Eminent Domain, Coastal Access, and the Fight Over Who Owns the Beach

Property rights, public trust doctrine, and the contested shoreline of Southern California

The Shore and Its Owners

MALIBU, CA — The public trust doctrine holds that the tidal zone — the land between mean high tide and mean low tide — is owned by the state in trust for the public and cannot be privately owned or closed. This is settled law. What is less settled is the question of how the public reaches the tidal zone when private property extends to the mean high tide line, which it does along much of California’s coast.

In Malibu, private landowners have historically blocked lateral beach access by posting private property signs at the dry sand above the tide line, refusing to recognise public access easements, and in documented cases physically confronting beachgoers attempting to walk the coast. The California Coastal Commission has required public access easements as permit conditions for coastal development since the 1970s. Many of those easements are unrecorded, unmarked, or unknown to the public they theoretically serve.

The Buyout Question

Eminent domain — the government’s power to take private property for public use with just compensation — is theoretically available as a tool to create coastal access where it does not currently exist. It is rarely used for this purpose because the cost of acquiring Malibu beachfront at market value is prohibitive and because the political will to condemn property owned by wealthy coastal homeowners is limited in California’s coastal governments, which are governed largely by the same homeowners or their social peers.

The libertarian position on this tension is genuinely complicated: private property rights are foundational, and the public trust doctrine limits those rights at the tide line; the pathway to the tide line is a separate question that market solutions (purchased access easements, voluntary conservation agreements) address imperfectly; and government acquisition through eminent domain is a legitimate tool whose political economy makes it rarely available in the places it is most needed.

The Surfrider Foundation beach access programme maps documented access points and barriers along the California coast. The maps show both the rights that exist and the access that doesn’t. The distance between the two is where property rights, public trust, and political economy intersect in ways that no clean ideological framework fully resolves.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com