Your Seawall, Our Beach: The Property-Rights Case That Cuts Both Ways

A cracking wall in Laguna Beach shows why owners want to defend their homes, and why a wall that saves one lot can cost the public the sand in front of it

Seawalls and Property Rights on the California Coast

There is no purer test of a property-rights position than a house on a bluff with the sea coming toward it. The owner bought the land lawfully. The owner pays the taxes. The ocean is about to take the back garden. Surely the owner is entitled to build a wall.

That instinct is sound as far as it goes. The difficulty is what the wall does to the property next to it, which in California is usually a public beach.

Laguna Beach, September 2026

Over the Labor Day weekend a powerful swell arrived on the Southern California coast together with high tides. A Los Angeles television station reported that a cracking seawall protecting oceanfront homes in Laguna Beach was raising concerns as the surf built, with crews in neighbouring Newport Beach piling up sand berms in preparation.

A resident told the station that the sand had been washed out completely, that the wall was cracked in several places and that “every day gets worse.”

From the homeowners’ side the picture is straightforward. A structure built to protect their houses is failing. If it goes, the houses may follow. They want it repaired, and quickly.

The Owner’s Case

It deserves to be stated at full strength.

The right to protect what you own from destruction is about as basic as property rights get. Nobody thinks a homeowner must stand by while a fire burns the house down. Why should water be different?

California law has long recognised something of the kind. The Coastal Act provides that protective structures shall be permitted when required to protect existing structures in danger from erosion, subject to conditions. Many of the walls now standing were built under that provision or before the Act existed.

The owners also point out that the state approved the building of their homes, collected taxes on them for decades and in many cases approved the walls. To change the rules now, when the sea is higher, looks to them like moving the goalposts.

What a Wall Does

The counter-argument is not about feelings. It is about physics.

A natural beach is not fixed. As the sea rises or the bluff erodes, the whole strip of sand shifts landward. The beach survives by moving.

A seawall fixes the back of the beach in place. The water keeps coming. The sand in front of the wall is scoured away and has nowhere to retreat to. In time the waves break directly on the wall and there is no beach.

A recent explainer on the September storms summarises the state’s position: the California Coastal Commission warns that shoreline armouring can accelerate the loss of beaches by preventing them from migrating inland. The process is known to geologists as passive erosion.

There is a second effect. An eroding bluff is itself a source of sand. Wall it off and that supply stops, which starves beaches further along the coast.

The Libertarian Problem

Here is the difficulty for anyone who takes property rights seriously.

The standard defence of property is that an owner may do as he likes with what is his, provided he does not damage what belongs to others. A factory may operate, but not pour waste on the neighbour’s field.

In California the land seaward of the mean high tide line belongs to the public. That is not a modern regulation. It is the public trust doctrine, inherited from English common law and Roman law before that, and written into the state constitution.

So when a private wall causes the public beach in front of it to disappear, one owner’s protection has destroyed another owner’s property. The other owner happens to be everyone.

On strict property-rights grounds, that is not an exercise of a right. It is a harm to a neighbour.

And Yet

The matter does not end there, because the homeowner has replies.

First, causation is contested. Beaches are also losing sand because rivers have been dammed, harbours built and the sea is rising. To put the whole loss on the nearest wall is too simple.

Second, the state itself armours the coast when its own assets are threatened. Highways, railways and public car parks along the shore are protected with rock. If government may defend its property, the homeowner asks why he may not defend his.

Third, there is the question of compensation. If the public interest requires that a private home be surrendered to the sea, the owner may fairly ask whether the public should pay for what it is taking.

A Way Through

A consistent position, for those who value both property and the commons, might run as follows.

An owner should be free to protect an existing home, but should bear the full cost of doing so, including the cost imposed on the beach. California already charges sand mitigation fees on some permits. Whether those fees reflect the real value of a lost beach is doubtful. Pricing the harm properly is more in keeping with market principles than either a ban or a free pass.

New construction is different. Anyone who builds today on an eroding shore does so with full knowledge. There is a strong case that such owners should waive any future right to a wall, and many permits now say so.

And the state should apply to itself the rules it applies to others. A public agency that armours its own car park while refusing a homeowner invites the charge of hypocrisy.

What Surfers Have at Stake

For those who use the water, the interest is direct. A beach that has been squeezed out is a beach you cannot cross to reach the surf. Waves reflecting off a hard wall change how a break behaves. A sand-starved coast produces different sandbars.

The surfer on that Laguna beach and the homeowner behind the wall may be the same person. One nearby resident told the television station he had grown up two blocks from the beach and surfed there all his life. That is the real shape of the dispute. It runs through neighbourhoods, and sometimes through households.

This article sets out arguments on both sides and relies on published reports for its facts. The British have been quarrelling with the sea for longer than California has existed, and The London Prat covers it in its British satirical news on walls against the sea and its London satirical news about holding back the tide. Bohiney Magazine handles the American coast.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/