No such thing as a 'private beach' in CA. No matter how rich you are, you cannot own a beach in California, though you can own the adjoining land and be a real dick about closing long-standing beach access paths.
It seems ridiculous that these too-rich-for-the-law-to-apply-to-me types keep doing this - if having your own beach is important to you then go live somewhere where you can legally own one
While there may not be any private beach under CA law, Kholsa actually tried to use a sneaky legal argument to get around that[1]. Essentially, he argued that federal land patent on the property from the 1800s superseded the California Coastal Act. It didn't work, but had it work it would have set a dangerous precedent for any properties that could make a similar claim.
> Why do you say it didn't work? From what I've read, the court has ruled in his favor so far.
One court ruled in his favor on that issue in the Friends of Martins Beach v. Martins Beach LLC, the court in the later Surfrider Foundation v. Martins Beach LLC case did not find in his favor, and has ordered him to provide access. The former case is on appeal, and Khosla has petitioned for a new trial after losing the latter case.
Because the scope of property rights in the property he bought did not include the right to deny beach access, and the fact that it did not was factored into the market value of the property when he bought it.
And because he is the one using force to prevent access to the public to property belonging to them.
He wants to be treated as if he bought something that was never for sale, and which he didn't buy, and which would have added significant cost to what he actually bought had it been for sale and been included with what he bought.
> The dispute in this case is the state is demanding he allow people to walk across his private land to get the comparatively tiny public land.
A right of access secured both by the Article X of the California Constitution and the Coastal Act, and a public access requirement well-known to the market when Khosla purchased the property, and whose impact was factored into the market price when he bought it.
You know, where I am from (northern Italy) if someone like this decided to antagonize their whole neighborhood like that, they'd end up having to move. Not because of threats or property damage: people would simply shun him to starvation. It's no fun to be unable to buy groceries or gas.
That's one of the dangers of high economic inequality. There is now a class of people who are essentially insulated from the social consequences of their actions.
No fun for the hired help who need to buy the groceries or gas perhaps. I doubt a billionaire would notice or care if their neighbours don't like them.
That's actually something I noticed when I moved here, people are a lot less likely to know their neighbors (even if they have fewer neighbors than I'm used to).
I bought a condo in San Rafael, and when I did a round to introduce myself to my neighbors, I had TWO people ask me if I was a sex offender! That made me wonder what kind of crazy place I had ended up in!
Then someone explains to me that sex offenders have to do that by law, and just about nobody else does that.
At least nobody yelled at me for doing deliveries by unmanned rover.
Then I left for India for work for a couple of months, and when I came back, someone was living in my place... Americans are very interesting :)
I've found Americans pretty apathetic about injustice like this. They just think there's nothing they can do, nobody raises a fuss... currently dealing with this on the opposite coast...
Well when many effective firebrands like MLK, RFK, MalcomX and the like keep getting assassinated, you get a population that knows it shouldn't get uppity.
Not even talking about grand scale things like that. Little things -- the construction next door has been negligent and constantly wreaking havoc on neighbors, the environment, etc. Nobody other than me complains. Nobody files complaints. Nobody cares. Police don't care. Americans are brainwashed into thinking complainers are losers/weak and we all just have to "suck it up" and deal with it.
Because Americans foolishly still believe that 'one day they can make it too'. How else could one explain why millions vote for 'lower taxes for the rich' if they are quite poor themselves?!
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" -- John Steinbeck
You know, where I am right now (India), if someone like this decided to antagonize their whole neighborhood by allowing Africans to rent their room (particularly African bachelors), they'd end up having to leave.
Passive aggressive mob justice doesn't sound so hot when the victims are members of our tribe, does it?
(Background for westerners: Indians don't really like Africans much, particularly in the abstract. I have no idea why. Various non-Nigerian Africans blame it on the fact that Nigerians are all criminals and give Africans a bad name.)
> Background for westerners: Indians don't really like Africans much, particularly in the abstract. I have no idea why.
It's because quite a few Indians are super racist. Especially against anyone (even other Indians) that are dark-skinned.
It's no surprise that bleaching cream is incredibly popular in India, and that all the Bollywood actors are incredibly fair-skinned. Hell, usually their music video dancers, cheerleaders at IPL games, etc..., are all just white people. Historically the higher castes also consisted of fair-skinned Indians.
Doesn't surprise me that Indians would object to 'questionable' (ie. African or Black) neighbours...
I don't think it has much to do with fairness. Africa has fair&lovely too. But from what I hear they love black people. (Never visited myself.)
It's the particular distaste for Africans that I don't understand. All foreigners face a degree of racism, but Africans seem to get it the worst. Women tend to be the most racist, morality police and spurned vixen depending on the situation. If an African woman wears shorts in her housing society it's a danger to good morals. And if an Indian woman tries to pick me up but I don't feel like dumping my (Mozambican) girlfriend right there, somehow the black girl is the problem.
In Brazil, all beaches are public by law. The owners are obliged to leave a path open so the public can access the beach. Not that we also don't have our bunch of billionaires, millionaires, judges and assholes in general that try to prevent it.
The owners are obliged to leave a path open so the public can access the beach.
Can you be held liable in Brazil for things that happen on your property? For example, if somebody hurts themselves on the path, can they then sue you?
Why is a Canadian newspaper covering this and not the San Francisco Chronicle? Have you guys seen sfgate.com recently? There is no news of interest anymore, it's a wannabe Buzzfeed. Unbelievable how far it has fallen.
I wonder if this is just a big misunderstanding and if Vinod Khosla is just a nice, upstanding, Old Testament kind of guy. He is a successful investor after all.
There are studies (such as [1]) that show that the more you think about money, handle money, etc the more selfish you become. Given that logic you would have to say that most professional investors are more likely to be on the selfish end of the spectrum.
Edit: That's what I get for not reading carefully enough! Maharaj is the protestor, not the owner, and as such my comment below is inaccurate and erroneous. Thanks to mortoc for pointing this out to me. Off to get a coffee and focus...
>“You can’t thwart a billionaire,” Maharaj said in an interview after a stroll along the deserted sandy coastline on Jan. 15, a day when the gate leading to the beach was locked.
One day you'll get what's coming to you if you keep up that attitude, plutocrat. Noblesse oblige is the only thing that spared Andrew Carnegie and is sparing Bill Gates the universal, effortless scorn and ridicule they would otherwise deserve. You'd do well to remember that.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's a simple reality that at a certain point of inequality and general unfairness, the main thing that the elite need to fear for is their own safety. Look at Brazil. The wealthy have bullet-proofed their Mercedes cars.
If he values privacy so highly, he probably shouldn't have bought coastal property in a jurisdiction with public access laws to which that property was subject.
Basic due diligence shouldn't be a foreign concept to a VC.
Is there any other side to this story, or is Khosla really a third-tier Bond villain?
Usually, news stories that read as black-and-white as this one are spun somehow. But here I can't figure out how. Beyond it being odd for a billionaire to embark on a legally futile quest to kick people off a beach at the expense of nearly his entire reputation.
I'll play devil's advocate and argue his position (even though it's not my own):
People hang out all day around Khosla's house. In order to access the beach, they have to cross his property. It feels like trespassing, although it's legal in this case. Sometimes they park where they shouldn't. Sometimes they are loud and disrespectful. Sometimes someone litters. Quite often people trespass on his portion of the beach, as there is no clear markings delineating public and private property. The gate that leads to the beach is clearly his, so he has decided not to open it and facilitate access anymore. Leaving the gate open at night is perhaps seen by his security staff to be inviting problems.
Now, here's my actual position: don't like surfers? Don't buy beach property in California.
He's only risking his reputation in the eyes of the public, not his peers.
Probably there are quite a few rich Californians who would be happy to see Khosla win, are backing him privately and are grateful to him for volunteering as the public villain.
"Khosla said he kept the beach open after the sale despite the $500,000 to $600,000 a year in costs for maintenance, liability insurance, infrastructure and other expenses. He said insurance alone was $30,000 a year, but he kept the beach open for two years even though he was losing money....Most of the beach has eroded away over the years and it is often dangerous, with sneaker waves and riptides, he said. He said only two or three people a day were visiting the beach and it was unreasonable to expect him to pay the costs to maintain public access....Khosla said he tried for three years to get a hearing with the Coastal Commission in an attempt to come up with a reasonable solution, but the organization refused."
Wait I'm confused, does he own the beach or just the gate which accesses the beach? And why is he responsible and needs to be insured for people using the beach, or maintain it?
It feels like either you own the beach and can do whatever the heck you please, or you don't, and then it's not your dime nor your responsibility...
PR nightmare though, anyone made a flash-game where you try to sneak upon Khosla's beach while being hunted by him and his security guards yet?
Yeah, this is disingenuous. No-one is requiring him to have liability insurance for beachgoers, and it'd be a pretty laughable attempt to sue him for any incident at the beach.
I think you'd have a fairly good case that you could not be held liable for for injury that occurred on an easement (actually, scratch that, I changed my mind and IANAL... given that an easement is non-possessive, you still own the property... but at what level are you required to make it safe?)
I don't know the pertinent CA laws, but in NY you can be fined for not shoveling snow off of your sidewalk and you are required to keep the sidewalk in good repair. If the sidewalk is broken and somebody trips, you can get fined by the city and/or sued by the ankle breaker. If it needs to be replaced, you're expected to do it yourself with your own money or be fined.
If only it were clearly legally futile. When you are a billionaire, NOTHING is legally futile. You get to help make the laws. I am still pessimistically thinking he will eventually find a way to have his way.
With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
> If only it were clearly legally futile. When you are a billionaire, NOTHING is legally futile. You get to help make the laws.
In general, sure, wealth and political power do correlate pretty strongly.
In this particular case of this particular wealthy person and this particular area of politics, well, there has been a law passed directly as a result of this controversy [0], and its one that Khosla tried to stop [1].
> With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
People who end up having so much often do so because they aren't the kind of person who ever is not seeking out every way to have more.
He probably doesn't, and any level of fine that would be reasonable to authorize in a general law would probably fail to deter him. Which is probably why a law passed last year empowers the State Land Commission to acquire a new access easement across the specific property at issue for public use, independent of whatever is already due to the public under state law, either by negotiation or condemnation if negotiation fails to secure an agreement by Jan. 1, 2016.
One of the best things about living in Scotland is that stuff like this is illegal. Everyone has non-motorized right of access to almost all land and water, with notable exceptions such as gardens, airfields, golf clubs and crop fields. If someone tried that here I could legally just hop the fence.
> First off, this guy feels entitled to be able to trudge across private property against the owner's wishes to get to "public" wet sand area. There is plenty of private property that welcomes people to trudge across it. Why does he need to on this specific person's property?
Because state law in fact requires such access to be maintained for the public, specifies a process that must be adhered to for substantial changes to such access, and because access via the particular property in question was, in fact, provided through the property in question for a century prior to the present dispute.
The "entitlement" here is entirely on the part of Khosla, who feels that he should be freed without cost from limitations on the scope of property rights applicable to the property he acquired, when those limitations were well known in the market when the property was sold and priced into the price when he purchased it.
> Sure it does, now. But that law was just passed last year
Article X of the State Constitution and the Coastal Act have required it for quite a long time.
> Before this law was passed there were no penalties for blocking beach access.
No, before one of the new laws passed last year, the Coastal Commission could not issue fines. Compliance could be ordered by a court, and failure to comply with such court orders could be punished as contempt. So, there was a longer route to penalties, but they were not absent.
> Bills of attainder are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution
A bill of attainder is a law declaring someone guilty of a criminal offense. It is not a law inspired by difficulty in addressing one persons conduct that creates a generally-applicable penalty, nor is it a law which enables a state agency to use the power of eminent domain (subject to the Constitutional requirement for compensation) to acquire some additional interest to that already controlled by the public for public use (which are the two new provisions of law passed in the last year motivated by the Khosla case.)
74 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadNothing new, see: Malibu.
For a nice counterpoint to this dickish behavior, see Steve Blank's series of posts about his time on the California Coastal Commission:
http://steveblank.com/category/california-coastal-commission...
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county-times/ci_2614203...
Why do you say it didn't work? From what I've read, the court has ruled in his favor so far.
One court ruled in his favor on that issue in the Friends of Martins Beach v. Martins Beach LLC, the court in the later Surfrider Foundation v. Martins Beach LLC case did not find in his favor, and has ordered him to provide access. The former case is on appeal, and Khosla has petitioned for a new trial after losing the latter case.
And because he is the one using force to prevent access to the public to property belonging to them.
He wants to be treated as if he bought something that was never for sale, and which he didn't buy, and which would have added significant cost to what he actually bought had it been for sale and been included with what he bought.
http://www.surfrider.org/programs/entry/beach-access
A right of access secured both by the Article X of the California Constitution and the Coastal Act, and a public access requirement well-known to the market when Khosla purchased the property, and whose impact was factored into the market price when he bought it.
He can just use Instacart, and he probably drives a Tesla.
It's not a garage. He's had the curb shaped like it's a driveway, and painted like it is, but it's not. Everyone, including the city know it's not.
But try and park there and you'll be fined like it is. Towed like it is.
I bought a condo in San Rafael, and when I did a round to introduce myself to my neighbors, I had TWO people ask me if I was a sex offender! That made me wonder what kind of crazy place I had ended up in!
Then someone explains to me that sex offenders have to do that by law, and just about nobody else does that.
At least nobody yelled at me for doing deliveries by unmanned rover.
Then I left for India for work for a couple of months, and when I came back, someone was living in my place... Americans are very interesting :)
What if the community decided to "shun" someone for being gay? or having a different political opinion?
Passive aggressive mob justice doesn't sound so hot when the victims are members of our tribe, does it?
(Background for westerners: Indians don't really like Africans much, particularly in the abstract. I have no idea why. Various non-Nigerian Africans blame it on the fact that Nigerians are all criminals and give Africans a bad name.)
It's because quite a few Indians are super racist. Especially against anyone (even other Indians) that are dark-skinned.
It's no surprise that bleaching cream is incredibly popular in India, and that all the Bollywood actors are incredibly fair-skinned. Hell, usually their music video dancers, cheerleaders at IPL games, etc..., are all just white people. Historically the higher castes also consisted of fair-skinned Indians.
Doesn't surprise me that Indians would object to 'questionable' (ie. African or Black) neighbours...
It's the particular distaste for Africans that I don't understand. All foreigners face a degree of racism, but Africans seem to get it the worst. Women tend to be the most racist, morality police and spurned vixen depending on the situation. If an African woman wears shorts in her housing society it's a danger to good morals. And if an Indian woman tries to pick me up but I don't feel like dumping my (Mozambican) girlfriend right there, somehow the black girl is the problem.
Can you be held liable in Brazil for things that happen on your property? For example, if somebody hurts themselves on the path, can they then sue you?
[1] http://www.livescience.com/1128-mere-thought-money-people-se...
>“You can’t thwart a billionaire,” Maharaj said in an interview after a stroll along the deserted sandy coastline on Jan. 15, a day when the gate leading to the beach was locked.
One day you'll get what's coming to you if you keep up that attitude, plutocrat. Noblesse oblige is the only thing that spared Andrew Carnegie and is sparing Bill Gates the universal, effortless scorn and ridicule they would otherwise deserve. You'd do well to remember that.
I'm not advocating murder; it's just what can eventually happen.
Khosla is still a dick though, so the rest of your point is valid.
Basic due diligence shouldn't be a foreign concept to a VC.
Usually, news stories that read as black-and-white as this one are spun somehow. But here I can't figure out how. Beyond it being odd for a billionaire to embark on a legally futile quest to kick people off a beach at the expense of nearly his entire reputation.
People hang out all day around Khosla's house. In order to access the beach, they have to cross his property. It feels like trespassing, although it's legal in this case. Sometimes they park where they shouldn't. Sometimes they are loud and disrespectful. Sometimes someone litters. Quite often people trespass on his portion of the beach, as there is no clear markings delineating public and private property. The gate that leads to the beach is clearly his, so he has decided not to open it and facilitate access anymore. Leaving the gate open at night is perhaps seen by his security staff to be inviting problems.
Now, here's my actual position: don't like surfers? Don't buy beach property in California.
Probably there are quite a few rich Californians who would be happy to see Khosla win, are backing him privately and are grateful to him for volunteering as the public villain.
"Khosla said he kept the beach open after the sale despite the $500,000 to $600,000 a year in costs for maintenance, liability insurance, infrastructure and other expenses. He said insurance alone was $30,000 a year, but he kept the beach open for two years even though he was losing money....Most of the beach has eroded away over the years and it is often dangerous, with sneaker waves and riptides, he said. He said only two or three people a day were visiting the beach and it was unreasonable to expect him to pay the costs to maintain public access....Khosla said he tried for three years to get a hearing with the Coastal Commission in an attempt to come up with a reasonable solution, but the organization refused."
It feels like either you own the beach and can do whatever the heck you please, or you don't, and then it's not your dime nor your responsibility...
PR nightmare though, anyone made a flash-game where you try to sneak upon Khosla's beach while being hunted by him and his security guards yet?
Just the gate. All beaches in CA are public property.
With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
In general, sure, wealth and political power do correlate pretty strongly.
In this particular case of this particular wealthy person and this particular area of politics, well, there has been a law passed directly as a result of this controversy [0], and its one that Khosla tried to stop [1].
> With that being said, I'll never understand why people who have so much already would be so eager to have a little more at the expense of most of the public hating you.
People who end up having so much often do so because they aren't the kind of person who ever is not seeking out every way to have more.
[0] http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...
[1] http://martinsbeach.blogspot.com/2014/05/khosla-hires-lobbyi...
Oh no. Khosla is worth $1.7B. Every year this goes by costs him almost 0.2% of his net worth. In five hundred years, they'll bankrupt him.
He's earning that much a day in interest on investments alone. Why would he care?
Because state law in fact requires such access to be maintained for the public, specifies a process that must be adhered to for substantial changes to such access, and because access via the particular property in question was, in fact, provided through the property in question for a century prior to the present dispute.
The "entitlement" here is entirely on the part of Khosla, who feels that he should be freed without cost from limitations on the scope of property rights applicable to the property he acquired, when those limitations were well known in the market when the property was sold and priced into the price when he purchased it.
Article X of the State Constitution and the Coastal Act have required it for quite a long time.
> Before this law was passed there were no penalties for blocking beach access.
No, before one of the new laws passed last year, the Coastal Commission could not issue fines. Compliance could be ordered by a court, and failure to comply with such court orders could be punished as contempt. So, there was a longer route to penalties, but they were not absent.
> Bills of attainder are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution
A bill of attainder is a law declaring someone guilty of a criminal offense. It is not a law inspired by difficulty in addressing one persons conduct that creates a generally-applicable penalty, nor is it a law which enables a state agency to use the power of eminent domain (subject to the Constitutional requirement for compensation) to acquire some additional interest to that already controlled by the public for public use (which are the two new provisions of law passed in the last year motivated by the Khosla case.)