said recently in her kitchen. “Every time I went out, I didn’t know if the house would still be there when I came back.”

Coastal erosion is a natural process as waves pound beaches all over the world, but along this part of England’s east coast, stronger storms and bigger waves are scaring local residents like never before.

Thousands of homes here are threatened by the sea, and the government agencies charged with its defense are doing their utmost to keep pace. The Climate Change Commission, an independent advisory body British Environmental Service, has reported that 8,900 homes – 1,200 of which are on vast coastlines with no protective structures – are at risk from coastal erosion. Without active coastal management, approximately 82,000 homes could be lost by 2105.

To turn the tide, the Environment Agency has pledged £5.2 billion (about $6.5 billion) to build and realign 2,000 defenses – including seawalls made from rock or cement and steel – that could protect communities from erosion and floods, but not forever.

But in some high-risk coastal communities, homes are left at the mercy of nature. Distressed homeowners in these areas face the prospect of eviction and, even worse, having their own homes demolished.

Mrs Ansbro’s house, which she bought in 2010 for around £590,000, now stands 30 feet from the cliff’s edge. After losing her garden, she applied for permission from the local East Suffolk Council and the Environment Agency authorities to replace the gabions (metal cages filled with stones) and sand-filled geobags that were lost with riprap. The requests were granted, but that didn’t necessarily mean help was on the way.

In England, the cost of building sea walls is shared between state and local offices. At the national level, a funding calculator assesses how much of that £5.2 billion budget may be available. It depends on whether the “the benefits outweigh the costs” based on a timeline of erosion and four site-specific policy levels: Advance the Line, where new defenses extend the land area to the sea; Hold the Line, where new defenses maintain the existing coastline; Managed Realignment, where the shoreline is allowed to erode but money is spent “steering it in certain areas”; and No Active Intervention, where no national resources are invested.

At the local level, municipalities and landowners must make a difference.

“In lay terms, the policy is referred to as defend, retreat, or give up,” said Angela Terry, CEO of One Home, a group that advocates for at-risk homeowners.

Aware that the policy for Thorpeness is Managed Realignment and that the council’s naval defense coffers were empty, Ms. Ansbro did not expect support for her home. “I knew that if I didn’t come up with the money myself, I would lose my house,” she said.

So she refinanced her London apartment to pay for the construction of a 1,500-ton granite riprap to reinforce the cliff below her property. It cost her nearly £450,000 but the house is still standing.

Her neighbors, she said, did not invest in protecting their property and were forced to leave and then demolish the house. “It was a shock to see it disappear,” Ms. Ansbro said, looking at where the house had stood since the 1920s. “The community believes that the government should step in and pay for coastal defenses.”

It’s not always possible. In a statement to The New York Times, an Environmental Agency spokesperson defended the tiered system of shoreline support, saying, “Protections may not be technically possible or affordable, or may be harmful to the environment.”

Where the coastline cannot be defended, the British government is trying to help communities return from the sea. Last year, as part of a wider £200 million innovation program flood and coast£36 million was earmarked to help residents in the two coastal districts with the highest rates of erosion in England – the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Norfolk – cover demolition costs and relocation.

The five-year pilot program, which is still in a “preparatory phase”, aims to “work with coastal communities that cannot be sustainably protected from coastal erosion”. But not everyone there is thankful.

In the East Riding of Yorkshire village of Skipsea, Peter Garforth has lived for 23 years in a brick house overlooking the beach from Green Lane. When he bought the house, he felt safe. Despite the lack of a sea wall, there was a road separating the end of his garden from the edge of the cliff, which was 55 meters away. He raved about “the best view in Yorkshire”, he said, and made improvements to the property, which was built in 1985.

But then the road and part of his garden plunged into the sea in a fall from a cliff in 2009. It fell to Jane Evison, an East Riding of Yorkshire councilor, to explain to Mr Garforth the government’s No Active Intervention policy to lay. “It was a difficult message to get across,” Ms. Evison said. “Most people honestly thought they would have their home for the rest of their lives.”

The road was never repaired and the cliff is now approaching the minimum allowable distance from inhabited houses, which is 9.36 meters. Thanks to the new pilot program in his area, Mr. Garforth, 78, eligible for aid that could help him finally move inland. But he wants full funding for improved seawalls to protect his community.

“We feel we are second-class citizens, not as deserving as others,” said Mr. Garforth. “Somehow the appetite to protect the coastline has been lost.”

The most of the remaining properties on Green Lane are now abandoned and destroyed. Some were sold for next to nothing in cash, as banks do not lend mortgages on high-risk properties. Insurance companies also do not provide coverage.

Still, the East Riding of Yorkshire Council keeps a close eye on houses along the beach. Every six months, aerial surveillance teams measure the distance between the front porches of the Green Lane properties and the cliff edge.

“We don’t want a property going over the edge with someone in it or someone on the beach at the time,” said Richard Jackson, the council’s coastal change manager.

Mr. Garforth is angry that the nearby hamlet of Mappleton is protected by two seawalls and a revetment, while his village is not. But there’s a reason: Route B1242, the main coastal road in the area, passes directly through Mappleton, giving the hamlet Hold the Line status.

There are other reasons for not erecting defenses along much of the coastline. Some are environmentally friendly. “The erosional sediment in the East Riding is important to Lincolnshire’s flood risk defenses,” Jackson said, referring to the county just to the south. And of course: “Coastal defense is expensive,” he said, pointing out that building a riprap could cost £10,000 per metre.

Mr. Garforth expects to have to leave his house soon, and when the time comes, he wants to fight against it. “If an eviction notice comes knocking on my door, I’ll go to court,” he said.

Two hundred miles south of Hemsby, the shoreline is allowed to erode, in accordance with the Managed Realignment Policy. In March, five homes were demolished after storms pounded the cliffs.

Noel Galer, a Great Yarmouth Borough councilor for Hemsby, said permission was recently granted for a 0.8-mile rock wall. But paying for it won’t be easy. The National Financing Calculator uses a formula based on the value of the homes at risk from erosion over the next 25 years. “As the value of these houses is low, the Environment Agency can provide £2 million,” he said.

The rest is for the municipality to come up with itself. “We are now in the fundraising phase,” said Mr. Galer.

Coastal erosion has claimed English communities like Hemsby for centuries. In the 19th century, even a seat was removed from parliament after half of the borough of Dunwich was lost to the North Sea. The eastern cliffs are composed of soft clay and gravel, and “when the clay gets wet it softens and erodes,” says Stuart McLelland, co-director of the University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute.

Climate change increases risks for homeowners as “sea level rise is making beaches smaller and an increase in storms is causing bigger waves,” said Dr. McLelland.

Many coastal residents are selling their homes while they still can. A recent search on Britain’s largest property portal, Zoopla, found 81 properties for sale in the village of Hemsby. Prices range from £26,000 for a two-bedroom bungalow to £600,000 for a five-bedroom villa.

The properties are mostly “cash only purchases,” said Bradley Stark, a senior real estate advisor at Minors & Brady Estate Agents, who lists two high-risk properties in Hemsby.

“We’re not trying to scare off customers, but we do need to give honest feedback about the area,” said Mr Stark, whose company sold a two-bedroom house a mile up the coast from Hemsby last year for £300,000 cash . month.

Ms Evison, the East Riding councillor, warned that people there who bought property on the coast after 2009 would not be eligible for assistance under the new pilot scheme. Still, for some house hunters, a property atop an unstable cliff may seem like an attractive option – at the right price.

Last October, Helen Vine jumped at the chance to buy the Sellwood Arms pub, which sits near the cliffs in the village of Aldbrough, 12 miles south of Mr Garforth’s home and is subject to the same no-action policy. The pub is only about 65 yards from where the main road collapsed into the sea six years ago. With beamed ceilings and a four-bedroom apartment on the first floor where Mrs Vine, 51, now lives with her family, the pub was a bargain at just over £100,000. Sepia photographs of village landmarks that have been washed away by the sea over decades hang on the walls. But she remains undaunted.

“I couldn’t have afforded a place like this anywhere else,” she said.

Mrs. Vine is renovating the upstairs rooms, without, she joked, incurring excessive expense. The plan is to recoup her investment, and maybe some more, before she’s forced to scrap — hopefully not in decades to come.

“It’s a risk,” she said.