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Basically a panel found in favor of an earlier Judge's ruling that because the previous owners charged a fee to enter the property, it isn't a public road/beach, but instead a permitted use road/beach, giving the owner the right to not permit ANYone to enter the property.
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A "public park" is simply owned by a public entity, it does not mean you get unlimited unrestricted access to it. If the city/county/state/fed decided to wall it off and not allow anyone in it, it would be their prerogative.
If I (a private individual/entity) owned a 60 acre flatland park, and one day decided not to allow people on my land, is that not my right as land owner?
If we allow a person to own the beach, then it is their property to disallow trespassers.
The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
>The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
Devil's advocate: why do we place such a high value on a "beach" vs any other kind of land? Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
Yes there is. Just look at the average property values of beach front property, riverfront property etc... There are other "special" types of land as well with additional value that governments have decided to regulate differently.
Have you heard of anyone who has been unable to trade, travel, or transport because he could not use Vinod Khosla's beach as a loading dock, port, and harbor? Waterways have ports which are often publicly-owned or operated for commercial use.
The answer is “tradition”. Shore access has been important to human civilization since before recorded history. Wars have been fought over shore access.
Not shoreline specifically, but commercially-viable shoreline. Ports, harbors, rivers, etc; places where you can move people and things to other places. Generic stretch of beach is not such a place.
There's a lot less of it than non beach front land for one.
It also has pretty universal recreational purposes. People love to go to beaches and swim, sunbathe, picnic, surf, play volleyball, etc. I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
You can sunbathe, picnic, and play volleyball on any other land. Surfing is relatively new, and swimming isn't unique to oceans.
>I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
In a world where even the most fundamental cultural norms are being questioned and upended, you're surprised that someone asks why a beach is so much more important than other land?
> Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
Absolutely. Maybe not tangibly precious, but anyone whose ever stood on a beach and looked out over the ocean knows that there's definitely something special about it.
There's a theory that we're hardwired to be drawn to shoreline, as accessing the resources of tidal zones would have been a definite competitive advantage for our ancestors.
Our natural obsession with tracking the moon also plays into this, as a way of predicting when tidal conditions are best to forage/fish/etc.
It's analogous to the theory where marathon hunting contributed to our physical endurance, brain power and predictive abilities, upright running, sweating, etc.
Both theories attempt to explain the general sense of pleasure we get from visiting the beach and long distance running, respectively.
> The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
Because people really want beaches, but aren't willing to pay taxes to buy back what is now private property. Fifth amendment says the gov't must pay for private property, and the California law is arguably un-constitutional. Just buy a path under eminent domain; problem solved. Honestly, this seems like an expression of resentment against a rich guy as much as anything, as evinced by others proposing to take boats to the beach and bang on drums.
The concept of prescriptive right-of-way depends on whether access was "taken" vs "licensed".
It's like squatters rights, but for a public right-of-way.
You can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent to the property owner the whole time.
In the same way, if the previous owner "licensed" access across his property, by charging fees for parking and/or entry, then no prescriptive right-of-way is/was ever established. It would be permissive right-of-way.
Since aquisition by prescription typically requires some element of abandonment, charging fees serves a double purpose: 1) proving the property is "in-use" / not abandoned, and 2) that the paying public recognized the private property rights of the owner. (Ie, that there was no public understanding or "expectation" that access across the private property should be free and/or unrestricted.)
Since legal consideration is required for a lawfully recognized contract, charging a fee makes this implied recognition of the property rights legally valid.
I'd never thought about this before. How do property rights apply to enclaves? If I own all the land encircling another piece of land, what prevents me from barring access to the encircled piece of land? Are there laws forbidding this?
If someone owns the encircled piece of land they can sue to force the owner of the surrounding land to allow access to the property. Usually they will be granted an easement to allow them to do so.
If you're interested, it's commonly referred to as landlocked property.
Typically the interior property will have a cross access easement, a legal document that gives them access across the encircling piece of land. This is also pretty common in commercial developments where you have to cross a parcel to get to an outlot in a development.
Interestingly, that's part of the issue in OP right? The existing private access road was grandfathered, so he could close it. But if Khosla made any changes requiring e.g. new permitting, providing access would have ended up as part of that. The difference being public vs private land, and you could theoretically come up the beach (not fully encircled).
My grandparents' house had a small lane beside it which was a right-of-way or easement (not sure the terminology used here). It was for horse drawn coal wagons so they could reach the building behind my grandparents house. The rear house was facing a main street but there wasn't any driveway or way for the coal wagon to reach the rear of the house.
Then of course coal for home heating became obsolete but for the next 70 years the right-of-way existed. The home behind my grandparents had a driveway and a parking lot added to it. A fence was put up probably 75 years ago, turned posts, very old fence.
The home changed hands many times I even lived in it as a baby when the rear house was divided into apartments.
Now lawyers own the rear house and guess what they want? Yes they are demanding the 75 year-old fence be torn down. And they want to use the right-of-way for vehicles. Only the right-of-way is four maybe at most barely five feet wide bordered by my grandparents old home and the fence of the house beside it.
There it is the use of close to 80 year old disused narrow coal path now demanded by the latest owners of another property.
This is actually really common in Western States where billionaires like Ted Turner buy up massive chunks of land surrounding public Access land and then put up fences to keep people out.
Of course it's illegal and they're required to provide an easement but laws don't apply the same to billionaires
There are ecological benefits. Studies show that relatively inaccessible private and public beaches and wilderness have healthier ecosystems and less litter.
For example, even just regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the local food chain:
Letting billionaires keep the proletariat in cages and fed maximally efficient nutrient paste from low impact farms would have ecological benefits too.
A recruiter recently emailed me about a startup whose “Series A was backed by Khosla” like it was a good thing! I actually replied to him that this is a show stopper to me. Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board.
Do the “right” thing - especially here in the valley, if you work in tech you have a lot of choices
> Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board.
Based on your track record, I fully expect an update to come out where it turns out this Khosla guy's 89 acre property doesn't actually exist, it was actually 8.9 acres magnified with an extremely elaborate mechanism of smoke and mirrors.
My brother applied for jobs at Theranos several times--he was in the biomedical engineering area--but somehow it never worked out (once they apparently lost his application, another time they cancelled an interview at the last minute, etc.).
Bloomberg also wants to have it both ways, they want their content to be referenced on Google, and a select number of people to share the articles they read for free, while disallowing others to do the exact same thing. Fortunately no nobody can prevents people from screenshooting and sharing the screenshot for free instead of the article directly.
A screenshot. If something is posted here and HN expect people to have a constructive discussion about its content, then that resource should be free to read or HN doesn't really want people to actually discuss the content of the source. HN can't have it both ways.
It’s a shame to read about these legal arguments that hang on technicalities (whether previous access was tied to private parking or not) as opposed to what surely must be the actual issue: the public’s right of access to the scarce national resource of beaches.
Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the law determined.
Surely that's the role of the courts? The legislature is there to provide broad guidance in the form of laws; it's judges and juries who agonize over these details and enshrine them in case law.
What about information asymmetry that makes it easy for some to manage these technicalities?
One billionaire can easily have a full-time team working for him to defend his case, and also buy politicians to do the same. In an oligarchy, technicalities can easily become tools of power.
> Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the law determined.
I think there are valid philosophical differences that significantly affect how the system interprets technicalities. I understand the US takes an approach that's much like code: specify everything precisely in great detail, and technicalities and loopholes can be exploited to subvert the original intent of the law. I may be mistaken on this, but understand the EU tends to laws that specify broader principles, so technicalities and loopholes aren't as useful.
The US approach leads to more precise and consistent application, at the expense of flexibility and achieving the original purpose of the law easier to subvert or avoid. The EU approach leads to less consistent application in corner cases, but is more flexible and harder to subvert the original purpose.
Apologies if I got the EU case wrong, please correct me if I did.
Personally I wish the US tended more towards the EU approach: so in this case if California law mandates public beach access, Khosla needs to provide it somehow, and can't weasel out of it on a technicality.
The legal philosophy is actually the opposite. Common Law is heavily based upon precedent and what the norms of the community are to “fill in the gaps”. The vast majority of what goes into a decision is this historical case law. The actual legal text is more of a framework than exhaustive guide.
Much of Europe works with civil law where everything is expected to be codified beforehand. Past cases have little bearing on how a new one will be decided.
In theory, civil law can still be technical or principled. It's a set of instructions used to make a decision. The interpreter then decides, maybe based on law maybe based on precedent, or a mix.
If a case has been litigated in the past then you should get the same result if the facts are the same. It's the party with the case law on their side's responsibility to demonstrate past rulings that support them. If you spend time watching legal shows you'll see them use the word "precedent" a lot for this reason.
Of course the facts being the same is the big "if". Jury verdicts are also not strictly bound to precedent the way judges are.
What you're talking about is a feature of common-law.
I'm talking about civil law or codified jurisdictions. The ancestor comment confused the US for being a (mostly) codified system, which is why I quoted that, but it was really about describing civil law as being "precise and consistent".
Not a lawyer, but counter-intuitively I think it ends up working the other way around. Because in civil law the law itself reigns supreme and can't be "fixed" in the courts, the law must be error-free, which is why you'd generally want to write it in a vague way with room for interpretation. In common law, interpretation is equal to the letter, so lawmakers can afford to be specific without breaking stuff.
Codification of everything does not lead to more consistent application, since it's impossible to code for every possible scenario, and every decision depends on the interpretation of the particular jurist reading the code. Which means in a "pure" codified legal framework, stare decisis is not a thing.
The US has certainly leaned more towards codification since it's inception, but it is still primarily and very much a common law jurisdiction at heart.
So the real difference is that the US likes actual laws and the EU likes political tools? Seems about right considering their cash grab regulations aimed at American tech.
> The US approach leads to more precise and consistent application, at the expense of flexibility and achieving the original purpose of the law easier to subvert or avoid. The EU approach leads to less consistent application in corner cases, but is more flexible and harder to subvert the original purpose.
What you're overlooking is that laws are often compromises, and governments routinely invoke "the spirit of the law" to end-run around previously made compromises.[1] That's why the US approach is such a stickler for things like textualism (which is associated with conservatives, but is in reality the default interpretive style on both the left and right). "I'm only going to give you as much as I agreed on paper to give you and not an inch more."
[1] A great example of this is the Clean Water Act. There is a ton of fighting over what the phrase "waters of the united states" means. A bi-partisan coalition passed the CWA, intending it to allow the federal government to clean up the country's lakes and rivers. Lately, however, the same law has been interpreted to give the government authority to basically engage in building permitting involving "wetlands" that may be far from the sorts of lakes and rivers that Congress originally sought to address.
>so in this case if California law mandates public beach access, Khosla needs to provide it somehow, and can't weasel out of it
I think people may be misunderstanding here a bit. This case is regarding access above the high tide line. Access below the high tide line is not in question. I'm just thinking from a lot of the comments I'm reading on both sides of this issue that people really aren't quite grasping the question being settled.
In essence, the only thing being debated, is whether or not Khosla has to provide a road and convenient parking above the beach. Predictably, the courts are saying the obvious, "No he doesn't." Why? Because he is obliged by law to make the beach below the high tide line accessible.
FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
Also, the courts are not being paid off here by the wealthy in an attempt to disenfranchise the public. The base issue is one of definitions. Obviously, globally speaking, high tide line has served as a fairly convenient, and somewhat obvious definition of "beach". The question you have to answer if you change that is, if the property line is not at the high tide line, then where is it? That's the point at which you start to run into problems, with some saying it's high tide plus maybe 100m? Others might say high tide plus 400m, while still others could claim high tide plus 800m and on, and on, and on.
> I think people may be misunderstanding here a bit. This case is regarding access above the high tide line. Access below the high tide line is not in question. I'm just thinking from a lot of the comments I'm reading on both sides of this issue that people really aren't quite grasping the question being settled.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to require a public access easement to reach the beach below the high tide line. It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea.
> FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
If you're correct, the law should be amended to require a public access easement.
The issue is that even if you get the easement, it only has to be to the land below the high tide line. So either way, Khosla would be under no obligation to maintain, or even keep, the current road and parking. As all of the current infrastructure is above the high tide line. That's the essential problem.
Also:
>It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea
It's the high tide line that is the marker, not the low tide line. So access is always by land.
The issue is that the current custom is to access via the road and parking above the high tide line. That's what locals are accustomed to, that's what is being taken away by Khosla, and that's what the suit is about.
Not quite, because legally, whether the custom was licensed or not matters. By paying the fee to park and cross the property, the public implicitly recognized his private property rights (which means the public didn't have any presumption of a public right-of-way, or even prescriptive easement).
It's the public version of squatters rights, and you can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent the whole time.
But laws based on historical technicalities tend to lose sight of the big picture around which laws were originally designed.
Initially, access was completely free, then the government allowed one owner to collect parking fees from visitors, and now they try to ban all public access outright... Then before you know it, in line with historical technical trends, they will put us all in cages and force us to work for free.
The law is not about technicalities at all, that's BS. The law is irrational; it's all about feelings. It should reflect how the average person feels about things. That's why criminal court cases have a jury instead of a computer to decide on the verdict.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm pretty sure almost every state with beaches (inland or ocean) has laws that provide for public access to the beaches. How far reaching they are - and how they're enforced - would require more research.
It's often in the form of public right to use the coastline below mean high water or something along those lines. However, that often does not include an automatic right to land access. The details vary mostly at the state level.
Which any soon to be property owner would know before buying a place. If the rules were a surprise to Mr Khosla he should be suing his realtor and not the state.
Well, as a fellow swede I can say that this is only half the story, because not only do we have the very extensive right to roam law, but we also have an additional law regarding this in particular called "Strandskydd" (literally beach protection) which makes it very hard and exceptional to make a coast line private.
In Nordic (and other European) countries the access right is much broader, not restricted to beaches. It's called Freedom to Roam [1]. Exclusivity of private property is not an unambiguous universal.
In fact, I'd claim that there are almost no jurisdictions where there are no limitations on the control of private property.
Even if we limit it to "just" restrictions on public access, I don't think there are many jurisdictions that don't have carve-outs that provides protections for public access of some sort to some private land.
The reason, of course, being that most countries have traditions of access that long pre-dates modern property law, and that had to be accommodated.
In Norway, the freedom to roam was considered so intrinsic to Norwegian culture that is was not even mentioned in law until the 1960's, because it was considered "obvious", despite the fact that the Norwegian legal system is based on codified laws with very limited use of precedents, and certainly no "common law" element. In a completely opposite way of seeing it, Sweden embedded it in their constitution, because it was considered such an innate right.
While the expansive freedom to roam of the Nordic countries, is relatively rare, ensuring public access to the shore has been considered not just an issue of leisure access, but an issue of guaranteeing economic interests and food safety for centuries in a large proportion of countries with shore lines, and so has been very widespread - countries that don't guarantee access to the "dry" part of the beach have often still guaranteed access to the tidal zone, for example, to allow for fishing, or gathering mussels etc.
The idea that some people have of property rights as something exclusive just does not match reality - there's been a very acute recognition in most legal systems that property rights restricts the freedoms of the general public, and that as a consequence some trade-off must be made. The question is generally not if one needs to be made, but how extensive the right of public access should be.
As a Swede living in California, I think I have some knowledge of this.
I don't think the Swedish "Allemansrätten" would allow the public to a beach in front of someone's home, as the California rule does, and as this fight is about.
I don't know how close this specific billionaire housing unit is to the beach, so I can't speak to this case, but the Swedish rule is less permissive than the California one.
I would also observe that these "right to roam" rules work well in sparsely populated places like Scandinavia, but you won't see much of them in more dense jurisdictions.
California is pretty much the size of Sweden, but with 4x the population.
In Canada we don't have those rights. But we do have mineral rights in northern regions where anyone can stake a claim on private property for mineral rights. It's as simple as marking around the area.
Scotland has a right of access to land (including beaches) as well as inland water throughout the country. This is known as 'the right to roam' and is a good example of a jurisdiction where statutory right of access works well: https://www.scotways.com/faq/law-on-statutory-access-rights
Hawaii's beaches are all open to the public. County governments and private developers are required to provide public access and parking in areas where the shoreline is dominated by residential dwellings.
> Managing access to scarce resources is the primary purpose of the system of private property.
The purpose of private property is economic. Locke's theory of private property was that because a laborer improves nature through their labor, they are thus entitled to the fruits of said labor, with the intention that they will keep up the land better than common land. In other words, they worked hard to develop their garden, so they get exclusive management of it. The result of this work on the land was intended to result in improved economic output.
But the quality of the land, or the result of the labor of its management, is a separate concern from access. We're talking about wanting the public to have access, not for it to be kept better, or to be used as an economic tool. According to (at least one) theory of private property, an individual owner could still maintain it properly while allowing public access to it. And that's probably why a UK law allows the public to roam on private property (well, that and traditional rights).
The "public's right of access" to the beach is not at issue in this case. (See pp. 429-430 of the above.) Private ownership of the land in question dates back to before California was a state. When the Mexican-American war ended, the United States entered into the Treat of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which among other things promised the protection of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments in the land that was being ceded to the United States. The California Lands Act of 1851 set up proceedings wherein Mexican and Spanish land titles were turned into U.S. federal patents (land titles).
More than a century later, California added Article X, sec. 4 to its constitution, which declared a public easement over tidal lands to be held for the benefit of the public. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court held that the federal Treaty obligation to protect the scope of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments could not be impaired by California's later assertion of a sovereign right of the public to access tidal waters: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122714134443780...
Because California had not asserted any public easement in the proceedings under the 1851 act, Khosla's beach is not subject to the general right of the public to access beaches. (See pp. 430 of the above.)
This whole litigation is therefore about a different issue entirely: the public dedication doctrine, which says that private land can become subject to a public easement if "dedicated" to public use. That's where the whole "private parking" thing comes in. Martin's beach was operated as a beach accessible to the public, but where a fee was charged for access. That doesn't count as dedication to the public.
So this case is really about two things that aren't technicalities at all: (1) the relatively small number of California property titles granted by the Mexican and Spanish governments are protected under Treaty against later State assertions of authority; and (2) the difference between dedicating private property to public use, and selling access to property to members of the public.
More generally, technicalities matter. Anglo legal systems like ours are not only about governing society, but protecting individuals and their property from the government. That's why the Magna Carta is a long list of things the King can't do, many of which are the foundation for our Bill of Rights. Protections of private property from seizure by the government for "public purposes" is right there in the Constitution, in the Takings Clause. The United States has thus been fastidious in protecting private property rights inherited from England, Spain, France, etc.
This is also about not changing the rules after the fact. There's lots of fair ways to structure a society. But it undermines notions of rule of law for the government to change the terms of the bargain after-the-fact. A state could be entirely justified in declaring that all oil fields in the state belongs to the state to lease for the benefit of the public. But the state should not be able to sell oil fields to private parties, and then come back later and declare that "in the public interest" the state should get half of all the oil production.
Many governmental abuses result from ignoring "technicalities" in favor of some vaguely-defined (and usually opportunistic) view of the "public's right[s]." The gove...
> This is also about not changing the rules after the fact. There's lots of fair ways to structure a society. But it undermines notions of rule of law for the government to change the terms of the bargain after-the-fact.
Surely that happens all the time, though?
I mean, if I brought a car factory in 1950 is it unjust that the government changed the deal by forcing me to start supplying seatbelts in the 1960s?
Oftentimes it's unavoidable. You operate businesses subject to the (legitimate) right of the government to create laws of general applicability. But there is a spectrum.
In this case, a California court of appeals found that there was no "public trust" right to access the beach years ago. So what did the state do? It pursued a frivolous theory based on the idea that just because someone has been operating a public beach, they and all their successors must keep operating a public beach. That's not a law of general application "requiring everyone to put seatbelts in cars." That's abuse targeting a single individual and his property.
Knowing HN, yeah, they probably consider seatbelts extreme big government overreach lol. "Let the market decide what safety devices people want! You're just raising costs for everyone with these unnecessary nannies!"
This is just me, a non lawyer, talking. But I kinda feel like the SCOTUS cases you reference were wrongly decided. When CA asserted its public easement over tidal lands it's hard for me to see why a taking from a regular piece of land should be any different than a piece of land that happened to be governed by the Mexican government over a century ago.
At some point doesn't the past have to become the past?
I think Khosla should be allowed to shut down the parking lot, but be required to maintain some sort of minimal road/path easement.
I should really read the full SCOTUS decision though before feeling confident in this POV.
> This is just me, a non lawyer, talking. But I kinda feel like the SCOTUS cases you reference were wrongly decided. When CA asserted its public easement over tidal lands it's hard for me to see why a taking from a regular piece of land should be any different than a piece of land that happened to be governed by the Mexican government over a century ago.
Because part of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were that Mexicans residing in land ceded to the US at the time would retain certain rights.
Is Khosla Mexican or descended from the Mexican landowners? Why were the special property rights of the Mexican landowners under the treaty passed to subsequent US owners of the land? So now there is land in CA that is not federal or native-American land, but it is not subject to CA laws. That's the part that doesn't seem logical in this.
Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
> So now there is land in CA that is not federal or native-American land, but it is not subject to CA laws. That's the part that doesn't seem logical in this.
Just wanted to point out that this kind of arrangement exists already for things like embassies.
> Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
I don't sympathize with Khosla and admit that I haven't fully researched the impacts of the treaty but it does seem like something most easily resolved by the federal government.
Time to find out the exact borders of what is considered "his" beach and crowd the ever living shit out of it, just outside of what could be considered "his". "I'm not touching you!"
That’s awesome! I was thinking a little more nefariously though about one that would inspire people to collaborate and visit “his” area and perhaps “celebrate” with drums
He doesn't live there - has never lived there - and has said he will never live there. He's just completing the lawsuit "for the principle" of it which is as insane as it sounds.
Under the California Coastal Act, everything below the mean high tide line is public. But that's not the issue here; the issue is getting access to this beach.
So you could bring in house boats and floating docks. This is common in some regions. I am not sure if the coast guard would have any say in it though.
How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?
> the three-judge panel upheld a trial judge’s ruling in Khosla’s favor, finding there was substantial evidence that the previous owners didn’t intend to dedicate the road for public use because they charged fees.
Why does it matter what the previous owner(s) did? The law states there must be public access to the beach. This is an 89 acre parcel of land, providing not even a single access point sounds like the owner could be blocking an appreciable amount of ocean frontage.
Not sure why the downvotes. It's actually a reasonable question, the answer to which can vary by state. The details vary but, in some cases, having only water access to property--even if not an island--is considered access for purposes of the law. (For example, I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land.)
>I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land.
Maybe that's state law but legal easement is required in many municipalities, for example Kennebunkport will not let you surround a property with other people's property with no access to public property (the road)
It would be ironic if Khosla woke up one day to find a continuously-growing fleet of recreational and commercial boats including party barges with beach anchors, lights, speakers, generators and tons of booze using the beach, ferrying anyone who desired it to get to the beach from nearby beaches/docks, turning it into the worst destination party-scape he was trying to avoid tepid versions of in the first place. He just made it clear via the case that water access was permitted, he doesn't privately own the beach itself, and there are plenty of waterborne partiers in CA who would take him up on the "offer" of partying on an "exclusive" beach.
People pay big bucks on cruises to get to "exclusive" beaches, and there are any number of "entrepreneurs" who will jump at the chance to turn a quick dollar to ferry people to exactly such a beach (albeit created through a legal technicality than natural features), plus throw in the gratuitous "ogle a billionaire's house" in marketing schticks on top to goose the customer buy rate.
There might be a corollary of the Streisand Effect at work here...
He probably could take that into court and have that action taken down.
However, I'm not so clear that third parties wouldn't capitalize upon the exclusivity he just de jure created by restricting land access. But without actual ownership of the beach itself to turn it into private property, he might have unintentionally triggered a tragedy of the commons scenario, where he's raised the attractiveness of that particular spot of the beach without being able to charge and throttle access for it, and those third parties will be able to deliver that access and charge for it, without having to pay for the beach capex and opex itself.
This has the potential to be environmentally terrible, and I'd rather truly not see that happen, even though if it does happen it would make others in this thread happy on how much a Pyrrhic victory it would represent for Khosla.
I'm sure they'll then get you with noise complaints that the motors are too loud, then have boats banned from being within any meaningful distance of the beach.
The law is not implemented like that. Basically if there is a property which does not provide through-access to the beach, the law does not require them to provide it. If any change is made to the property, including improvements, then as part of the permitting process a requirement will be made to provide the access.
This is why at California beach areas and piers, old buildings have no access, but all remodeled ones do.
That all said, still amazingly entitled behavior by Khosla.
The concept that property is so religiously sacred that simply owning of a thing entitles one to cause external harm using that thing, even passively, is sickening.
This is a reduction to absurdity. Would you like it if anyone could just wander into your kitchen and take from the fridge? How about lie in bed with your spouse?
Nobody’s proposing that. The California state constitution is pretty clear that beaches are public access. Khosla more than most knew that going in, well before he was in a position to grab his rake and run up and down the beach yelling at sunbathers. This wasn’t a shocker. He wanted to litigate this case well before the ink was dry on the purchase papers, and kicked it off arguing the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American war superseded the state constitution. Fun fact: it did not.
Other jurisdictions like Australia have public access to beach rules. In much of Europe the same rules apply to much more inland areas too. And you know what? It works great there, and surprisingly, you can’t sleep with the spouse or anyone who owns beachfront property there either.
Coming into your house isn't even almost the same thing as walking through someone's yard.
Walking through someone's yard isn't a good comparison wither because a medium plot of land is maybe 4 thousand square feet and his property is 4 million square feet.
Coming from Norway, where this is a concept that is being taught from primary school, because we have extensively legally protected rights to access private land ("freedom to roam"), it always surprises me how difficult this distinction is to get for people.
We had it hammered into us from childhood, and it boiled down to getting us to think about what would affect us if people wanted to access our land, and what would have only minor effect, and what kind of access we might want to have that would have at most minor affect on the owner. It takes minimal prompting to get kids to come up with trade-offs that deals with the distinction of "walking through someone's yard" vs. "grant access to larger areas of land".
It was a founding priciple of America that we have the fundamental right to private property. We have no king/monarchy so private citizens can have complete ownership of the land as if they were a king.
Better comparison would be easements. Utility companies can dig up your hard because the city has granted them an easement. Some properties are land locked by other private properties so there is easement for access. Go anywhere in rural America and these easements are quite common. Granting easements for passage to a public resource follows the same principles.
You must live in a different world than the real one, where restrictions on land use and ownership are quite common.
Land is a finite natural resource, coastline even more so. Restrictions that even the playing field such that the rich aren't able to privatize all the beachfront seems like a great idea to me.
If it wasn't for California's strong environmental restrictions there would be no coastline for Khosla to appreciate from his private property, or rather it would be a much different landscape.
Everyone else plays by these same rules.
Khosla is very conspicuously using his outsized monetary influence to the pervert the spirit of the law.
The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America in the beginning. Instead of paying a Lord you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
In this situation is sucks for regular people but in a lot more situations it benefits everyone else.
If the county wants to allow beach access they should build it or buy land. If it becomes a serious problem they should use eminent domain. The home owners shouldn’t be forced to build access.
I don't think so. The concept of having spare land, sure. Private ownership of land is and always has been a social construct, subject to limits imposed by both society and physics. To claim that it is "sacred" is to misunderstand the nature of society.
Accordingly, modern (sub)urban land ownership has very little to do with Spanish and English colonial land grants or US settlers. It comes with huge social benefits and is encumbered by extensive permitting, taxation, and use limits. You'll notice that Vinod Khosla isn't interested in exchanging his Half Moon Bay property for, say, an equivalent amount of land in North Dakota, where he might be permitted to block public access all day long.
> The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America in the beginning.
That's not what you describe below.
> Instead of paying a Lord [sic] you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
I think the most important thing here is the free land aspect. Property ownership has never been "sacred" and was always subject to things like squatter's rights and other practical exceptions:
> The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights embody the most basic concept of property and ownership, which can be summarized by the adage "possession is nine-tenths of the law," meaning the person who uses the property effectively owns it. Likewise, the adage, "use it or lose it," applies. The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights predate formal property laws; to a large degree, modern property law formalizes and expands these simple ideas.
I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second home trashed.
> I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second home trashed.
There's a lot wrong with your comment:
1. It looks like all states have adverse possession laws [1].
2. 2-3 weeks wouldn't cut it anywhere to claim adverse possession. The shortest time required to be in possession is 5 years [1].
3. Why would you believe any anecdote that you read on Reddit? So many are lies posted to gain sweet e-points that all should be met with heavy skepticism.
I guess it's your right to not "believe in" squatters rights, but abandoned and underutilized property does society no good, and squatter's rights are a reasonable solution to that problem.
You aren't quite getting it. Lords controlling the land is property being sacred. A lot of people came to America because less property was already locked down by the rich. But if we treat "my great-grandfather stole this fair and square" as sacred, we'll end up in the same boat.
> Instead of paying a Lord you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
Yeah, because America had more lands than people, because European settlers (whether willingly or not) managed to wipe out most of its previous inhabitants. So it could literally afford to hand out free lands, and because it needed people, it lured people with that promise.
I'm not sure what's that got to do with property being sacred. Surely all those European lords and merchants also considered their own properties extremely sacred.
You're right the he is legally entitled. I wasn't clear enough: he is acting morally entitled. In this sense, "entitled" means a person who feels it is reasonable to use their wealth and power to do anything they want and other peoples wants are irrelevant.
What I don't understand is why the road isn't an easement by necessity on the land with the dominant estate being the public beach. If the beach were private property the owner of the beach could certainly claim an easement exists and that the servient estate (Khoslas) illegally terminated the easement. Is there some kind of exclusion for easements by necessity for public lands?
Because the law was written at a time when some beaches were already private property, and so its provisions were written to grandfather in existing private beaches while preventing future ones from being created. So many legal arguments end up centering on the original usage of the land.
That's not correct. The California Constitution has always made beaches public[1].
The Coastal Commission was established in 1972 to improve access. The act grandfathered in properties with no access, but requires any improvement or change to pull a permit with the Commission. The Commission requires public access when approving any permit.
[1] Tidal beaches only. Beaches on lakes can be private
Because legally, charging a fee means it wasn't a public easement, it was licensed access across private land.
If you're arguing that it should be "taken" as an easement of necessity, that's separate, and a more political question.
Easements by necessity are granted generally when no other access is possible; they're not for convenience.
Additionally, (for private party transactions anyway) the party that creates the encumbrance is who is responsible for granting access. If you're not responsible for isolating the tract of land, then there's not (usually) any requirement to grant an easement. And even if there is, it wouldn't be a public easement.
And by responsible, I mean in terms of land transactions and changes in law, not putting up a gate.
When faced with the nearly limitless resources of a government agency, most people put in a similar situation have no choice but surrender or face bankruptcy.
It's only unusual because when having a disagreement with the government, 99.99% of us can't afford to fight the government based on principle.
Some of beach front lands were in private ownership before the access law passed. One notable example is Hollister ranch another is Martins beach. This lawsuit means that there's no pre-existing or effective easement for the road because the previous owners charged for access / parking. So as much as we want this land to be open and accessible, it is not. You can also legally access the beach by boat.
It would be ironic if a mega billionaire bought the land surrounding his land and worked with the county to route the road around that surrounding property.
dude... that dude is 64?!?!?! he looks like he's 84. dude must of had a tough life.
while it sucks that he wants to restrict access, i can see where he is coming from if this was a private beach to begin with and the original owner allowed the public to use it. it also says in the article that the original owner would charge for parking so that strengthens his case.
can't hate on a dude from wanting to do with what is rightfully his.
There are no private beaches in CA by law. He owns the only road leading to it, which the previous owner allowed people to drive through for a small fee for many years.
In France, la Loi littoral guarantees public access to the shoreline, everywhere. Or at least it should since it's often compromised by private interests. But it's still quite good for anyone who likes the sea, ocean and coasts. I'd love France to also have a "right to roam" law like Norway.
Are there such laws in your country? How well is it enforced?
Spain is the same. There are some loopholes, like limiting land access with an "eco tax", but that's useless against boats. I watched recently on tv a program attacking "party boats" that took a lot of young people, many of them Brits on holydays, to a closed beach frequented by Hollywood celebs, with all-you-can-drink included.
In most states no. It’s a feature not a bug. Property rights are considered sacred. Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their property. It’s bad in this situation but good for owners in plenty of others.
Fort Walton county is one of 2 counties in Florida where the property owners own the beach to the high tide line. You’re allowed to walk on the beach around the water line but not setup on the beach. The Sheriff and county decided they want to change it and is now suing all the beach owners in Fort Walton (my wife’s family being one of them).
The Florida governor signed an emergency Bill that they couldn’t just take the land all of the sudden they had to go through the courts. The Sheriff’s office came out and said they would stop issuing or enforcing trespassing on the beach and lesson beach patrols.
The home owners legally own the beach. The county officials want to take it from them without paying anything and change the uniqueness of the county that drew home owners in the first place.
I can see both sides but the county government and Sheriff can’t just decide one day they want to take property. No vote or anything just we want to take it.
My family owns a condo in the next county over. It’s a lot more noisy and I can see why home owners were draw to Fort Walton in the first place.
> Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their property.
Sure if we pretend libertarianism exists as a functional concept. Can you build an enrichment facility on your property? No. Can you dump toxic chemicals into your well? Nope! Can you fly drones at 30K feet? Nah. Can you brew up a batch of grandma’s finest crystal meth? No siree bob. So yeah, you accept plenty of encroachment. The sanctity of your property is an arbitrary line you’re drawing to exclude campers, sunbathers and randos off on a hike. That’s sure to teach somebody... something...
You're actually kind of making my point here. You're accepting the governments intrusion (defining what can and can't be done on "your" tract of land via zoning and law). And that's my point. Once you accept that it's a question of where you draw the line -- you're debating shades of grey and not moral black and white.
I don't know the area, but could someone setup a little business nearby ferrying people to and from the beach on a boat? How much did the previous owners charge for access? Would the same amount of money per trip make a ferrying business viable?
Is it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach.
It's not very caring to the rich guy. It's not like there's no other substitutes people could use to get their beach fill. But for him, it's right there. Come on, where's your empathy for the guy?
Could one not walk up to this beach by foot following the road built? I ask this because the article said the previous owner charged for parking not access. If so I don't agree with the judges assessment because that would mean anyone from the public could just walk to this beach and use it as they are arguing it has always been open to the public which seems true to me from what I've read.
It's a shame that so much energy is put into blocking public access to beaches.
This was on HN ~5 months ago, related topic: "Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay hit with $1.6 million penalty for failing to provide public beach access" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511
368 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadVinod “Gatekeeper” Khosla
If I (a private individual/entity) owned a 60 acre flatland park, and one day decided not to allow people on my land, is that not my right as land owner?
If we allow a person to own the beach, then it is their property to disallow trespassers.
The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
Devil's advocate: why do we place such a high value on a "beach" vs any other kind of land? Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
Same reason we value ice cream over poop.
It also has pretty universal recreational purposes. People love to go to beaches and swim, sunbathe, picnic, surf, play volleyball, etc. I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
>I'm surprised it's utility is even being questioned, this is a very strong cultural norm.
In a world where even the most fundamental cultural norms are being questioned and upended, you're surprised that someone asks why a beach is so much more important than other land?
Absolutely. Maybe not tangibly precious, but anyone whose ever stood on a beach and looked out over the ocean knows that there's definitely something special about it.
Our natural obsession with tracking the moon also plays into this, as a way of predicting when tidal conditions are best to forage/fish/etc.
It's analogous to the theory where marathon hunting contributed to our physical endurance, brain power and predictive abilities, upright running, sweating, etc.
Both theories attempt to explain the general sense of pleasure we get from visiting the beach and long distance running, respectively.
Because people really want beaches, but aren't willing to pay taxes to buy back what is now private property. Fifth amendment says the gov't must pay for private property, and the California law is arguably un-constitutional. Just buy a path under eminent domain; problem solved. Honestly, this seems like an expression of resentment against a rich guy as much as anything, as evinced by others proposing to take boats to the beach and bang on drums.
It's like squatters rights, but for a public right-of-way.
You can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent to the property owner the whole time.
In the same way, if the previous owner "licensed" access across his property, by charging fees for parking and/or entry, then no prescriptive right-of-way is/was ever established. It would be permissive right-of-way.
Since aquisition by prescription typically requires some element of abandonment, charging fees serves a double purpose: 1) proving the property is "in-use" / not abandoned, and 2) that the paying public recognized the private property rights of the owner. (Ie, that there was no public understanding or "expectation" that access across the private property should be free and/or unrestricted.)
Since legal consideration is required for a lawfully recognized contract, charging a fee makes this implied recognition of the property rights legally valid.
https://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/necessity-and-p...
If you're interested, it's commonly referred to as landlocked property.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/21/public-l...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/wilks-brothers-frackin...
Then of course coal for home heating became obsolete but for the next 70 years the right-of-way existed. The home behind my grandparents had a driveway and a parking lot added to it. A fence was put up probably 75 years ago, turned posts, very old fence.
The home changed hands many times I even lived in it as a baby when the rear house was divided into apartments.
Now lawyers own the rear house and guess what they want? Yes they are demanding the 75 year-old fence be torn down. And they want to use the right-of-way for vehicles. Only the right-of-way is four maybe at most barely five feet wide bordered by my grandparents old home and the fence of the house beside it.
There it is the use of close to 80 year old disused narrow coal path now demanded by the latest owners of another property.
Of course it's illegal and they're required to provide an easement but laws don't apply the same to billionaires
For example, even just regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the local food chain:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Do the “right” thing - especially here in the valley, if you work in tech you have a lot of choices
Based on your track record, I fully expect an update to come out where it turns out this Khosla guy's 89 acre property doesn't actually exist, it was actually 8.9 acres magnified with an extremely elaborate mechanism of smoke and mirrors.
Dodged a bullet there.
I had to look up Theranos to understand this. I somehow feel dirty.
Sad, but poetically fitting.
Bloomberg can't have it both way.
A screenshot. If something is posted here and HN expect people to have a constructive discussion about its content, then that resource should be free to read or HN doesn't really want people to actually discuss the content of the source. HN can't have it both ways.
One billionaire can easily have a full-time team working for him to defend his case, and also buy politicians to do the same. In an oligarchy, technicalities can easily become tools of power.
I think there are valid philosophical differences that significantly affect how the system interprets technicalities. I understand the US takes an approach that's much like code: specify everything precisely in great detail, and technicalities and loopholes can be exploited to subvert the original intent of the law. I may be mistaken on this, but understand the EU tends to laws that specify broader principles, so technicalities and loopholes aren't as useful.
The US approach leads to more precise and consistent application, at the expense of flexibility and achieving the original purpose of the law easier to subvert or avoid. The EU approach leads to less consistent application in corner cases, but is more flexible and harder to subvert the original purpose.
Apologies if I got the EU case wrong, please correct me if I did.
Personally I wish the US tended more towards the EU approach: so in this case if California law mandates public beach access, Khosla needs to provide it somehow, and can't weasel out of it on a technicality.
Much of Europe works with civil law where everything is expected to be codified beforehand. Past cases have little bearing on how a new one will be decided.
Technical and principled? Yes
Precise? If that particular scenario has been anticipated and coded for, yes.
Consistent? No
Of course the facts being the same is the big "if". Jury verdicts are also not strictly bound to precedent the way judges are.
I'm talking about civil law or codified jurisdictions. The ancestor comment confused the US for being a (mostly) codified system, which is why I quoted that, but it was really about describing civil law as being "precise and consistent".
In hindsight I see that it's confusing...
The US has certainly leaned more towards codification since it's inception, but it is still primarily and very much a common law jurisdiction at heart.
What you're overlooking is that laws are often compromises, and governments routinely invoke "the spirit of the law" to end-run around previously made compromises.[1] That's why the US approach is such a stickler for things like textualism (which is associated with conservatives, but is in reality the default interpretive style on both the left and right). "I'm only going to give you as much as I agreed on paper to give you and not an inch more."
[1] A great example of this is the Clean Water Act. There is a ton of fighting over what the phrase "waters of the united states" means. A bi-partisan coalition passed the CWA, intending it to allow the federal government to clean up the country's lakes and rivers. Lately, however, the same law has been interpreted to give the government authority to basically engage in building permitting involving "wetlands" that may be far from the sorts of lakes and rivers that Congress originally sought to address.
We're talking about the compound H2O which isn't considered "water" until it reaches a lake, river, sea.
My bad.
I think people may be misunderstanding here a bit. This case is regarding access above the high tide line. Access below the high tide line is not in question. I'm just thinking from a lot of the comments I'm reading on both sides of this issue that people really aren't quite grasping the question being settled.
In essence, the only thing being debated, is whether or not Khosla has to provide a road and convenient parking above the beach. Predictably, the courts are saying the obvious, "No he doesn't." Why? Because he is obliged by law to make the beach below the high tide line accessible.
FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
Also, the courts are not being paid off here by the wealthy in an attempt to disenfranchise the public. The base issue is one of definitions. Obviously, globally speaking, high tide line has served as a fairly convenient, and somewhat obvious definition of "beach". The question you have to answer if you change that is, if the property line is not at the high tide line, then where is it? That's the point at which you start to run into problems, with some saying it's high tide plus maybe 100m? Others might say high tide plus 400m, while still others could claim high tide plus 800m and on, and on, and on.
It seems perfectly sensible to me to require a public access easement to reach the beach below the high tide line. It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea.
> FOMB will likely lose their case because, as a series of judges are now making more clear, the public is only entitled to keep the beach proper public. (ie-below the high tide line.)
If you're correct, the law should be amended to require a public access easement.
Also:
>It's a mockery of public access if the only access is by sea
It's the high tide line that is the marker, not the low tide line. So access is always by land.
The issue is that the current custom is to access via the road and parking above the high tide line. That's what locals are accustomed to, that's what is being taken away by Khosla, and that's what the suit is about.
It's the public version of squatters rights, and you can't claim squatters rights if you've been paying rent the whole time.
Justice depends on poorly written, easily hacked code with almost no amount of security team or patching, and also the security team is paid off.
Initially, access was completely free, then the government allowed one owner to collect parking fees from visitors, and now they try to ban all public access outright... Then before you know it, in line with historical technical trends, they will put us all in cages and force us to work for free.
The law is not about technicalities at all, that's BS. The law is irrational; it's all about feelings. It should reflect how the average person feels about things. That's why criminal court cases have a jury instead of a computer to decide on the verdict.
Managing access to scarce resources is the primary purpose of the system of private property.
http://www.beachapedia.org/Beach_Access
Spain - https://www.spanishpropertyinsight.com/legal/ley-de-costas-c... Sweden - https://visitsweden.com/about-the-right-of-public-access/ Australia - https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/travellers-stor...
and so on... all but a search query away.
You're allowed to move freely on most land, and even camp there. But that right ends when you're within sight of the owners home.
https://visitsweden.com/about-the-right-of-public-access/
California law has no such exceptions. You're allowed on the beach up to the high tide level, regardless of if somebody's home is right there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Nordic_countri...
Even if we limit it to "just" restrictions on public access, I don't think there are many jurisdictions that don't have carve-outs that provides protections for public access of some sort to some private land.
The reason, of course, being that most countries have traditions of access that long pre-dates modern property law, and that had to be accommodated.
In Norway, the freedom to roam was considered so intrinsic to Norwegian culture that is was not even mentioned in law until the 1960's, because it was considered "obvious", despite the fact that the Norwegian legal system is based on codified laws with very limited use of precedents, and certainly no "common law" element. In a completely opposite way of seeing it, Sweden embedded it in their constitution, because it was considered such an innate right.
While the expansive freedom to roam of the Nordic countries, is relatively rare, ensuring public access to the shore has been considered not just an issue of leisure access, but an issue of guaranteeing economic interests and food safety for centuries in a large proportion of countries with shore lines, and so has been very widespread - countries that don't guarantee access to the "dry" part of the beach have often still guaranteed access to the tidal zone, for example, to allow for fishing, or gathering mussels etc.
The idea that some people have of property rights as something exclusive just does not match reality - there's been a very acute recognition in most legal systems that property rights restricts the freedoms of the general public, and that as a consequence some trade-off must be made. The question is generally not if one needs to be made, but how extensive the right of public access should be.
I don't think the Swedish "Allemansrätten" would allow the public to a beach in front of someone's home, as the California rule does, and as this fight is about.
I don't know how close this specific billionaire housing unit is to the beach, so I can't speak to this case, but the Swedish rule is less permissive than the California one.
I would also observe that these "right to roam" rules work well in sparsely populated places like Scandinavia, but you won't see much of them in more dense jurisdictions.
California is pretty much the size of Sweden, but with 4x the population.
https://visitsweden.com/about-the-right-of-public-access/
> Managing access to scarce resources is the primary purpose of the system of private property.
The purpose of private property is economic. Locke's theory of private property was that because a laborer improves nature through their labor, they are thus entitled to the fruits of said labor, with the intention that they will keep up the land better than common land. In other words, they worked hard to develop their garden, so they get exclusive management of it. The result of this work on the land was intended to result in improved economic output.
But the quality of the land, or the result of the labor of its management, is a separate concern from access. We're talking about wanting the public to have access, not for it to be kept better, or to be used as an economic tool. According to (at least one) theory of private property, an individual owner could still maintain it properly while allowing public access to it. And that's probably why a UK law allows the public to roam on private property (well, that and traditional rights).
The "public's right of access" to the beach is not at issue in this case. (See pp. 429-430 of the above.) Private ownership of the land in question dates back to before California was a state. When the Mexican-American war ended, the United States entered into the Treat of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which among other things promised the protection of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments in the land that was being ceded to the United States. The California Lands Act of 1851 set up proceedings wherein Mexican and Spanish land titles were turned into U.S. federal patents (land titles).
More than a century later, California added Article X, sec. 4 to its constitution, which declared a public easement over tidal lands to be held for the benefit of the public. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court held that the federal Treaty obligation to protect the scope of private property rights that had been granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments could not be impaired by California's later assertion of a sovereign right of the public to access tidal waters: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=122714134443780...
Because California had not asserted any public easement in the proceedings under the 1851 act, Khosla's beach is not subject to the general right of the public to access beaches. (See pp. 430 of the above.)
This whole litigation is therefore about a different issue entirely: the public dedication doctrine, which says that private land can become subject to a public easement if "dedicated" to public use. That's where the whole "private parking" thing comes in. Martin's beach was operated as a beach accessible to the public, but where a fee was charged for access. That doesn't count as dedication to the public.
So this case is really about two things that aren't technicalities at all: (1) the relatively small number of California property titles granted by the Mexican and Spanish governments are protected under Treaty against later State assertions of authority; and (2) the difference between dedicating private property to public use, and selling access to property to members of the public.
More generally, technicalities matter. Anglo legal systems like ours are not only about governing society, but protecting individuals and their property from the government. That's why the Magna Carta is a long list of things the King can't do, many of which are the foundation for our Bill of Rights. Protections of private property from seizure by the government for "public purposes" is right there in the Constitution, in the Takings Clause. The United States has thus been fastidious in protecting private property rights inherited from England, Spain, France, etc.
This is also about not changing the rules after the fact. There's lots of fair ways to structure a society. But it undermines notions of rule of law for the government to change the terms of the bargain after-the-fact. A state could be entirely justified in declaring that all oil fields in the state belongs to the state to lease for the benefit of the public. But the state should not be able to sell oil fields to private parties, and then come back later and declare that "in the public interest" the state should get half of all the oil production.
Many governmental abuses result from ignoring "technicalities" in favor of some vaguely-defined (and usually opportunistic) view of the "public's right[s]." The gove...
Surely that happens all the time, though?
I mean, if I brought a car factory in 1950 is it unjust that the government changed the deal by forcing me to start supplying seatbelts in the 1960s?
In this case, a California court of appeals found that there was no "public trust" right to access the beach years ago. So what did the state do? It pursued a frivolous theory based on the idea that just because someone has been operating a public beach, they and all their successors must keep operating a public beach. That's not a law of general application "requiring everyone to put seatbelts in cars." That's abuse targeting a single individual and his property.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Metarules/Metarules.h...
It discusses some of the problems with both horns of the dilemma about changing rules.
At some point doesn't the past have to become the past?
I think Khosla should be allowed to shut down the parking lot, but be required to maintain some sort of minimal road/path easement.
I should really read the full SCOTUS decision though before feeling confident in this POV.
Because part of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were that Mexicans residing in land ceded to the US at the time would retain certain rights.
Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
It's the least we could do for Khosla.
Part of a right of ownership is to be able sell or otherwise dispose of property (or the rights thereof).
Saying you can own it, but not sell it isn't ownership. At best, it's usufruct.
Just wanted to point out that this kind of arrangement exists already for things like embassies.
> Also maybe how CA could end this situation: pass a law that all current property rights are guaranteed, but only rights recognized under current CA law are conveyed at sale. Or maybe it needs to be a US law--or a treaty amendment with Mexico.
I don't sympathize with Khosla and admit that I haven't fully researched the impacts of the treaty but it does seem like something most easily resolved by the federal government.
I must have missed that part in the constitution. Mind pointing it out?
How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?
Why does it matter what the previous owner(s) did? The law states there must be public access to the beach. This is an 89 acre parcel of land, providing not even a single access point sounds like the owner could be blocking an appreciable amount of ocean frontage.
Can you not access it by boat? Does that count?
Maybe that's state law but legal easement is required in many municipalities, for example Kennebunkport will not let you surround a property with other people's property with no access to public property (the road)
People pay big bucks on cruises to get to "exclusive" beaches, and there are any number of "entrepreneurs" who will jump at the chance to turn a quick dollar to ferry people to exactly such a beach (albeit created through a legal technicality than natural features), plus throw in the gratuitous "ogle a billionaire's house" in marketing schticks on top to goose the customer buy rate.
There might be a corollary of the Streisand Effect at work here...
However, I'm not so clear that third parties wouldn't capitalize upon the exclusivity he just de jure created by restricting land access. But without actual ownership of the beach itself to turn it into private property, he might have unintentionally triggered a tragedy of the commons scenario, where he's raised the attractiveness of that particular spot of the beach without being able to charge and throttle access for it, and those third parties will be able to deliver that access and charge for it, without having to pay for the beach capex and opex itself.
This has the potential to be environmentally terrible, and I'd rather truly not see that happen, even though if it does happen it would make others in this thread happy on how much a Pyrrhic victory it would represent for Khosla.
This is why at California beach areas and piers, old buildings have no access, but all remodeled ones do.
That all said, still amazingly entitled behavior by Khosla.
Nobody’s proposing that. The California state constitution is pretty clear that beaches are public access. Khosla more than most knew that going in, well before he was in a position to grab his rake and run up and down the beach yelling at sunbathers. This wasn’t a shocker. He wanted to litigate this case well before the ink was dry on the purchase papers, and kicked it off arguing the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American war superseded the state constitution. Fun fact: it did not.
Other jurisdictions like Australia have public access to beach rules. In much of Europe the same rules apply to much more inland areas too. And you know what? It works great there, and surprisingly, you can’t sleep with the spouse or anyone who owns beachfront property there either.
Your slippery slope is flat and dry.
Walking through someone's yard isn't a good comparison wither because a medium plot of land is maybe 4 thousand square feet and his property is 4 million square feet.
We had it hammered into us from childhood, and it boiled down to getting us to think about what would affect us if people wanted to access our land, and what would have only minor effect, and what kind of access we might want to have that would have at most minor affect on the owner. It takes minimal prompting to get kids to come up with trade-offs that deals with the distinction of "walking through someone's yard" vs. "grant access to larger areas of land".
The fact that people feel entitled to tell others what to do with their own private property is sickening.
Land is a finite natural resource, coastline even more so. Restrictions that even the playing field such that the rich aren't able to privatize all the beachfront seems like a great idea to me.
Everyone else plays by these same rules. Khosla is very conspicuously using his outsized monetary influence to the pervert the spirit of the law.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/photo/2014/08/t...
Oil rigs on the sand, not many yards away from the tide.
In this situation is sucks for regular people but in a lot more situations it benefits everyone else.
Limiting the power of individuals to completely dictate land use seems like it's better for the populous as a whole.
Accordingly, modern (sub)urban land ownership has very little to do with Spanish and English colonial land grants or US settlers. It comes with huge social benefits and is encumbered by extensive permitting, taxation, and use limits. You'll notice that Vinod Khosla isn't interested in exchanging his Half Moon Bay property for, say, an equivalent amount of land in North Dakota, where he might be permitted to block public access all day long.
That's not what you describe below.
> Instead of paying a Lord [sic] you could literally come to America and be given free land by the Federal government. It was a huge reason we rebelled against England in the first place.
I think the most important thing here is the free land aspect. Property ownership has never been "sacred" and was always subject to things like squatter's rights and other practical exceptions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
> The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights embody the most basic concept of property and ownership, which can be summarized by the adage "possession is nine-tenths of the law," meaning the person who uses the property effectively owns it. Likewise, the adage, "use it or lose it," applies. The principles of homesteading and squatter's rights predate formal property laws; to a large degree, modern property law formalizes and expands these simple ideas.
There's a lot wrong with your comment:
1. It looks like all states have adverse possession laws [1].
2. 2-3 weeks wouldn't cut it anywhere to claim adverse possession. The shortest time required to be in possession is 5 years [1].
3. Why would you believe any anecdote that you read on Reddit? So many are lies posted to gain sweet e-points that all should be met with heavy skepticism.
I guess it's your right to not "believe in" squatters rights, but abandoned and underutilized property does society no good, and squatter's rights are a reasonable solution to that problem.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-state-rules-ad...
Yeah, because America had more lands than people, because European settlers (whether willingly or not) managed to wipe out most of its previous inhabitants. So it could literally afford to hand out free lands, and because it needed people, it lured people with that promise.
I'm not sure what's that got to do with property being sacred. Surely all those European lords and merchants also considered their own properties extremely sacred.
It is the law, that many beaches are public.
Edit: fixed autocorrect
The Coastal Commission was established in 1972 to improve access. The act grandfathered in properties with no access, but requires any improvement or change to pull a permit with the Commission. The Commission requires public access when approving any permit.
[1] Tidal beaches only. Beaches on lakes can be private
If you're arguing that it should be "taken" as an easement of necessity, that's separate, and a more political question.
Easements by necessity are granted generally when no other access is possible; they're not for convenience.
Additionally, (for private party transactions anyway) the party that creates the encumbrance is who is responsible for granting access. If you're not responsible for isolating the tract of land, then there's not (usually) any requirement to grant an easement. And even if there is, it wouldn't be a public easement.
And by responsible, I mean in terms of land transactions and changes in law, not putting up a gate.
The only reason this seems unusual is because a rich person is affected this time.
It's only unusual because when having a disagreement with the government, 99.99% of us can't afford to fight the government based on principle.
Another part of me is like - what's it to him? It seems like it'd only help him to make the beach public and be the good guy.
while it sucks that he wants to restrict access, i can see where he is coming from if this was a private beach to begin with and the original owner allowed the public to use it. it also says in the article that the original owner would charge for parking so that strengthens his case.
can't hate on a dude from wanting to do with what is rightfully his.
Are there such laws in your country? How well is it enforced?
Fort Walton county is one of 2 counties in Florida where the property owners own the beach to the high tide line. You’re allowed to walk on the beach around the water line but not setup on the beach. The Sheriff and county decided they want to change it and is now suing all the beach owners in Fort Walton (my wife’s family being one of them).
The Florida governor signed an emergency Bill that they couldn’t just take the land all of the sudden they had to go through the courts. The Sheriff’s office came out and said they would stop issuing or enforcing trespassing on the beach and lesson beach patrols.
The home owners legally own the beach. The county officials want to take it from them without paying anything and change the uniqueness of the county that drew home owners in the first place.
I can see both sides but the county government and Sheriff can’t just decide one day they want to take property. No vote or anything just we want to take it.
My family owns a condo in the next county over. It’s a lot more noisy and I can see why home owners were draw to Fort Walton in the first place.
Sure if we pretend libertarianism exists as a functional concept. Can you build an enrichment facility on your property? No. Can you dump toxic chemicals into your well? Nope! Can you fly drones at 30K feet? Nah. Can you brew up a batch of grandma’s finest crystal meth? No siree bob. So yeah, you accept plenty of encroachment. The sanctity of your property is an arbitrary line you’re drawing to exclude campers, sunbathers and randos off on a hike. That’s sure to teach somebody... something...
Can I buy residentially zoned property and do residential things on it? Yes.
Could you do illegal things anywhere? Yes but you’ll face the consequences.
It's not very caring to the rich guy. It's not like there's no other substitutes people could use to get their beach fill. But for him, it's right there. Come on, where's your empathy for the guy?
This was on HN ~5 months ago, related topic: "Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay hit with $1.6 million penalty for failing to provide public beach access" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511