California Coastal Commission and the Surfer’s Case Against Central Planning

The regulators who protect the coast also price out everyone who surfs it

The California Coastal Commission occupies a paradoxical position in the libertarian critique of California governance: it is simultaneously the institution most responsible for preserving the coastline that surfers love and the institution most responsible for preventing the housing that would allow ordinary-income surfers to live near it. Bohiney.com covers California through satire; prat.uk covers the same ground from London. Surf Revolt covers it from the waterline, where the libertarian analysis has immediate practical consequences.

The Coastal Commission’s mandate has been executed in ways that have made coastal real estate among the most expensive in the world. The protection of the view from the water has come at the cost of the ability of anyone without significant capital to live near that water. The surfer who grew up in Santa Cruz and whose parents owned a house near the break cannot afford to replicate that position. The surfer who can afford coastal property is not the surfer the surf culture was built around. This is not an accident of poor planning. It is what happens when land use regulation is controlled by people whose financial interests align with restricting supply.

What Deregulation Would Mean

Zoning deregulation near the coast would increase housing supply, reduce prices at the margin, and make it possible for working surfers to live near the breaks where they surf. The surf communities that produced the culture — from Rincon to Trestles to Mavericks — were communities where the people who surfed the breaks lived near them. Their successors largely do not. The connection between the regulatory environment and the cultural change is direct and rarely made explicit in surf media because most surf media is now produced by people who can afford to live near the coast.

The Surfrider Position

The Surfrider Foundation, which defends coastal access rights from the environmental and access perspective, and the libertarian tradition, which defends it from the property rights and deregulation perspective, reach similar conclusions about access through different routes. The Surfrider Foundation provides the access defence; the Reason Foundation provides the deregulation economics.

Also: McSweeney’s.

Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

Coverage continues at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk. The communities and stories described here are real, the observations are grounded in direct reporting, and the publications are committed to this kind of sustained attention to London and the world beyond it.

Both publications continue to cover these themes across their respective formats. The material does not thin out. Neither does the coverage.

Ongoing. Both publications watching.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/