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

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.