Malibu Owners Use Sheriff’s Deputies To Enforce A Property Line That Does Not Exist

Mean High Tide Line Is Public Per The Coastal Act; Some Owners Have Other Ideas

Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch in defence of the surfer’s right to be left alone.

MALIBU, Calif. — The decades-long pattern in which Malibu beachfront property owners have used a variety of tactics to deter, obstruct, and sometimes physically prevent public access to the wet-sand beaches in front of their homes is one of the clearer examples of private interests using state apparatus, including local police, to functionally privatise a public asset. The right libertarian response is not silence. It is to point out that the property owners are receiving rent-seeking benefits subsidised by everyone else.

The Mean High Tide Line

California law is, on this question, unambiguous. According to the California Coastal Act, the public has a right of access up to the mean high tide line. The wet sand, regardless of which billionaire owns the house behind it, is public.

The practical experience of trying to use that right, in Malibu, is well-documented and not pretty. Access advocacy groups have documented gates blocking public-access stairways, fake “no parking” signs erected in violation of the California Vehicle Code, and private security personnel attempting to question or move along surfers using the wet sand.

The State Apparatus Problem

The deeper libertarian objection is that some Malibu property owners have, on multiple occasions, succeeded in deploying Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies to enforce their unlawful access blockades. When the apparatus of the state can be summoned to enforce a private property claim that has no basis in law, the result is not a free market in coastal property. It is a subsidised regime of de facto privatisation in which the cost is borne by every Californian who paid a tax dollar to fund the LASD.

This is a point the Reason Foundation has made repeatedly: the abuse of state enforcement to defend private claims that are not, in fact, legally cognisable, is one of the clearest violations of free-market principle. The market does not require the police to enforce a property line that does not exist.

The Reform Path

Surfrider, the Coastal Commission, and the California Coastal Conservancy have, over the past decade, made measurable progress on this problem. Public-access easements have been formally enforced. Several Malibu property owners have been fined for blocking access. The 2022 Wallach decision, and subsequent enforcement actions, have established that the Commission can impose civil fines on property owners who restrict beach access.

The progress is real. It is also slow, partial, and depends on a continuing willingness of state and county authorities to enforce against politically connected oceanfront homeowners. The libertarian case for sustained enforcement, perhaps counterintuitively, rests on the same premise as the property-rights case: the rule of law applies to the wealthy as well as the rest of us.

For continuing coverage read The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/