California’s Regulation Prices Out the Surfers Who Built Its Culture

When Coastal Living Doubles Every Decade, the People Who Made These Places Worth Living in Are Replaced by People Who Film Them

Published by Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat | California libertarian perspective.

The Irony the Regulations Built

The coastal California communities that produced surf culture — from Malibu to Santa Cruz, from Ocean Beach to Huntington — have become communities that surf culture practitioners can no longer afford to live in. The median home price in Malibu is approximately four million dollars. The median home price in Santa Cruz approaches one point four million. These prices do not reflect the incomes of the surfers, teachers, musicians, artists, and beach workers who built the culture that makes these places worth living in. They reflect the prices that the intersection of limited supply, extreme demand, and regulatory constraints on new construction produces. The environmental regulations that California coastal communities have enacted to protect the character that made them desirable have also restricted the supply of housing that would allow the people who created that character to continue living there.

This is not a simple story about environmentalists pricing out the working class. The restrictions on coastal development serve genuine environmental values that the surf community shares: protecting water quality, maintaining natural coastal processes, preserving habitat. The tension is not between environmental values and housing affordability. It is between the specific regulatory tools used to protect environmental values and the supply constraints those tools produce. Different tools could protect the environment without the same housing supply effect. The political will to use different tools has not materialised because the communities that would benefit from new housing supply are not the communities making the regulatory decisions.

The CEQA Mechanism

California’s Environmental Quality Act requires environmental review of essentially all development projects above a minimal threshold. The review process adds time and cost to housing construction and provides legal standing for project opponents to challenge approvals through environmental litigation. The law was designed to prevent genuine environmental harm from development. It has been used to challenge transit-oriented housing developments, infill construction in existing urban areas, and housing projects near beaches that would allow more people to live near the ocean. The use of an environmental review law to prevent housing that would not have significant environmental impact is the mechanism by which supply is restricted and prices rise.

The law’s application to projects with no genuine environmental impact is the abuse that produces the affordability problem, and changing this would require legislative amendment that the interest groups benefiting from the restriction reliably block. According to Reason, California’s housing permitting process is among the most time-consuming and expensive in the country. The Cato Institute analyses CEQA reform from a regulatory efficiency perspective. The surf community’s political energy directed toward CEQA reform that maintains genuine environmental review while eliminating abuse would produce better outcomes for surf culture than the current alignment that produces expensive communities that surfers can visit but not afford to live in.

The Talent Displacement

The displacement of long-term coastal residents by the housing price spiral produces cultural consequences that go beyond the personal hardship of individual families. The shapers, the lifeguards, the surf instructors, the board repair technicians, and the informal knowledge holders who constitute surf culture’s practical infrastructure do not have the income to live in the communities where they work as those communities’ housing prices rise. The culture that the surf community values is produced by people who are being priced out of the geography that anchors it. The replacement residents are not wrong to want to live near the ocean. The policy that forces the choice between environmental protection and cultural continuity is the problem. Better policy would not force the choice.

The housing affordability crisis in coastal California has a specific demographic consequence for surf culture that goes beyond individual displacement: it is producing a generational break in the transmission of surf culture from established practitioners to newcomers. The informal apprenticeship that surf culture has historically relied upon — young surfers learning from more experienced surfers in the same lineup, at the same breaks, over years of shared practice — requires geographic proximity between generations that housing prices are making increasingly difficult to maintain. The experienced surfer who would have mentored the next generation lives in an inland community two hours from the break. The newcomer who lives near the break does not have the local knowledge context that extended proximity to a specific break develops. The culture’s informal transmission mechanism is degraded not by any deliberate decision but by the cumulative outcome of housing policy choices that the surf community has not organised around because they seemed like someone else’s political issue. They are not someone else’s issue. They are the issue most directly threatening surf culture’s continuity.

The policy response that would address this specific consequence — increasing housing supply in coastal communities through zoning reform, CEQA streamlining for infill development, and reduced permitting timelines for housing near transit — is available and has been advocated by housing organisations across California for a decade. The surf community’s endorsement of this agenda, grounded in the specific cultural argument that surf culture’s continuity requires affordable coastal housing, would add a constituency that housing advocacy has not previously had. The ocean culture argument for housing reform is available. The surf community has not yet picked it up.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/