Waterfronts represent some of Southern California’s most valuable real estate and most sought-after recreation destinations. Despite Los Angeles County’s reputation for large public beaches, privatization and the discouragement of public use came to characterize Malibu’s Broad Beach by the end of the twentieth century. In the same era, erosion reshaped the boundary between public and private property on the beach. Residents called for permanent structures to stabilize the coast. Public beach activists rejected homeowners’ claims that beach armoring was in the public’s interest. Activists demanded state authorities expand access opportunities and protect public recreation instead of protecting beachfront mansions. As coastal erosion altered the parameters of public access, environmental change raised the stakes regarding state and federal authorities’ responsibilities to maintain beaches. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the longstanding challenge to public access in this exclusive Malibu enclave collided with the unfolding climate crisis, highlighting the entwined nature of environmental risk and real estate development on the beach.

In June 2005, homeowners on Broad Beach hired a company to bulldoze sand off the public shore—without a permit. The result was an eight-foot-tall berm meant to protect their Malibu, California, properties from waves. Berm construction lowered the profile of the public beach, leaving visitors without any dry sand to access, and presented a physical barrier to those forced to dodge waves when the surf was high.1 A narrow strip of sand between Point Lechuza and Trancas Creek, Broad Beach is backed by some of the most expensive, exclusive real estate in Los Angeles County. Homeowners included celebrities such as Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman, and Steven Spielberg.2 While this enclave of celebrities and Hollywood moguls could afford to privately mobilize to fight beach erosion, they could not prevent public and governmental backlash to an unpermitted project that left so little space for would-be joggers and sunbathers.

Environmental groups, scientists, and government officials condemned the berm construction, and public access advocates such as the Surfrider Foundation organized protests on Broad Beach.3 The head of the California Coastal Commission (CCC), the state regulatory authority that oversees public access and development alongshore, deemed the bulldozing “the most egregious, arrogant, inexplicable behavior ever” by beachfront homeowners. “They basically stole the public beach…leaving the public to walk in the water…It's incomprehensible.”4 The boundary between public and private ownership on California beaches is drawn at the ordinary high water mark; the rule of thumb is that the wet sand is public. After the Broad Beach berm went up, however, little tide-washed sand remained, meaning little public space. The CCC issued a cease and desist order requiring the restoration of the beach; homeowners appealed to make the berm permanent. The ensuing contest grew to encompass more than just riparian owners’ attempts to undertake private construction on the beach. The longstanding challenge to public access in this exclusive Malibu enclave collided with concerns over erosion and the climate crisis and residents’ demands for coastal protections.

The history of Broad Beach reveals the often competing visions of the public-private divide among day-trippers, government authorities, and landowners along the Southern California coast. Because of the federal Public Trust Doctrine, state governments must preserve the foreshore—the territory between high and low tide—as public land. Under the trust, two geographic areas with distinctive legal significance comprise tideland property. Tide-washed land is held in trust for the public, while dry land can be privately owned. The dynamism of beaches, however, often leads to disputes over where public property ends and private property begins. Across the twentieth century, private landowners nationwide took advantage of this uncertainty by intimidation or obfuscation.5 Exclusion from the beach became a hallmark of racial, social, and economic-based privatism of elite beach communities.6

The 2005 bulldozing of Broad Beach was an escalation in a longstanding battle between public beach advocates and wealthy beachfront residents. To situate this battle within coastal environmental history, this article focuses on three moments of conflict. The first section traces the establishment of the California Coastal Commission and private property owners’ responses from the 1970s through the 1990s. California attempted to regulate its coastal zone in the heyday of late sixties and early seventies environmental activism. Challenging this vision, beachfront property owners successfully used the courts to subvert the regulatory optimism of the era. Still a sleepy coastal community of 2,300 people at midcentury, in subsequent decades Malibu became a wealthy celebrity enclave. Its shoreline epitomized the social exclusivity and astronomical real estate values that often clashed with the legal inclusiveness of beaches as public spaces.7 The next section examines how Broad Beach became a site of activism, as early twentieth-century open beach advocates challenged privatization. The final section examines how, in the same era, the additional variable of accelerating beach erosion led beachfront property owners to reconceptualize public oversight alongshore. Long resistant to coastal commission intervention, property owners, recognizing the importance of addressing climate change, claimed that the public good required large-scale government work to protect Broad Beach. But public beach activist groups like Surfrider called on the state to protect and expand public recreation, not beachfront mansions facing erosion.8 Critics argued that when wealthy beachfront residents called for environmental protections, they did so out of self-interest. Property owners took up the language and resources of the “commons” to buttress their private affluence in the face of rising environmental risks along Malibu’s famous coast.9

This article answers the call for further scholarly investigations of coastal access in the face of accelerating environmental change. In 2015 historian Andrew Kahrl argued that “while the social repercussions of the privatization of public space in America continue to generate innovative and important scholarship and commentary, the environmental impact has received far less attention, and the relationship between the social and the environmental has gone virtually unnoticed.”10 Malibu’s coastal history speaks to four essential issues in the twenty-first-century United States: the concentration of wealth, the social inequalities built into the landscape, the privatization of public space, and the climate crisis.11 More studies of these issues, as they intersect on the beach, are needed because coastal history is fundamentally local history. Since the Public Trust Doctrine is a state common law doctrine, state laws and courts are the ultimate interpreters of the scope of the trust.12 And the stakes are ultimately higher than a single eroding beach; the coast is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to future environmental hazards of the unfolding climate crisis. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the longstanding challenge to public access in this exclusive Malibu enclave collided with the unfolding climate crisis, revealing how the conflict between private property owners and the recreating public over land use was shaped by environmental risks. While private homeowners and public beach activists may have had different goals surrounding beach use and ownership, both ultimately advanced arguments that centered on coastline preservation in the face of environmental change.

In the early twenty-first century, Los Angeles County boasted that its beaches represented “one of the world’s most recognizable features and important public resources.”13 Yet intensive postwar residential development transformed its celebrated beaches into leisure environments with competing users. The creation of the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in 1972 marked a substantive statewide commitment to public access, open land preservation, and habitat protections on the beach. The history of property owner pushback to open beach initiatives, however, illustrated the contradictions inherent to the simultaneous rise of coastal protections and suburbanization in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite popular support and the legislative powers established in the 1970s, the CCC could claim little success in improving public beach access in Los Angeles County’s elite coastal enclaves across the remainder of the century.

The 1970s were by many metrics a high-water mark for beach environmental activism in California.14 The late-sixties Save the Bay campaign in San Francisco, which established an agency with the power to regulate use of the bay and its waters, and the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill galvanized activists who organized a statewide grassroots voter initiative for clean beaches, while a diverse coalition of more than one hundred activist groups successfully mobilized around beach access. In 1972 voters passed the ballot initiative Proposition 20, also known as the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act, and then in 1976 voted for the California Coastal Act.15 In establishing coastal protections, California was not alone; states nationwide added ecological protections, public access, water-orientated recreation, and open space preservation to the coastal public trust. At the national level, Congress passed the 1972 Coastal Zone Management Act to “preserve, protect, develop, and where possible, to restore or enhance the resources of the nation’s coastal zone.”16 Development pressures and environment concerns would, in theory, receive equal attention, but the federal government did not set specific federal standards, leaving the work to states.17 To achieve this balance at the state level, in 1976 California made permanent the CCC and vested in it the regulatory and planning authority to oversee resource protection and shoreline hazard management—such as erosion mitigation—and free and unrestricted recreation on the beach.

To ensure public access and environmental protections, California tasked the CCC with reviewing all proposals for public and private shoreline development. To exercise its regulatory and appellate jurisdiction, the CCC established five regional commissions to review development projects and deny or issue permits on or adjacent to open coast tidelands. As part of compliancy regulations, the CCC also required local bodies submit Local Coastal Plans for review.18 In Malibu the Local Coastal Plan was, theoretically, designed to offset the impact of private development on public access to and along the beach. The CCC certified Malibu’s plan in 1986.19

Coastal suburbanization and public funding challenges hampered the CCC’s beach recreation goals in Southern California in the 1970s.20 Even as Californians voted in favor of stronger regulatory oversight of coastal environmental resources, coastal privatization via residential development emerged as a perennial challenge to both the Public Trust Doctrine and coastal protections. In Los Angeles County, and Malibu in particular, the opening of public access routes lagged. The Pacific Coast Highway is the lone approach road to Malibu’s beaches; would-be recreationalists required vertical accessways, an area of public land such as a trail or stairs, to approach the beach from the highway. Vertical accessways could only be built if the Commission or another government body, like the County, agreed to accept liability and maintenance responsibilities. The burden of such work was unappealing to most agencies, and the CCC lacked the personnel and funds to oversee accessways. The County also lacked the funds to build and maintain paths, shifting this important work to local agencies and nonprofits for the rest of the century.21 Only eight of twenty-nine planned vertical accessways had been opened by 2011. In contrast, San Diego and Orange County boasted rates of completion of 85 percent and 73 percent, respectively.22

Broad Beach homeowners proved unwilling to support the CCC’s vision. Residents did not welcome the recreating public. A New Yorker article on the passage of Proposition 20 captured the attitude of Malibu residents intent on keeping beaches exclusive: “the houses between the road and beach are linked together to form a solid wall, like riot police…Wherever there is an empty lot, a fence runs across it to be grabbed by the house on the other side.”23 Homeowners envisioned beachfront property as a retreat. Fearing mass consumption—crowds in the surf and on the sand—they sought to make the shoreline as exclusive as possible.24 Some Broad Beach property deeds included legally mandated accessways. Although some of these deed restrictions dated to the late 1970s, some landowners nevertheless fought accessway construction. Homeowners living near access paths argued that the lack of parking, restrooms, and policing made intensive public beach use untenable; they argued that sufficient beach access was available nearby and that access routes would encourage trespassing on privately owned beach above the mean high tide line.25 Similar fears unfolded nationwide, as urban demand for recreational spaces seemingly threatened the property rights of landowners on the metropolitan edge.26 Sam Bass Warner has argued that the American tradition of privatism centers on the individual’s search for wealth, leading to, in part, income-segregated neighborhoods and polarization along class and ethnic lines.27 On Malibu’s beaches, the goal of social exclusion led property owners to work to subvert state coastal regulations designed to ensure access opportunities.

Malibu beachfront residents successfully waged an anti-public use campaign in court. Focusing on the primacy of private property, homeowners undermined the environmentalist optimism at the heart of the CCC by obstructing regulators’ ability to keep the beach a public space. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court sided with homeowners and curtailed the CCC’s powers to demand offers to dedicate public access routes; until this year the commission had required such offers as a precondition for a construction permit. In 1987 in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission the court ruled that the CCC could not force owners to provide easements; the commission would need to use eminent domain and pay for public access routes. Private property, according to the ruling, was inviolate; the public interest in shore access was not. Subsequently, the CCC stopped requesting new offers to dedicate public access routes. Even though the courts upheld the offers to dedicate demanded by the commission prior to the ruling, legal challenges from defiant littoral property owners characterized the opening of accessways in Los Angeles.28

In the late 1970s and 1980s the CCC faced diminished public support that further reduced the effectiveness of the already financially and legally hampered authority. Public relations missteps, a number of anti-commission bills in the state legislature, and the election of George Deukmejian, a self-proclaimed opponent of the CCC, led to budget and staff cuts during Deukmejian’s 1983–1991 governorship. During this era, the commission’s power diminished, and its appointed members became increasingly pro-development. The result was internal conflict, delayed Local Coastal Plan programs, and limited coastal protection and public access progress.29

Despite 1960s activism and the 1970s establishment of the CCC, by the 2000s, only two public walkways provided vertical access to Broad Beach—and both had been established in the 1940s, not as a result of CCC work. To improve accessibility in the new century, the authors of the City of Malibu’s updated Local Coastal Program proposed opening five additional access points on Broad Beach. Such a plan would provide one entranceway for approximately every 1,000 feet of beach, but extensive riparian development effectively precluded their construction.30 In 2013 Linda Locklin, the head of the commission’s coastal access program, admitted “[t]here is a lot of resistance to opening new access ways.…Our record is frankly not so good. It takes us forever to open them.”31

Blocked vertical accessways were but half of the problem of coastal access in Malibu. Despite legal easements that opened stretches of dry sand to public use, residents often intimidated beachgoers by posting signage and hiring private security to keep recreationalists from enjoying such spaces in front of private homes. And by the turn of the twenty-first century private development lined all but four miles of Malibu’s coast.32 In August 2003, former chairperson of the CCC Sara Wan laid her towel on the dry sand of Broad Beach to illustrate this challenge. Wan was soon confronted by a private security guard who told her she was trespassing on private property; the guard called the county sheriff when she refused to move. Armed with documentation, she explained to the sheriff that despite the no-trespassing signs and private security, the strip of dry sand in question had been granted to the public by a homeowner in exchange for a construction permit. Many homeowners had agreed to public-use easements that expanded the territory protected by the Public Trust Doctrine. As part of the CCC’s permitting process Broad Beach homeowners had traded dry sand easements for construction rights. Such permits secured, for the public, the right to enjoy sections of sandy beach.

That Broad Beach dry sand easements lacked uniform parameters made identifying public dry sand difficult. Some homeowners signed easements extending inland twenty-five or fifty feet, to the dune vegetation line (no matter its distance from the water), or even all the way to a structure; sometimes this final permit type included a ten-foot privacy buffer line between home and beach. To complicate matters further, dry sand easements were given from various points, either the mean high tide or daily high tide line. Just under half of the lots at Broad Beach came to have public easements of some kind by the early 2000s.33 The result was an evolving crazy quilt of easements that made the task of identifying the public-private boundary in person difficult. Boundary disputes concerning the public trust emerged as swimmers, joggers, and sunbathers attempted to use the beach (fig. 1). In fact, 42 of the 108 homeowners along the beach had agreed to easements, deed restrictions, or other legal documents providing public access across the seaward edge of their lots. Misleading signs and aggressive private security guards undermined public use of dry sand easements.

Figure 1.

One twenty-foot wide public accessway is denoted on this stretch of Broad Beach. Each property is numerically identified as well as all easements. The seven easements vary from the mean high tide line landward to ten feet from private decks and a seawall, twenty-five-feet inland from daily high water line (which can lag behind the mean high tide line or exceed it, given the lunar cycle), or twenty-five-feet inland from mean high tide line (MHTL). In this graphic, the limit “daily high water line (b)” excludes a 10 foot buffer from the authorized development. Source: This figure is adapted from the California Coastal Commission, Broad Beach Public Shoreline Access Guide (July 2004), California Coastal Commission Publications, https://www.coastal.ca.gov/pubs.html (accessed 19 July 2019). Photograph copyright (c) 2002–2023 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.Californiacoastline.org.

Figure 1.

One twenty-foot wide public accessway is denoted on this stretch of Broad Beach. Each property is numerically identified as well as all easements. The seven easements vary from the mean high tide line landward to ten feet from private decks and a seawall, twenty-five-feet inland from daily high water line (which can lag behind the mean high tide line or exceed it, given the lunar cycle), or twenty-five-feet inland from mean high tide line (MHTL). In this graphic, the limit “daily high water line (b)” excludes a 10 foot buffer from the authorized development. Source: This figure is adapted from the California Coastal Commission, Broad Beach Public Shoreline Access Guide (July 2004), California Coastal Commission Publications, https://www.coastal.ca.gov/pubs.html (accessed 19 July 2019). Photograph copyright (c) 2002–2023 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.Californiacoastline.org.

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By the turn of the twenty-first century, private development, illegal and deceptive signs concerning dry sand easements, hidden vertical accessways, and misleading private security guards revealed the extent to which private ownership could constitute a near monopoly of a beach.34 Open beach and recreation activists responded to privatization attempts by framing beach access as a social justice issue nationwide. In Southern California, beach access was not solely constrained along the public-private property divide: social exclusivities built on class, race, and identity had long governed people’s experiences of the area’s beaches. In the 1930s Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.’s renowned planning and landscape architecture firm had presciently warned of beachfront privatization in greater Los Angeles. “The…tendency is toward a condition in which private and public ownership will be ranged against each other on opposite sides of mean high water on an indefinite line…dividing it so that neither faction can secure what it wants except by sufferance of the other.”35 As in cities and suburbs across the nation, Southern California’s high-quality leisure environments were frequently coupled with whiteness and wealth and used to separate and regulate people and places. In the late twentieth century, Los Angeles County’s 1 percent articulated a similarly exclusionist socio-spatial identity rooted in a proprietary attitude and squared off against beachgoers in Malibu.36

Twenty-first century beach activists looked to re-animate the Public Trust Doctrine by increasing public knowledge and supporting the enactment of public space on Malibu’s beach, including Broad Beach. In greater Los Angeles, combatting the sense of privacy and trespassing fostered by beach residents became the work of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers. The organization drew on the stereotype of public park rangers as interpreters of ecological and cultural resources. Environmental writer Jenny Price first began encouraging the public to use beaches by co-founding the organization in 2004. The motivation behind the Urban Rangers, Price explained in an interview, was to “take all the curiosity and wonder that people bring out to Yellowstone and Yosemite, and…instead ask questions about the places where people actually live.”37 As part of its “Public Access 101” series, the group invited members of the public to explore local beaches. Malibu “safaris” of August 2007 included overviews of jurisdiction, lessons in the identification of public and private property, and “practice” using the beach by reading trashy magazines and sunbathing. Safaris also included public easement “potlucks” to remind beachgoers that stretches of dry sand were available to the public, not just private landowners.38

The Urban Rangers Malibu safaris were part of what Price deemed “consciousness changing” on the beach. Simply being on the beach, Price contended, helped make visible the beach’s publicness, challenging the air of exclusivity fostered by wealthy beachfront residents.39 With this cultural and social initiative, the rangers looked to make beachgoers aware of their rights and make them feel comfortable fulfilling those rights, even when faced with intimidating signage and guards. After a number of weekend safaris, Joe Edmiston, the head of both the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a parks agency, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, offered to fund the Urban Rangers’ Malibu beaches work. Price recalled that the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority “ultimately asked us if we could take their rangers to the beaches and teach them what we knew about access. So, here you have the real rangers asking the fake rangers if they can assist the real rangers.”40 While Price found irony in this unexpected advocacy partnership, the synergy between government and community activists highlighted that the diminishment of the public trust in Malibu worried both cohorts. In 2013, Price went on to create Our Malibu Beaches, a smartphone app designed to democratize information concerning beach access.41 The app supplied beachgoers with information and images of illegal signage and hidden entrance ways designed to discourage legal use of beaches.

Open beach activists confronted Malibu residents who wielded social and economic influence to demand the state protect their right to private property by discouraging public recreation alongshore. But homeowners who had used courts to “narrow” Malibu’s Broad Beach socially did not realize that environmental forces would conspire to narrow it ecologically as well, to their own detriment. In addition to public use advocacy, Broad Beach residents confronted a second challenge, that of a shifting coastline. In the face of environmental change, wealthy beachfront suburbanites stopped asking to be left alone by the state. Instead, they demanded California halt littoral change, reframing Broad Beach as a public asset and fragile environment in need of public protection.

Long insistent on the sacredness of private property, the right to exclusivity, and segregation from the general public, Broad Beach owners rediscovered the public good when erosion appeared to threaten their homes. Coastal environmental change, especially fluctuating sediment supply, cycles of erosion and bluff retreat, and damaging storms led to new contests over public land—and calls for government intervention—in Malibu.42 Beach erosion altered the parameters of public access and raised the stakes regarding the Public Trust Doctrine and state and federal authorities’ responsibility to maintain beaches.

Coastal morphology narrowed Broad Beach in the late twentieth century. Malibu’s beaches were historically sensitive to shoreline changes due to the region’s low sediment supply and its vulnerability to coastal flooding during winter storms. Scientists estimated that 75 to 95 percent of all beach sand on the California coast was at one time provided by rivers that empty onto coastal plains. Before widespread urbanization, rainfall in the region’s tributary watershed transformed into runoff as it traveled to the coast, eroding and carrying with it the inland sediment that ultimately fed beaches. Once the sediment settled at the mouth of tributaries like Malibu Creek, waves and currents transported it along shore.43 Malibu sits within the Santa Monica Littoral cell, a forty-nine mile section of coastline dependent on sediment drainage of the Santa Monica Mountains. More than one hundred years of development in greater Los Angeles, coastal armoring, and dams and debris basins that trapped sediment en-route to the coast lowered the region’s sediment budget (the balance in the amounts of sediment being added to and removed from a coastline).44 By the late 1930s, state engineers and the general public understood that coastal development could cause or exacerbate erosion.45 While shoreline migration due to beach erosion is a natural process, human modification via coastal dredging and inland development can affect its speed by altering sediment supplies. By the twenty-first century the average annual sediment yield of Malibu Creek (the largest point source for the sediment that makes up the region’s shore) had declined by 54 percent from pre-development volumes. The west-facing exposure in Malibu is far more vulnerable to wave action and is not the natural depository for the area’s sediment. Due to sediment budget reduction and the area’s littoral drift capacity, the tendency of sands to drift eastward, or downcoast, away from Malibu, this coastline come to suffer from a constant sand debt.46 The declining sediment budget for the Malibu coastline contributed to increasing erosion on Broad Beach.

Intensive development made Malibu’s beaches more susceptible to erosion in the second half of the twentieth century. Coastal armoring—the addition of physical structures like vertical seawalls and riprap berms of rock to protect the beach and riparian structures from erosion or sea level changes caused by sediment loss—had unintended consequences. Unexpectedly, armoring exacerbated the effects of the region’s proclivity to erosion and its declining sediment budget. By 1996, shoreline armoring had altered roughly 50 percent of Malibu’s coast by limiting the influx of sediment from coastal bluffs and in front of some seawalls.47 Additionally, revetments, earthen embankments covered in protective materials meant to maintain beach shape, caused localized erosion. Such tidal scour, however, does not automatically result in the loss of beach acreage.48 According to the California State Lands Commission, “[u]nder the normal process of erosion and bluff retreat, the beach itself remains relatively stable in size and depth but progresses inland as the bluff or shoreline erodes.”49 The process of erosion and bluff retreat only became a threat in Malibu when development blocked inland progression. Neither homes nor the road could shift in concert with the natural cycles of erosion and bluff retreat.

Due to lower levels of sediment and impediments to erosion and bluff retreat, Broad Beach began to narrow in the 1970s. Around 1974 the mean high tide line began moving landward about two feet a year, resulting in a loss of sixty-five feet of beach by the start of the twenty-first century.50 The beach lost an estimated 600,000 cubic yards of sand between 1974 and 2000, with 35,000 cubic yards lost in the five years between 2005 and 2011.51 By the early 2000s, no public beach existed at Broad Beach high tide, while only approximately ten-to-twenty feet of sand appeared at low tide, severely limiting lateral access along shore. As Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, told a reporter in 2013, “I call it Invisible Beach.”52

A final environmental shift, the rising frequency of erosion-exacerbating storms, occurred in the same era that Broad Beach narrowed. Mid-to-late century coastal suburbanization in Malibu occurred during a relatively calm era for the coastal climate. At the end of the century, however, the climate shifted, replacing the relatively benign Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycle, a recurring fluctuation of the ocean-atmosphere climate, with a warmer cycle known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. This shift brought more frequent, and stronger, storms to the west Pacific.53 Thus coastal residents were forced to confront an era of greater risk for coastal erosion and flooding, particularly in the winters of 1978–79, 1982–83, and 1997–98.54 The winters of 2008–10 similarly caused unusually severe erosion at Broad Beach due to the combination of storm surge, exceptionally high tides due to lunar or seasonal cycles known as king tides, and an El Niño year storm season. Under these conditions, tidal erosion narrowed Broad Beach and seriously damaged two houses.

In 2010 Broad Beach residents applied for an emergency permit, allowing for the construction of a temporary 36,000-ton rock seawall running nearly the length of the beach; the CCC and City of Malibu approved the application. Ranging from thirteen to fifteen feet tall and more than thirty feet wide, the revetment of stone and industrial plastic black sandbags was an unattractive addition to the beach (fig. 2). It also violated public trust doctrine law since it partially or entirely covered thirty-two of the beach’s fifty-one lateral access easements and crossed the mean high tide line to cover public land.55 Despite this transgression, Broad Beach homeowners declared the revetment benefited the greater public good by preventing erosion, and they labored to make the work permanent. They looked to harness the state regulatory mechanisms that they had fought, and began to couch their private interests in the idea of the public good in the face of escalating risk.

Figure 2.

The effect of the seawall on the width of Broad Beach. Source: “Exhibit 10-Fixing the Back of the Beach 4-12-043 (Broad Beach GHAD),” California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 41, included in Broad Beach Geologic Hazard, California Coastal Commission (Nov. 25, 2014), California Coastal Commission http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2014/12/Th17a-12-2014.pdf (accessed 1 Mar. 2015).

Figure 2.

The effect of the seawall on the width of Broad Beach. Source: “Exhibit 10-Fixing the Back of the Beach 4-12-043 (Broad Beach GHAD),” California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 41, included in Broad Beach Geologic Hazard, California Coastal Commission (Nov. 25, 2014), California Coastal Commission http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2014/12/Th17a-12-2014.pdf (accessed 1 Mar. 2015).

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In September 2011 homeowners organized the Broad Beach Geological Hazard Abatement District (GHAD) and applied to the California State Lands Commission (CSLC) for a twenty-year project lease to armor Broad Beach and prevent erosion.56 Homeowners established the public agency under the California Public Resources Code to move their revetment proposal through the state’s multiple agency permitting process. The Broad Beach GHAD applied for permits at the local level from the City of Malibu, at the regional level from the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and Los Angeles County, at the state level from the CCC, the CSLC, and Caltrans, the state Department of Transportation, and at the federal level from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. California had created GHAD local assessment districts in 1979 to function as finance mechanisms to fund projects that prevented or abated geological hazards in response to a 600-acre landslide in Rancho Palos Verdes, Los Angeles County. While written in response to hillslope hazards of landslides and land subsistence, GHAD legislation also recognized erosion as a geological hazard that could necessitate abatement, and a minority of coastal communities created GHAD districts.57 In the fall of 2010 the Broad Beach GHAD proposed the immediate importation of 600,000 cubic yards of sand and an additional 450,000 cubic yards ten years later. Thus replenished, the authority said, the beach would stretch 100 feet wide, and the 2005 emergency rock sand berm and revetment would be buried and landscaped as part of a dune habitat reconstruction.58

Tasked with issuing—or denying—permits to ensure that local land-use did not damage the coastal environment or public access to it, the CCC organized a study of the revetment’s potential impact on the beach, which it finished in the fall of 2014. It determined that in the short-term the public trust would suffer during the construction process. Berm construction had brought about the closure of two of Broad Beach’s vertical accessways, and they would remain closed during and following construction.59 The CCC also recognized, however, that the public might benefit from beach reconstruction in the long-term. Broad Beach users interviewed in June 2012 as part of the study were generally receptive to the GHAD plan. Respondents recognized that beach restoration might help ensure continued access to the Malibu surf. One interviewer said, “I grew up in the area…we look forward to more public beach! Bring in the sand now!!”60 “I believe in public access to all beaches,” a second responded, “and would hope that it will be possible for the public to enjoy Broad Beach after the revetment.” Unsurprisingly, most homeowners spoke in favor of the project, arguing that beach protections would ultimately improve long-term public access, replacing the existing patchwork of easements with a larger and uniform beach. “All we're trying to do is repair the beach and make it better for everyone,” maintained Winifred Lumsden, a spokesperson for the beach’s property-owners’ association.61

Despite Broad Beach homeowners’ public relations campaign and the CCC’s positive interviews, reporting on the campaign revealed that the public did not support the emergency revetment or the GHAD’s proposal to make it permanent; the beach was already well-known for residents’ attempts to give it the impression of private land. Journalists captured a public that viewed the 2005 bulldozing on the beach and the 2011 revetment proposal as two examples of homeowners’ long-term strategy to exercise private authority over public land. As Broad Beach homeowners like Steve Levitan, co-creator of the Emmy-winning television show Modern Family admitted with frustration, the beach’s residents were characterized as villains.62 The overall public response interpreted homeowners as elitists working contrary to the goals of environmentalists, public access advocates, scientists, and government officials. When considered alongside Broad Beach’s earlier politics of environmental injustice, the GHAD’s rebuilding proposal was seen a self-serving program designed to enhance the beach for only a wealthy few. The efforts of homeowners who largely called the shots along the shore in the 1980s and 1990s had inspired critique from open beach advocates, from Jenny Price’s Urban Rangers to Surfrider, that undermined the GHAD’s public good claims. That newspaper coverage revealed an apparently broad consensus on the controversy reveals how powerful the California public beach tradition remained in the twenty-first century, despite years of disingenuous, if not illegal, undoing by coastal homeowners.

Broad Beach’s residents expressed surprise that their proposed investment could be so roundly critiqued—the $20 million GHAD plan was the largest private-funded beach nourishment program proposed to date in California. The plan underscored the economic might of homeowners and their assumption that they should direct future beach development.63 Yet residents who proclaimed good intentions and expressed indignation at the lack of community support overlooked crucial aspects of their previous attempts to reshape the beach. For example, after the emergency revetment’s installation in 2010, residents undertook unpermitted development around it. Property owners extended private landscaping, had patios and decks constructed on and adjacent to the revetment, and installed new “private property” and “no trespassing” signs.64 These actions could not be justified as in the public’s interest; they were private spaces built atop the revetment, which encroached on public land. Private development atop and around the berm illustrated the disconnect between beach homeowners’ deep-rooted expectations of private property rights and the Public Trust Doctrine.

In spite of California’s history of public beach protection, and notwithstanding promises of a widened beach and improved public access, Broad Beach homeowners never encouraged enactment of the public trust. Beachfront lot owners courted regulatory oversight of the beach when it focused not on the public trust, but on erosion prevention. The latter, they argued, was a public good, even if it hampered public access. Yet beach protection was also a way to shore up private property rights for those living on the foreshore.65 The extent of illegal privatization and misleading signs underscored that homeowners approached the public-private boundary with a focus on policing private rights—specifically the right of a proprietor to enjoy his or her property and bar the uninvited. The Broad Beach GHAD’s overemphasis on riparian homeowners’ private rights led the organization to downplay the rights of the public derived from the Public Trust Doctrine.

In the fall of 2014, the CCC provisionally passed the Broad Beach GHAD’s proposal to make the emergency berm permanent. But the CCC maintained that the GHAD could only proceed if it accepted a series of special conditions designed to mitigate “the adverse impact on public access and recreation that [had] already occurred, and [would] continue to occur in the future, as a result of the existing as-built emergency rock revetment.”66 The coastal commission focused on the fact that the revetment and dune construction would likely alter the public-private boundary on the beach and looked to mitigate negative effects.

The CCC mandated two separate public access easements to come into effect if renourishment, the importation of sand to supplement eroded sediment, failed to create a permanent twenty-five-foot wide public beach. The first condition required that homeowners provide “unambiguous public access” over the entirety of the area running parallel to the shore and extending landward twenty-five feet from the ambulatory mean high tide line, as identified by the CCC, if the line were to shift further landward in the future. This condition could potentially make public both dry sand and private property if the shape of Broad Beach evolved. The second condition required lateral public access easements on the land side of the revetment if public access was not viable on the beach. In other words, the commission wanted to ensure the future possibility of opening a ten-foot wide public pedestrian path on top of the revetment. The public right to pass and repass on private property on the land side of the revetment would only come into effect under two conditions: when less than ten feet of dry sand beach existed seaward of the revetment at any point along it, or a circumstance prohibiting the public’s use, access and enjoyment of the beach, such as an oil spill.67 The commission lastly looked to ensure that Broad Beach’s two vertical public accessways remained open and crossed the revetment by mandating that public paths be merged with the access stairways that property owners built from their homes to the beach.

Both the CCC and riparian property owners recognized a connection between beach renourishment, revetment construction, and the Public Trust Doctrine. The GHAD hoped that the work of making the emergency berm permanent would further underscore Broad Beach’s public-private boundary, since the revetment and new dunes would function as a privacy buffer and a physical barrier from public tidelands.68 The Broad Beach GHAD responded coldly to the commission’s conditions. Its reaction illuminated the paradox created by conflicting ideas of property rights, the public trust along shore, and coastal environmental management. Private homeownership and public recreation followed contradictory beach use and development goals. The GHAD challenged the CCC’s provisions to improve public beach access. The group claimed that it lacked the legal authority to require residents to provide vertical access from the beach to their residence. It interpreted the CCC’s public access conditions as erosive to residential privacy.69 “As the lines between public and private property become invisible,” a GHAD spokesperson declared, “the privacy and safety of homeowners and their families will be put at risk.”70 To prevent the dissolution of private property rights, the GHAD challenged the Public Trust Doctrine, proposing limiting trust lands by building the revetment across them and constraining the trust by limiting vertical accessways at Broad Beach.

In the debate over armoring Broad Beach, state regulatory agencies, wealthy homeowners, and Public Trust Doctrine advocates pursued the same ultimate goal: to anticipate and rationalize environmental change while preserving the beach. Because of legal precedent, coastal boundaries and beach territory considered part of California’s public lands follow shifting shorelines.71 In its report on the Broad Beach GHAD proposal, the CCC pointed out that “[a]s the beach eroded the ambulatory public-private boundary…[had] shifted landward. Uncertainties over the location of public beach versus private property resulted in diminished public access along the beach.”72 The CCC recognized that future erosion and sea level rise would cause gradual landward migration of the shoreline and continually reshape the proposal’s public trust impacts. The dynamism of beach morphology and littoral drift patterns at Broad Beach frustrated scientific modelling and predictions as to how beach nourishment would perform over time.73 Malibu’s “ultimate littoral fate” was generally known but “not always understood to a high level of quantitative confidence,” frustrating government attempts to accurately forecast the future extent of tidelands protected by the public trust.74 Conflict over the public-private divide arose between beachfront homeowners and nonresident joggers, swimmers, and sunbathers—the private property owner versus the recreating public. Both had rights at Broad Beach, but the GHAD saw these rights as contradictory and competing interests. Environmental change complicated the contest over public use of the beach.

While the Broad Beach GHAD protested the CCC’s public use conditions, contests over public trust rights did not stall what had the potential to be the largest beach replenishment program in California: a four-year approval process and subsequent legal fights over funding and sand importation did. The coastal commission only narrowly approved a ten-year renourishment plan in October 2015—and estimates of the cost to owners rose in the meantime.75 In the following four years, the City of Fillmore and Ventura County initiated litigation, protesting the potential dirt, traffic, and diesel exhaust pollution from the estimated 44,000 truck trips along the Pacific Coast Highway to deliver sand to Malibu. Further legal challenges arose when, due to escalating project costs the estimate for ten years of work eventually rose to $50 million—some Broad Beach property owners also filed lawsuits.76 In the interim, riparian landowners’ presumption of public land remained the subject of much political and legal debate across California.77 The stalled Broad Beach GHAD plan raised fundamental questions, in the words of the CCC, “about how to address significant coastal hazard risks to development while protecting other coastal resources, including public beach access.”78 In 2015 Jack Ainsworth, a CCC senior deputy director, acknowledged that due to the crisis of climate change, no precedent existed with which to evaluate the plan: “You can have the best modeling in the world but not know the effect of all the variables…this gets more difficult as time goes on and the sea level rises and we have more vigorous storms.”79

During the CCC’s review of the GHAD proposal, Surfrider Foundation representatives urged the agency to deny the revetment permit, since coastal armoring is not a panacea—seawalls or rock revetments, the most common strategies of armoring, can exacerbate erosion. As Lesley Ewing, an engineer for the coastal commission explained, the “reflective wave energy coming back from the rock structure—it quickens the amount of sand mobilized and taken offshore when the rock is exposed.”80 Surfrider encouraged the CCC to see Broad Beach erosion as an opportunity to rethink both coastal engineering of public beaches and beachfront development. The organization proposed that managed retreat was a more realistic goal for Broad Beach. Rather than further building along the shore in attempts to prevent erosion, the group argued, the CCC should allow for coastal inland progress to again reshape Malibu’s beaches. This radical approach would necessitate the removal of all hard structures, like the emergency revetment, and, where possible, homes. The commission did not take up Surfrider’s controversial idea of managed retreat and shelved the idea of contingency planning for potential future erosion.81 California’s Coastal Act acknowledged that armoring could have adverse impacts on coastal resources and could result in the loss of beach; while the act placed limits on such construction, the CCC also recognized that in practice “government agencies have been reluctant to deny permits in the face of pending loss of improved upland properties.”82 The climate crisis and changing coasts are incompatible with government understanding of private property as sacrosanct. Yet government bodies like the state of California proved unwilling to step away from the cycle of repairing and rebuilding properties in the path of coastal landscape change into the twenty-first century. Constituents demanded short-term protections such as renourishment and seawalls and government officials proved unwilling to address the endemic problem of private homes situated on a mobile littoral.83

As the twenty-first century unfolds, Broad Beach will be a bellwether for how California coastal communities address the tension between public access and private development in the face of climate crisis and sea level rise. All parties involved in the Broad Beach GHAD proposal acknowledged that at the tail end of the project’s twenty year life, sea level rise could change erosion rates and/or the elevation of mean high tide and push the California State Land Commission (CSLC) to potentially change property boundaries. The inherent changeability of the state’s coast is likely to grow even more dynamic in the future due to climate change. Territory that was once beachfront private property, the protection of which required coastal armoring and beach renourishment, might one day become tide-washed, and thus public, land. Estimated sea level rise over the proposed twenty years of beach replenishment ranged from 3.4 to 17.9 inches (with a projected value of 8.5 inches). The CSLC concluded that erosion rates at Broad Beach were potentially accelerating and that with projected sea level rise a restored beach would likely last ten to twenty years, even less if a series of significant storms or El Niño years occurred.84

Due to the Public Trust Doctrine and the coastal commission’s affirmation of recreation as an appropriate use of the trust, the public has a right to access all California beaches, and the CCC and the CSLC endeavored to provide it. Yet coastlines like Malibu’s Broad Beach represent some of America’s most valuable real estate. Homeowners who can afford such spectacular views often dislike the realities wrought by the Public Trust Doctrine. Malibu will doubtless lean even more heavily on public assistance to combat both wildfires and rising sea levels over time, even while signaling commitment to the exclusivity and anti-public attitude that attends their community’s affluence. This paradox offers few paths forward to face the dual demands of social justice and the climate crisis on the beach. Ultimately, the debates around both the public’s right to enjoy tide-washed beach and the policing of the littoral’s public-private boundary may not matter in the longer term. As climatologist Bill Patzert observed, Californians “want a solution to the sea-level-rise problem, but there are only temporary, expensive solutions, and every year, every decade, those solutions become less realistic. In the next fifty years, Broad Beach is going to be toast. I will guarantee it.”85

I would like to thank the hosts and participants of the 2014 Summer Institute on Contested Global Landscapes, part of Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences, and the Urban Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections for supporting this research. Thanks are also due to Stephen Halsey, Thomas Lekan, Elsa Devienne, and the PHR’s anonymous readers whose comments allowed me to clarify and improve this article.

1.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 41, included in Broad Beach Geologic Hazard, California Coastal Commission (Nov. 25, 2014), California Coastal Commission, accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://documents.coastal.ca.gov/reports/2014/12/Th17a-12-2014.pdf.

2.

Gary Baum, “Malibu’s Bizarre Sand War Pits Celebrities vs. Nature,” The Hollywood Reporter, Dec. 29 2012, accessed Feb. 23, 2015, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steven-spielberg-dustin-hoffman-stars-395131.

3.

Jim Moriarty, “Malibu: Access, Geffen, Trudeau and Bulldozers,” The Shaping Room–Surfrider Foundation (June 28, 2005), accessed Feb. 12, 2015, http://surfriderfoundation.typepad.com/shapingroom/2005/06/malibu_access_g.html.

4.

Daniel B. Wood, “In Malibu, a Skirmish Over Lines in the Sand,” The Christian Science Monitor, Jun. 14, 2005, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0614/p02s01-ussc.html.

5.

David C. Slade, Kerry Kehoe, and Jane K. Stahl, Putting the Public Trust Doctrine to Work: The Application of the Public Trust Doctrine to the Management of Lands, Waters, and Living Resources of the Coastal States (Washington, D.C.: Coastal States Organization, 1997); Robert Thompson, “Beach Access, Tresspass [sic], and the Social Enactment of Property,” Roger Williams University Law Review 17, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 351–72. My thinking on boundaries is informed by the work of geographer Nicholas Blomley, who interrogates the boundary between the public and private sphere as “central to liberal notions of property and boundary policing.” See Nicholas Blomley, “Flowers in the Bathtub: Boundary Crossings at the Public-Private Divide,” Geoforum 36 (2005): 281. See also Nicholas Blomley, “The Boundaries of Property: Lessons from Beatrix Potter,” The Canadian Geographer 48, no. 2 (2004): 91–100; Nicholas Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (New York: Guilford Press, 1994); Nicholas Blomley, “Mud for the Land,” Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002): 557–82; and Nicholas Blomley, “The Borrowed View: Privacy, Propriety, and the Entanglements of Property,” Law and Social Inquiry 30, no. 4 (Oct. 2005): 617–61.

6.

Andrew Kahrl, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 15. For examples of attempts to racially segregate beaches and civil rights protest over access to clean, safe beaches, see also Andrew Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Alison Rose Jefferson, “African-American Leisure Space in Santa Monica,” Southern California Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2009): 155–89; James Patterson Smith, “Local Leadership, the Biloxi Beach Riot, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 1959–1964,” in Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866–2000, ed. Gilbert R. Mason (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 65, 176, 196; and Adam Keul, “The Fantasy of Access: Neoliberal Ordering of a Public Beach,” Political Geography 48 (2015): 49–51.

7.

On Malibu’s evolution see Thomas J. Osborne, Coastal Sage: Peter Douglas and the Fight to Save California’s Shore (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 37. On Los Angeles’s pro-development “beach lobby” see Elsa Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea: Reinventing the Beach for the Suburban Age in Postwar Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History 45, no. 1 (2019): 99–125; and Clark Davis, “From Oasis to Metropolis: Southern California and the Changing Context of American Leisure,” Pacific Historical Review 61, no. 3 (May 1992): 357–86. On suburbanization and public space infringement, see Ronald A. Davidson and J. Nicholas Entrikin, “The Los Angeles Coast as a Public Place,” Geographical Review 95, no. 4 (2012): 585; and Mike Davis, “How Eden Lost Its Garden: A Political History of the L.A. Landscape,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 6, no. 4 (1995): 1–29. On the connection between local identity and the beach, see Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Elsa Devienne, “Spectacular Bodies: Los Angeles Beach Cultures and the Making of the ‘California Look’ (1900–1960s),” European Journal of American studies 14, no. 4 (2019): 1–25.

8.

“Report on Conferences of Federal Departments and of Atlantic and Pacific Coast and Gulf States Held at Asbury Park…New Jersey Oct. 14–15, 1926” (Jersey City, N.J.: Board of Commerce and Navigation, n.d.), 51, folder 2, box 31, Regional Plan Association Records, 1919–1997, #2688, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. On Malibu residents’ demands for protection against fire, see Mike Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Environmental History Review 19, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 1–36.

9.

Christof Mauch, “Unruly Paradise—Nature and Culture in Malibu, California,” in “Unruly Environments,” eds. Siddhartha Krishnan, Christopher L. Pastore, and Samuel Temple, RCC Perspectives no. 3 (2015): 47–48. See also Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

10.

Andrew Kahrl, “Fear of an Open Beach: Public Rights and Private Interests in 1970s Coastal Connecticut,” Journal of American History, 102, no. 2 (Sept. 2015): 462.

11.

Tension between property rights, the privatization of environmental amenities, and public space planning characterized suburbanization nationwide in the twentieth century. See Kara Schlichting, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Setha M. Low, “Claiming Space for an Engaged Anthropology: Spatial Inequality and Social Exclusion,” American Anthropologist 113 (Sept. 2011): 389–407. See also Setha Low and Neil Smith eds., The Politics of Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2006); David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (Sept./Oct. 2008): 23–40. See also Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1998); and Setha M. Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003). For a survey of legal theory regarding property and the public-private divide, see Lynn A. Staeheli and Don Mitchell, “‘Don’t Talk with Strangers’: Regulating Property, Pursifying the Public,” Griffith Law Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 531–45; and Lynn A. Staeheli and Don Mitchell, “Locating the Public in Research and Practice,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 6 (2007): 792–811.

12.

In California this line is demarcated by the mean high tide line; in Oregon, the public has access to all dry sand. Seven states extend private rights to mean low water: Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire. See William J. Lahey, “Waterfront Development and the Public Trust Doctrine,” Massachusetts Law Review 70, no. 2 (June 1985): 56n12; Thompson, “Beach Access, Tresspass [sic], and the Social Enactment of Property”; Jack H. Archer et al., The Public Trust Doctrine and the Management of America’s Coasts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Slade et al, Putting the Public Trust Doctrine to Work; and Diana M. Whitelaw and Gerald Robert Visgilio, eds., America’s Changing Coasts: Private Rights and Public Trust (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005).

13.

Los Angeles County Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan: CRSMP 2012, 4, California Division of Boating and Waterways (2014), accessed Feb. 23, 2015, http://www.dbw.ca.gov/csmw/pdf/LACO_CRSMP_DraftReport.pdf.

14.

Robert G. Healy and Jeffrey A. Zinn, “Environment and Development Conflicts in Coastal Zone Management,” Journal of the American Planning Association 51, no. 3 (1985): 299–311.

15.

Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea,” 117; Sara Fingal, “Turning the Tide: The Politics of Land and Leisure on the California and Mexican Coastlines in the Age of Environmentalism” (PhD diss: Brown University, 2012), 119–69; and Jared Orsi, “Restoring the Common to the Goose: Citizen Activism and the Protection of the California Coastline, 1969–1982,” Southern California Quarterly 78, no. 3 (fall 1996): 257–84. On the creation of Proposition 20, see Osborne, Coastal Sage, 55–73.

16.

Coastal Zone Management Act 16 U.S.C. §§1451–65. On the expansion of the Public Trust Doctrine by California courts see Marks v. Whitney 125. 491 P.2d 374, 380 (Cal. 1971); City of Malibu, City of Malibu LCP Land Use Plan Adopted September 13, 2002 (Seattle: Quality Code Publishing, 2015), 7; Archer et al, The Public Trust Doctrine, 23–25; and Benjamin Longstreth, “Protecting ‘The Wastes of the Foreshore’: The Federal Navigation Servitude and Its Origins in State Public Trust Doctrine,” Columbia Law Review 102, no. 2 (2002): 471–500. California was not the only state to protect beaches for the public in this era. On Texas’s vanguard 1950s legislation see Kahrl, Free the Beaches, 110, 184–85; and Kahrl, “Fear of an Open Beach,” 454. On activism and legislation in Oregon, see Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 110–11; and the documentary by Tom Olsen and Kathryn A. Straton, Politics of Sand (Cannon Beach, Ore: Cannon Beach History Center and Museum, 2009).

17.

Healy and Zinn, “Environment and Development Conflicts,” 308.

18.

California Coastal Zone Conservation Commission, California Coastal Plan (1975), accessed July 17 2019, http://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/caldocs_agencies/91. See also Charles Lester and Mary Matella, “Managing the Coastal Squeeze: Resilience Planning for Shoreline Residential Development,” Stanford Environmental Law Journal 36, no. 23 (2016): 31.

19.

City of Malibu, City of Malibu LCP, 2–3, 7, accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.qcode.us/codes/malibu-coastal/.

20.

Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 62, 136–37; Davis, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” 9; and Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 110–11, 115. Elsa Devienne argues that Southern California’s beach lobby, which from its organization in the 1930s insisted on public access to the beach (even if such access was a means to private profits), set the stage for the late 1960s and 1970s push for statewide coastal protections. Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea,” 117. Mike Davis argues that the roots of late 1960s activism can be seen in the unrealized 1930s Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for Los Angeles County. Davis, “How Eden Lost Its Garden.”

21.

Tony Barboza, “Beach Access Bingo,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 18, 2012, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/18/opinion/la-ed-beaches-20120118.

22.

California Coastal Commission, Public Access Report, 8, 26.

23.

Calvin Trillin, “Some Reflections on Sand as Real Estate,” New Yorker, Nov. 18, 1972: 216.

24.

Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 213.

25.

Trillin, “Some Reflections on Sand as Real Estate,” 214–21.

26.

Thomas Sugrue identifies “defensive localism” among conservative white homeowners after World War II. See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 210–11. On suburban landscapes organized around exclusion, see Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Stephen Richard Higley, Privilege, Power, and Place: The Geography of the American Upper Class (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995); James S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb (New York: Routledge, 2004).

27.

Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

28.

Nollan v. California Coastal Commission 438 U.S. 285, 834 (1987); David W. Myers, “High Courts Leave Mark on Industry,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1988, accessed July 14, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-01-10-re-34451-story.html. See also Osborne, Coastal Sage, 100–102; and Davidson and Entrikin, “The Los Angeles Coast as a Public Place,” 578–79, 587–88.

29.

Orsi, “Restoring the Common to the Goose,” 273, 277–80.

30.

California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources, 3.2-5-3.2-6.

31.

Adam Nagourney, “An App Shows the Gaps in Malibu’s Beachfront Wall,” New York Times, June 12, 2013: A14.

32.

On public access in southern Los Angeles County, see Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 21–70.

33.

California Coastal Commission, Public Access Report: Status of Vertical Accessways Acquired by the California Coastal Commission Actions 1973–2011… (San Francisco: California Coastal Commission, Statewide Public Access Program, 2011). See also Martha Groves, “Drawing Lines in the Sand in Battle Over Broad Beach,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 14, 2005, accessed Sept. 14, 20214, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/aug/14/local/me-beach14.

34.

“A Malibu Civics Lesson,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 2003: B1.

35.

Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew and Associates, Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region: 9, reproduced in Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region, eds. Greg Hise and William Deverell (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 91. For an analysis of the plan as a failure due to its over-reliance on planning science and its technocratic leanings, see Terence Young, “Moral Order, Language and the Failure of the 1930 Recreation Plan for Los Angeles County,” Planning Perspectives 16 (2001): 333–56.

36.

On the fight for class and racial equity in leisure activities on Southern California beaches see Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea,” 102; Sarah S. Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 46–47; Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 21–70; Keul, “The Fantasy of Access,” 56; and Davis, City of Quartz, 221–64.

37.

For quote see Nicole Seymour, “Public Thinker: Jenny Price on Refusing to Save the Planet,” Public Books website (March 23, 2020), accessed 30 March 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-jenny-price-on-refusing-to-save-the-planet/. See also Jenny Price, “Whose Coast Is It? Access, Planning & Resiliency on NJ & California Beaches” (Apr. 9, 2014), public talk at Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

38.

Seymour, “Public Thinker.”

39.

On “consciousness” see Price, “Whose Coast Is It?”; Jenny Price, “Malibu Public Beaches Safaris,” L.A. Observed, July 13, 2007, accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2007/07/malibu_public_beaches_safaris_1.php. Price, “Summer Beachcraft,” L.A. Observed, Aug. 27, 2007, accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2007/08/summer_beachcraft.php. For a consideration of how publics are maintained and how privatized space can diminish public space, see Davidson and Entrikin, “The Los Angeles Coast as a Public Place,” 579–80.

40.

Seymour, “Public Thinker.”

41.

Price, “Whose Coast Is It?” See also Adam Nagourney, “An App Shows the Gaps in Malibu’s Beachfront Wall,” New York Times, June 12, 2013, A14; and Martha Groves, “Scouting Out Malibu Beaches? There’s an App for That,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2013, 1.

42.

For an example of how beachfront homeowners, originally defenders of property rights, shifted to depend on federal assistance, see Kahrl, The Land Was Ours, 210–49.

43.

On the geologic, oceanic, and climatic forces that shape the California coast see Osborne, Coastal Sage, 15–25. On sediment budgets see Los Angeles County Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, 43, and California State Lands Commission, Shoreline Protective Structures, 3. On the geological setting and behavior of Southern California’s littoral cell see Douglas L. Inman, Patricia M. Masters, and Scott A. Jenkins, “Facing the Coastal Challenge: Modeling Coastal Erosion in Southern California,” UC San Diego Coastal Morphology Group (Oct. 27, 2002), accessed Feb. 20, 2020, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kk9s8q9.

44.

Los Angeles County Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, 7, 34, and City of Malibu, City of Malibu LCP, 59. The Santa Monica Littoral Cell stretches from Point Dume to Palos Verdes Point. Outside of artificial beach nourishment, the cell’s major sediment sources are the small streams of Malibu Creek, Topanga Creek, and Ballona Creek, which comprise a total watershed area of 232 square miles. For a visualization of the Santa Monica Littoral Cell, see the Coastal Morphology Group of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Kavli Institute’s website “Littoral Cells,” Living With Coastal Change (June 2003), accessed July 13, 2020, http://coastalchange.ucsd.edu/st3_basics/littoralcell.html.

45.

Devienne, “Urban Renewal by the Sea,” 105.

46.

Reinard T. Knur and Young C. Kim, “Historical Sediment Budget Analysis of the Malibu Coastline,” Sand Rights ’99: Bringing Back the Beaches: Conference Proceedings: September 23–26, 1999, Holiday Inn Ventura Resort, Ventura, California (Reston, Va.: American Society of Civil Engineers, 2000), 217. On coastal sediment balances in general, see also Douglas L. Inman and Birchard M. Brush, “The Coastal Challenge,” Science 181, no. 4094 (July 6, 1973): 24–27.

47.

City of Malibu, City of Malibu LCP Land Use Plan, 59–60.

48.

California Coastal Sediment Management Workgroup, California Coastal Sediment Master Plan Status Report, California Coastal Sediment Management Workgroup, Sept 2006, 1, California Division of Boating and Waterways (2014), accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://dbw.ca.gov/csmw/csmwhome.htm.

49.

California State Lands Commission, Shoreline Protective Structures (April 2001), 2–3, State Lands Commission Reports (2010), accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://www.slc.ca.gov/Reports/Shoreline_Protective_Structures/Shoreline_Protective_Structures_Report.pdf. On the types of coastal retreat, including shoreline migration and long-term beach retreat to due to declining sand delivery, see Gary B. Griggs, “Lost Neighborhoods of the California Coast,” Journal of Coastal Research 31, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 140–41.

50.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 2.

51.

California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources and Values for the Broad Beach Restoration Project—July 2014, ES-10, California State Land Commission.gov, accessed Feb. 12, 2015, http://www.slc.ca.gov/division_pages/DEPM/Reports/Broad_Beach/Broad_Beach.html; see also Trancas Property Owner’s Association, Broad Beach Restoration Project Coastal Development Permit Project Description, City of Malibu Document Center (Jan. 2011), accessed Feb. 12, 2015, http://www.malibucity.org/DocumentCenter/View/1223. On California’s sand budget see California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 38.

52.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, “From Coast to Toast,” Vanity Fair Magazine, Aug. 2013, accessed Feb. 12, 2015, http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2013/08/end-of-malibu-nantucket-erosion.

53.

Griggs, “Lost Neighborhoods of the California Coast,” 140. See also Gary B. Griggs, “California Coastline: El Niño, Erosion and Protection,” California's Coastal Natural Hazards, CSBPA Conference, eds. L. Ewing, and D. Sherman (Santa Barbara: University of Southern California Sea Grant Program), 36–55. On the relationship between damaging storms and El Niño–Southern Oscillation events, see Curt D. Storlazzi and Gary B. Griggs, “Influence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Events on the Evolution of Central California’s Shoreline,” GSA Bulletin 112, no. 2 (Feb. 2000): 239–41.

54.

Osborne, Coastal Sage, 23; and Tom Ross et al., “The El Nino Winter of ’97–’98,” National Climatic Data Center Technical Report No. 98–02, April 1998, accessed Mar. 14, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f7fe/b92617fe78d270d7b52d469fb3bdb0663072.pdf.

55.

California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources, 3.2-7- 3.2-9. On damaging El Niño events, including 2009–10, see Griggs, “Lost Neighborhoods of the California Coast,” 129, 140.

56.

The BBGHAD encompassed the entirety of the beach’s 122 single-family residential parcels (owned by 114 individual property owners). Fifty-one of the parcels had restrictions protecting public lateral beach access, thirty-two of which were directly underneath or landward of the revetment. Thirty-six of the parcels had easements held by the State Lands Commission, twenty of which were in the revetment area. Another eleven of the existing residences had “no future seawall” conditions required by the Commission or the City of Malibu. Seven of these eleven residences were located behind the proposed revetment. California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 2.

57.

Robert B. Olshansky, “Geologic Hazard Abatement Districts,” California Geology 39, no. 7 (1986), 158–59; “About the Project,” Broad Beach GHAD website, 2012, accessed June 20, 2019, http://www.bbghad.com.

58.

Trancas Property Owner’s Association. See also Moffatt and Nichol, Broad Beach Restoration Project Coastal Development Permit Project Description FINAL, Document Center, MalibuCity.Org, Jan. 2011, accessed July 17, 2019, https://www.malibucity.org/DocumentCenter/View/1223/Project-Description?bidId=.

59.

Tony Barboza, “Construction by Malibu Homeowners Stirs Up Anger Over Public Beach Access,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 02, 2010, accessed Feb. 12, 2015, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/02/local/la-me—broad-beach-20101031.

60.

Appendix E: Recreational User Survey, California State Lands Commission, Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources and Values for the Broad Beach Restoration Project (October 2012), 6, Surfrider.org, accessed Feb. 2, 2015, http://www.surfrider-southbay.org/download/Broad_Beach_Restoration_Project_MASTER-DOCS.pdf.

61.

Wood, “In Malibu, a Skirmish over Lines in the Sand.” The Broad Beach GHAD created a pro-renourishment website and hired consulting firms as part of its public relations campaign. See Broad Beach GHAD website, 2012, accessed June 12, 2019, http://www.bbghad.com/about-the-project/.

62.

Grigoriadis, “From Coast to Toast.”

63.

Jimy Tallal, “Broad Beach Sand Project Clears Major Hurdles Project to Widen Broad Beach,” The Malibu Times, Apr. 9, 2014, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_2d6984e4-c019-11e3-ba06-001a4bcf887a.html.

64.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 32.

65.

Fingal, “Turning the Tide,” 2, 5.

66.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 32.

67.

Ibid.

68.

Barboza, “Construction by Malibu Homeowners Stirs Up Anger Over Public Beach Access.”

69.

See Agenda Item 17a, Thursday, December 11, 2014, Coastal Development Permit 4- 12-043 (Broad Beach Geologic Hazard Abatement District) California Coastal Commission, Broad Beach Geologic Hazard; see also Addendum Exhibit 3: Letter from Broad Beach Geologic Hazard Abatement District (Dec. 5, 2014), California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources.

70.

Addendum Exhibit 3: Letter from Broad Beach Geologic Hazard Abatement District.

71.

California State Lands Commission, A Report on Sea Level Rise Preparedness (Dec. 17, 2009) State Lands Commission, accessed Mar. 1, 2015, http://www.slc.ca.gov/reports/sea_level_report.pdf.

72.

California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources, 3.2-6. On sea level rise and climate change see John Walsh et al., “Sea Level Rise,” 2014, National Climate Assessment, accessed July 11, 2020, http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/node/5667.

73.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar (Apr. 4, 2014), 59. On the commission’s interest in climate change and accelerated sea level rise see Lester and Matella, “Managing the Coastal Squeeze,” 27–28. On landward migration diminishing the public trust alongshore, see also Center for Ocean Solutions, The Public Trust Doctrine: A Guiding Principle for Governing California’s Coast under Climate Change (Stanford: Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 2017).

74.

Los Angeles County Coastal Regional Sediment Management Plan, 34, 36. See also California Coastal Commission, Sea Level Rise Policy Guidance, Aug. 2018, accessed July 14, 2020, www.coastal.ca.gov/climate/slrguidance.html.

75.

Emily Sawicki and Tallal, “Coastal Commission OKs Broad Beach Sand Replacement,” The Malibu Times, Oct. 15, 2015, accessed July 17, 2019, http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_e64e6b0c-72cc-11e5-b406-e301b7a2051b.html.

76.

Suzanne Guldimann, “Broad Beach Residents Still Waiting on Sand,” The Malibu Times, Nov. 10, 2016, accessed July 17, 2019, http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_fb439ca0-a6d6-11e6-871e-fba60ba84818.html; Jimy Tallal, “Broad Beach Homeowners Win Court Battle with Ventura County,” The Malibu Times, June 27, 2018, accessed July 17, 2019, http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_ed46c7b6-7a2f-11e8-9f76-0774ed0ffa7c.html; and Tallal, “Broad Beach Sand Project Costs Jump to $55–60 Million Per Decade” The Malibu Times, Oct. 26, 2017, accessed July 17, 2019, http://www.malibutimes.com/news/article_a2efdc2a-b9af-11e7-9869-3736a6dc27fd.html. For challenges from Broad Beach homeowners see the Save Broad Beach website, SaveBroadBeach.com.

77.

See, for example, the CCC response to Newport Beach, Orange County, and its attempt to charge beachfront homeowners fees on private decks and lawns on public land; Anne C. Mulkern, “State Orders Homeowners to Remove Lawns Encroaching on Beach,” E&E News, July 11, 2019, accessed July 11, 2019, https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060725833.

78.

California Coastal Commission Staff Report: Regular Calendar, 4.

79.

Martha Groves, “Dustin Hoffman, Ray Romano and Pierce Brosnan All Hope to Restore This Prized but Battered Malibu Beach,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26, 2015, accessed July 17, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-broad-beach-sand-20151022-story.html. On climate change and sea level rise on the west coast, see Matthew Heberger et al, “The Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on the California Coast,” California Energy Commission Report CEC-500-2009-024-F (Sacramento: California Energy Commission, 2009), accessed July 14, 2020, https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/sea-level-rise.pdf; and Linwood Pendleton et al, “Estimating the Potential Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Southern California Beaches,” Climatic Change 109 (Nov. 2011): 277–98.

80.

California State Lands Commission, Shoreline Protective Structures, 3. On the negative effects of coastal engineering on beaches, see Wallace Kaufman and Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., The Beaches Are Moving: The Drowning of America’s Shoreline (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Press, 1979); Orrin H. Pilkey and Katharine L. Dixon, The Corps and the Shore (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996); and Cornelia Dean, Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

81.

Addendum Exhibit 8: Ex parte Communications by Commissioners, “Dec 8, 2014, teleconference, Stephanie Sekich, Surfrider, Dana Murray Heal the Bay, Gia Brazil, Ocean Conservancy with Jana Zimmer,” California State Lands Commission, Revised Analysis of Impacts to Public Trust Resources. For a reflection on why communities embrace or reject managed retreat, see Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2018).

82.

California Coastal Commission, Broad Beach Geologic Hazard, 50; see also California State Lands Commission, Shoreline Protective Structures, 3.

83.

Kahrl, Free the Beaches, 209, 294–95; and Orrin Pilkey, “We Need to Retreat from the Beach,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2012, cited in Kahrl, Free the Beach, 294n17.

84.

California Coastal Commission, Broad Beach Geologic Hazard, 2–3. See also Gary Griggs, Coasts in Crisis: A Global Challenge (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

85.

Grigoriadis, “From Coast to Toast.”