Re: Is California Planning to Steal the Malibu Coastline from Residents?

On May 28, 2025 at 12:56:17 PM PDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com>
wrote:

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:
 

For the last six months, the rebuilding from the fires in the Palisades has
proceeded-- unreasonably slowly, to be sure, but proceeded nevertheless. The
same is true in Altadena, the site of the second great fire last January. But
the residents of Malibu have been frozen in time by the state. Nothing is
happening. No debris clean-up, no environmental studies, permit applications
are held in limbo, etc. And now the residents are hearing rumors of the
reason
for this: the state of California doesn't like people living on the beach.
State bureaucrats have always taken a dim view of homes built right on the
shoreline but haven't been able to do anything about it because those homes
were built in an era when people were mostly free to do as they liked and the
massive regulatory state didn't exist. . . .

 
I don't think you characterized this correctly. It's my understanding
that there never were exclusive riparian rights and that the public
always had access to the beaches but the state never enforced it to
appeased wealthy people who illegally grabbed the beaches for
themselves.
 
The public was excluded but it was illegal to do so, but that's not like
the Great Lakes in which the law is completely muddled, that the public
can be legally excluded, and when lots were sold off in Chicago, lots on
partly or entirely submerged lands were sold off because no one bothered
to map the shoreline first.
 
In my opinion, homes might be built a reasonable distance back from the
shoreline but beach access must never be exclusive.
 
Of course, you are going to tell me that the distance will be
unreasonable, and I'm sure you're correct.

The law in California is that the mean high tide line down to the water is
public property and cannot be owned by anyone from the Mexico border up to
Oregon. (Technically, there's an exception for the federal government in
places like the SEAL training base in Coronado, the Army depot at Point Dume,
the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, etc. The federal government does own
those beaches and can exclude the public from them, especially during live
military exercises.)

But those rich folks in Malibu like to pretend they own the whole beach
outside their back door and treat it like it's their private property. Since
the beach has always been legally public property and they couldn't own it,
decades ago, they all decided that the best way to keep the public off 'their'
beaches was to build a wall... with their houses. They literally built fences
from the side of each house to the property line, where the next person's
fence would take over. Malibu is a city that's one mile wide and thirty miles
long and there was literally no way to get from the road to the beach for most
of that 30 miles.

Back in the 80s, a series of lawsuits made their way to the CA Supreme Court,
with the plaintiffs arguing that blocking off access to the beach for miles at
a time was effectively illegally appropriating public property for private
use. The Court agreed and ordered a series of property condemnations at
one-mile intervals all along Pacific Coast Highway. Designated property owners
had five-foot wide strips of their property condemned and bought by the state,
which were then turned into access corridors from the road to the beach. The
richey-riches screamed and yelled but in the end, they lost and now people can
get to the beach. That didn't stop them, though. Over the years they've
developed all sorts of tricks to hide those access points and/or make parking
along PCH near the access points practically impossible. They've done things
like plant shrubbery around the access gates to camouflage them and they put
construction cones out to make it seem like they're the gates or the street
parking around them are closed for repair, and they've even painted the backs
of their homes to look like garages and constructed fake driveway cutouts
along the street in front of otherwise legal parking spots to make it seem
like you'd be blocking someone driveway and garage if you parked there.

Nevertheless, to this day if you take a long walk up the Malibu beachfront,
you stand good odds of being harassed by private security employed by studio
moguls and our precious, precious celebrities to keep your dirty unwashed
prole ass off 'their' beach. This is especially true if they're having one of
their glitzy catered soirees, where they put tables and chairs out on the sand
for the guests. During those parties, the security guards are actually posted
out on the beach and turn around anyone who tries to walk past, as if they
actually have the authority to do it.

About seven years ago, a group of folks put together an app for smart phones,
which details exactly where all the state-mandated beach access points are,
notes if they happen to be (coincidentally) hidden by shrubbery, etc. and also
points out where property owners have constructed fake driveways and other
schemes to discourage the riff-raff from parking on PCH.

It also has copies of the California statutes that guarantee public access to
all beaches, in case you're approached and harassed by someone's private
security guards.**

When the app came out, it absolutely infuriated all the 1%-ers in Malibu and
there was even an ill-fated attempt at legal action to prevent its release on
the grounds that the wealthy would be 'unsafe' if their beach access points
were publicized. That argument went over with the court like a fart in church.
Since then, the L.A. Times has reported that use of Malibu beaches by
non-Malibu residents has skyrocketed, which I'm sure is giving all those folks
out there a serious case of red-ass.


**I had my own amusing encounter with private security on a beach in Malibu
when I first moved here back in 2011. The girlfriend du jour and I were
walking along the surf line, when these two guys in suits came down off the
deck of one the houses and ran down to intercept us. They told us the beach
was private and we couldn't go any further. I said that it was my
understanding that all beaches in California were public, to which one of the
goons replied that "there's the law, and there's reality," while subtilely
letting his coat hang open to let me see he was armed. I said, "Oh, I have one
of those, too!" and lifted my shirt so he could see it and the badge right
next to it. I said, "You wouldn't be threatening people with violence for
walking on a beach which they have every right to use, would you? 'Cause that
would kinda be a felony. How does five years in Chino sound to you? Matter of
fact, whoever your boss is in that big ol' house over there could also be
civilly liable for whatever you do next, and it's obvious he has deep, deep
pockets, so please, try and stop us from walking down the beach. And if you
put hands on us, that'll really make my day. I'll get to arrest you *and*
retire 10 years early."

They backed off so fast you'd have thought their asses were on fire, and we
decided to not only keep going across their 'private' beach, but we stopped
and sat down for a while to enjoy the view, too.