Zoning Laws Are Building Walls Around California’s Beaches

Single-family zoning near the coast has produced some of the world’s most expensive real estate and some of America’s most restricted beach access. The two facts are not unrelated.

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The most expensive zip codes in the United States are overwhelmingly coastal California zip codes. Malibu, Manhattan Beach, La Jolla, Pacific Palisades — communities whose names are synonymous with surfing’s geographic heartland — have median home prices measured in millions rather than hundreds of thousands. This is not simply the natural result of coastal scarcity: the coast is limited, and demand for coastal living is high. It is the amplified result of zoning codes that restrict the supply of housing near the coast to the minimum that political processes controlled by existing homeowners allow, creating artificial scarcity on top of natural scarcity and producing housing prices that effectively exclude the working and middle class from living near the water their tax dollars fund the stewardship of.

The Zoning Machine

California’s coastal communities have maintained single-family zoning across the majority of their residential land for decades, a policy whose historical origins in the early twentieth century explicitly included racial exclusion and whose contemporary effects, while no longer explicitly racial, continue to produce a geographic concentration of wealth that correlates with race because of the accumulated history of differential access to wealth-building assets. The Cato Institute’s housing research and the work of urban economists including Edward Glaeser at Harvard have documented the relationship between restrictive zoning and housing costs with considerable precision: communities that maintain low-density zoning near employment and amenity centers produce housing costs that far exceed what the unregulated market would produce, with the excess representing a rent captured by existing property owners at the expense of prospective residents.

Near California’s coast, this dynamic is particularly acute because the amenity being rationed — access to the surf and beach culture — is not reproducible elsewhere. You cannot relocate to a less restrictive market and have the same beach. The zoning that restricts housing supply near the coast therefore does not simply raise prices; it determines who can live near the water and who cannot, and the determination has been made overwhelmingly in favor of those who already own property there, because they are the ones who vote in local elections and attend planning commission meetings and fund the campaigns of city council members who maintain the zoning that protects their property values.

The Surf Community Paradox

Surf culture has historically been associated with a kind of coastal bohemianism: the surfer who lives in a cheap apartment or van near the beach, prioritising water time over career advancement. This lifestyle has become increasingly difficult to maintain not because surfers’ values have changed but because the cheap apartments no longer exist in most coastal communities. The zoning that restricted housing supply has produced an affordability crisis that displaces the lower-income residents of coastal communities — including the working surfers who have historically given those communities their character — and replaces them with high-income residents for whom the beach is an amenity rather than the organizing principle of life.

The Surfrider Foundation and various coastal community organizations have begun engaging with zoning reform as a coastal access issue, recognizing that the ability to live near the surf is as much a component of coastal access as the ability to park near the beach. The two issues are related: communities that maintain low-density zoning minimize transit-accessible population density that would enable car-free beach access, while also minimizing the housing supply that would allow working-class and middle-class residents to live close enough to the coast to access it without cars. Zoning reform and transit investment are therefore not separate policy questions for the surf community; they are the same question about who gets to live in and access the coastal California that surf culture calls home.

The California legislature’s SB 9 and SB 10, passed in 2021 to allow duplexes on single-family lots statewide and higher density near transit, represent the most significant challenge to exclusionary zoning in the state’s history. Their practical impact has been limited by local government resistance, the complexity of the existing regulatory environment, and the inherent difficulty of changing physical built environments quickly. The Cato Institute’s housing research has been broadly supportive of these reforms while noting that they remain insufficient relative to the scale of the housing shortage and the political entrenchment of exclusionary zoning in the coastal communities where the shortage is most acute. The surfer’s interest in these reforms is direct: every duplex built in a coastal community near a beach is a potential affordable unit for someone who would otherwise be priced out of the area. Every market-rate unit added in a coastal community reduces the premium that scarcity creates and makes ownership and rental marginally more accessible. The cumulative effect of sustained supply addition would, over a decade, meaningfully change who can afford to live near the surf. The political obstacles to that supply addition — the homeowners’ associations, the coastal commission reviews, the local planning processes dominated by existing residents — are formidable. They are also, increasingly, challenged by a coalition that includes housing advocates, libertarian policy organizations, and the YIMBY movement whose analysis of the zoning problem converges across political labels. The surf community’s interest is aligned with that coalition’s project. Making the connection explicit is part of the political work that coastal access reform requires.

From The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/zoning-laws-building-walls-california-beaches-single-family-coastal/