Vinod Khosla is willing to litigate California’s coast for the rest of his life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
He was ordered to private access at $2 per car, with no adjustment for inflation, across his property to a beach, by a government entity. This despite some reasonable case law on the idea that if you charge people to access something, you can change that price or go out of that business if you want.
In addition, he WON this case in CALIFORNIA at the beginning, though I thought on a bit of a ridiculous approach
To catch folks up, he's now been on a super long losing streak, and the US Supreme Court did not take up the case. It's a bit hard to see the state getting the road they want for $300K they claim it's worth, and they are passing law after law to try and get it. My guess is it ends up more in the 1.5M range?
Now if the government REALLY wanted to give the public access to nature - they'd ban all the STUPID parking restrictions near natural resources. Every rich area in California has some kind of state park or regional park maintained by all our government dollars, but the rich people living near it do this totally wild weekend only parking restriction on these major roads all around the entrance to the park, so no one but the rich folks living right there can access the park. It's kind of genius. You literally have a huge wide road, with parking on the sides NORMALLY during the week, but during weekends to keep poor folks from parking on the road and using the park, they ban weekend parking on this main road and all side streets for a few miles from park entrance.
The Coastal Act requires that you provide access. It encourages cheap parking and other amenities and the owner can charge for these—as the previous one did. Improvements to these can also be requested/required if you want to further develop the property. However, I don’t think they force you to offer parking. This email from the city, which was part of the trial, mentions both the parking and the access, but only notes, repeatedly, that the access needs to be preserved:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw9SrI2nMR-WVVhiMVZtS3Rxd0U...
Who builds, maintains the road? If a person dies there or a car is stolen who is responsible etc etc...
It's not as simple, that is HIS property.
"Access 24/7?" in particular is one of the point in the discussion: the law says he can change the hours, but must get a permit, which he refuses to do.
If Vinod supplies a road he'd be responsible for maintenance. The other questions are handled already: he'd do the same thing as if someone died in his house or a car was stolen from his driveway. Any member of the public who observes crimes like this can also report them
So you can use all his property to access the beach, including unnecessarily zig-zags and passing right by his front door, 100 (or whatever) feet away from the beach? Why not require him to give people 80% of the rooms in his house too?
If people have to use his property it has to be done with a delicate balance between public and PRIVATE property rights. That's what courts are for. Judging by some of the comments here, I'm kinda glad he sued.
If they really wanted a footpath, and pre-existing law didn't already mandate maintaining access, they would take it (either in fee simple, or just an easement) by eminent domain.
I'd be curious how well off places like ross are, seems like a different set of rules up there.
Firstly, should the government give the person a right to charge at all for access to the beach? If they have the right, do they have a commensurate responsibility (provide a bathroom)? If they have both, how do we decide what the fair value is?
The problem is someone reading this thinks "no, don't charge, and no bathroom. That works for me!" Someone else thinks "Of course they should charge a fair amount. What are we? Animals?"
But this isn't supposed to be a battle of our moods and desires. Its supposed to be a principled discussion. What is the principle? At least VK puts one forward: he thinks private property rights should trump some others. Surf riders also has a principle: the public should have access to the beaches.
I agree with both. So lets say that we think private property rights should be respected AND beach access preserved. What is the best way to balance it? Perhaps the minimal private property rights consistent with beach access? Or the minimal access consistent with property rights?
It applies in rich parts of town in general.
I'm paying MY tax money for these roads but only people with a residential permit can use them.
Subsidizing wealthy peoples parking nets me no marginal benefit.
I'm amazed that general public is US is perfectly fine with government charging public to enter in to their own public land, sometime with outrageous fees that would be unaffordable by people on subsistence and who would like to live off the grid. No one takes an issue that public is already paying taxes for this! Using public lands is not a privilege but the fundamental right of the people. In many European countries it is actually prohibited to charge access to public lands in their constitution.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-peop...
It seems to me that he's the underdog here: his opponents not only also have the resources to drag this fight on for a decade, they also have the state legislature and the governor on their side. At this point, the state is prepared to use armed force (which is what eminent domain ultimately is) to take his property, and if he tries to physically resist its agents will use violence to subdue him. Ignoring the accountable government, it's remarkable that an unaccountable non-profit has the resources to fight one of the richest men in the world for years, and it's sobering to think of how little chance you or I would have if a similar nonprofit attacked us.
I have no idea if he's legally in the right or wrong, although given that the state has had to change the law, it sounds like he was originally in the right. And I wonder at what point laws aimed at a single person's situation become too akin to bills of attainder to pass constitutional muster.
As for violence, the only ones who were manhandled by the state have been surfers, not Khosla.
Based on his fallacious belief that he knows what is the right thing in a societal domain outside of his subject matter expertise.
Silicon Valley hubris in a nutshell.
But if it exists perpetually in one person on one topic in one set of observations and conditions, then they are simply a stubborn asshole.
it's not a natural law that creative, driven people also have to be petty assholes
You really don’t. It’s more than possible to believe in big things in one topic whilst not being a complete asshole in another.
Worse yet, he has bought his way to citizenship and has attempted to steal a public beach, blatantly breaking public access law.
Edit: Holy shit he is squatting on land he has never spent a night at, and regrets the purchase of? What an insolent asshole!
I'm supportive of loosening the immigration and naturalization laws, but we shouldn't allow people to bypass almost the entire process by spending money. As is, people like Pramila Jayapal and Vinod are only getting citizenship as its easily purchaseable, rather than going through the naturalization process.
It is a little vague on who is part of the community and who is not, but usually a good enough definition is easy. For a beach, maybe consider those who care and live within a day trip distance.
Vinod, at least, has been actively involved in the litigation, has probably read the briefs, knows the issues and the laws well, etc. The commentators here (including you) that assume he is wrong and just full of hubris have likely only read a few articles that poorly summarize all of the history and complexity of the case.
That’s not to say I have a view on the underlying case. He may still be an asshole and wrong. But maybe he’s right.
And, you know, the multiple courts that have ruled against him.
Without spending more than 5 minutes looking into this (so this could be an inaccurate or unfair summary), it looks like:
1. Per Vinod's blog post (https://medium.com/@vkhosla/martins-beach-a-matter-of-princi...), multiple courts have actually agreed with him that there is no right of public access at Martin’s Beach, finding in favor of Vinod on 7 different legal theories that were brought.
2. In Vinod's view, the plaintiffs then only succeeded based on a claim in a separate case they brought that changing the access hours to a voluntary gate constituted "development" under the Coastal Act that required a permit. If you read the law at issue and the facts of this case, I don't think Vinod's view that this was a "technicality" is totally unreasonable.
3. When he lost on the above, he appealed. Appealing a decision by a lower court that you disagree with is normal -- lower court decisions are often overturned.
4. You then have to consider why he lost the appeal. For example, the appellate court said one of his constitutional claims was not ripe, not necessarily wrong. Higher courts merely declined to hear the case.
2) The definition of "development" in the law in question includes “change in the intensity of use of water, or of access thereto”, which seems precisely what he did. The fact that this doesn't sound like the common definition of the word is irrelevant.
4) The court still ruled against him on the question at hand - whether he can simply close access as he wishes. The "not ripe" decision is about a different (if related) question.
Maybe if fewer of them thought of themselves as being better than everyone else and, more importantly, stopped acting like they thought that way, their reputation would improve.
But I don't believe that pains him. This isn't new. We've seen this kind of attitude in the wealthy time and again here in the US and every other society where a wealth gap as big as ours has existed. The results tend to not favor anyone, but the very wealthy tend to lose the most.
probably true but only because they have the most to lose
wipes tear with $100
>foundation for much of today’s internet
How did Java help the enable the Internet?
There’s a discussion to be had about it’s significance to programming languages, but I don’t see how the Internet would have flourished any less without it.
Seems it could be argued Java was an obstacle to the Internet w.r.t. it’s role in the history of various fat tech ideas that tried and failed to become a defacto browser standard.
With all due respect to his successes, I’m not quite sure which of those is the source of getting credit for creating the foundation of the Internet.
Sun didn’t invent HTTP and didn’t sell the only computers that could run a web server.
If the web had been built on NFS they might have a case.
Why would anyone want to be a business partner with him after reading this?
FTFY.
It's easy to be an asshole for an extended period of time when you can outsource all of the assholery to professional assholes.
With increased automation, we will all become lawyers.
We will make a living litigating against the minions of other rich people to seek damages from whoever it was that spilled their drink on the billionaire's carpet... It will not be about the money; it will be a matter of principle.
No, I’m not buying that this is an unfortunate surprise for him. He picked this fight intentionally.
“Here’s the thing about Vinod,” Mr. Kaul said. “He just doesn’t care.”
Yes, we see it clearly.
I'm not against capitalism but I think there is a fundamental bug in our system that gives rise to these symptoms. Perhaps in hundred years this "bug" will get fixed and our future generations will look back on us marvelling that billionaires existed in our world just like we marvel Pharaohs existed in the previous age.
But lobbying and narcissism only go so far...
Maybe the state should just launch eminent domain like proceedings and let courts decide on the price. He's not saying (that all) the beach is his, just don't come through my land to go to the public part. It has the same effect but it's different.
I can see this being weird if the access rights were addded after you bought the land, but if the easement long predates your ownership, as it allegedly does in this case, I don’t really see why “property rights” should be allow you to wiggle out of it. That easement is part and parcel of the property you bought—-it may have cost even more if it weren’t included!
To be fair, the courts are deciding this as we speak and maybe in the next 20 years :). The person has the right to argue this in courts, until the doors are slammed in his face.
Before or after they are ways to do this--legally, price is the only issue.
Is it fair to slap someone with a half a million bill just because "he's rich anyway"?
My impression was that the law requires access. Upgraded infrastructure can be part of a quid-pro-quo for other development in the area, but the coastal comission can’t, as far as I know, insist on improvements out of the blue.
But no. This guy's tea getting cold is much more important topic to concentrate on.
That said, I have walked that road many times. There are other properties there that require a road so he would not need to pay for everything. There is already garbage pickup service there so I assume like any other private road it would need to be maintained by all the property owners for basic services and emergency access.
The issue was that he kept the gate locked and was trying to have the police aggressively evict pedestrians. There is a small parking lot at the beginning of the road and if he had been a decent neighbor and allowed people to park there and walk, I doubt this would have ever become such an issue. But he took that path of most resistance.
Morally I think open access to beaches is the right thing. It is a public asset and the beauty a reminder of how important our stewardship is. On the other side of the coin, having been there over the years and now seeing how the public is trashing what was a super pristine amazing place with litter and feces, i would give him the right to charge a $10000 cleaning fee to anyone caught littering (or worse!)
The thing i notice here is that the belief system which got him that money, now he's using his money to support that belief system.
Don't see anything wrong with this.
His is the public case, many people might be acting like this behind the public scrutiny.
No one is threatening your individualism, if you don't like other people and the concept of cooperative society you can always go and live in the forest alone. This is possible for every single human being on the planet but no one takes it.
Because this fake individualism generates its identity not on the rugged individualism of standing alone but taking advantage of all the resources, benefits and skills of millions in societal human cooperation and then stand apart merely to legitimize petty self interest and exploiting others without remorse. In essence all the benefits of cooperation but none of the responsibilities.
This is people like Vinod Khosla in a nutshell and if your society is full of such 'individuals' and legitimizes their ideology you have to consider whether you have a 'society' worth fighting for. What is the motivation? Because these kind of individuals do not believe in the larger good, only self interest.
But in all cases, it's all different sides of the same coin.