Vinod Khosla Wins Ruling Threatening Public Beach Access
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The legal fees Vinod is paying are far greater than what he'd have to pay to maintain rightful public access. He likely didn't understand the access issue at the time of purchase (since he's never actually there!) and so this protracted argument was the only way for him to derive value from his purchase.
https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-m...
Beaches and rivers belong to all of us.
This seems like an arbitrary distinction. What makes you think this and not something like "all geographic features belong to all of us"? What makes beaches and rivers so special that rights suddenly don't apply?
Owning land merely means being the last in a line of people who enriched themselves on the backs of others by taking common property and depriving everybody else.
This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use.
That's just scratching the surface, though!
Rivers are more complicated than other geographic features because what you do upstream can affect me downstream so it makes sense to have some more rules around them, or even treat them as public.
At some point over a thousand years ago, some judge decided it was in the public's best interest that ships be allowed to beach themselves on the nearest toshore/bank without fear of consequence.
(Which is why the high tide line makes sense, as far as where to draw the line.)
They didn't want captains to hesitate if a boat was in distress.
Similarly, sailors getting off a distressed ship shouldn't fear consequences leaving a beached ship, and walking along the coast to the next port.
It's the same logic as a broken down car's driver being allowed to walk down the shoulder of the interstate highway to get to the next exit for help.
This right of passage came about due to interest of public safety; it had nothing to do with public "ownership" of the shoreline, especially for the purposes of enjoyment or recreation.
Now, you could argue it should be the public's right to enjoy all beaches recreationally, but that would require a separate political (as opposed to judicial) process, and would/should be considered a public taking (expropriation), where the land owner has a right to compensation at Fair Market Value, plus expenses.
But that's not what anyone here is arguing for.
A lot of people even take Chinese money, even YC opened China office for a while, which they closed a couple of days ago.
And therein lies the rub. Many entrepreneurs will not care about stuff like this because his money is still green. The Uber CEO just the other day referred to the Kashoggi killing as a "mistake". Adam Neumann grew up in Israel but is happy to take money from the same pot KSA uses to fund extremist groups, and publicly claims that MBS and Jared Kushner (!) will save the world.
For some people, Greed > everything.
Have a great day!
Didn't say it was everyone, gave two examples of two well-documented individuals, and said that this would be true of "some" people.
California courts have already held in this case that there is no "public trust" access to the beach, due to the peculiarities of land titles that originated in Mexico before Californian statehood.
A California court of appeals has now held that the State's other hook, the idea that the property was "dedicated to public use" is also baseless. That's what this article is about: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF
> That said, we have been tasked here with reviewing a trial court’s application of the common law of public dedication, which is the sole legal basis for Friends’ remaining claims in this case.
> We have endeavored faithfully to follow the prior holdings of our Supreme Court and fellow appellate courts in applying common law of public dedication principles here. However, we have not attempted to extend the public dedication doctrine beyond the common law parameters previously recognized by court decisions in this state. As strong as the coastal access policies of our state are, we do not understand them to empower us to do so.
There is no "rightful public access" to this property.
Interestingly, property right dating back to Mexican land grants are respected in the US as a part of the agreement that settled the Mexican American War.
I don't know enough to say whether that's a valid argument in this particular case.
> While the public trust doctrine can protect access rights over private land, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to extend that protection to private land certified under the 1851 federal law implementing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where the federal or state government had not asserted an interest in title proceeding. Therefore, the court of appeal in Friends I found that, because the Martin’s Beach property had been certified under the 1851 law without any mention of a public interest and never passed into state ownership, there could be no common law public trust easement over the land to the water.
> And while California courts hold that Article X, section 4 of the California Constitution affirms and codifies “at least in part” the public trust doctrine of coastal access, “absent clear legislative intent to the contrary,” the access requirements do not apply retroactively.26 Applying this constitutional principle, the court held that section 4 could not protect public access to Martin’s Beach since it was passed decades after the property became privately owned.
The California Coastal Access law was based on Sea Ranch blocking access to the ocean in the mid 1970s. All building at Sea Ranch was blocked until Sea Ranch put in access trails to the beach. The temporary Coastal Access law was then made permanent.
I don't feel sorry for someone of means buying property without any understanding of California state law. Vinod is claiming property rights he never had.
The appellate court held that his beach was not subject to California’s “public trust” doctrine due to title tracing back to a Mexican land grant before California statehood. That was in 2016.
All the litigation since then had been only a different, much weaker theory that the Martin’s beach owners dedicated the property to public use. Khosla just won that battle too.
The spirit of the law in California is very obviously to provide public access to all beaches without exception. Good job on his lawyers on finding a weird ancient technicality to lean millions of dollars on but it's bullshit and he and everyone else knows it.
Vinod is literally the evil heartless corporate billionaire in 80's movies who wants to bulldoze the small town rec center. He arrests surfers trying to go to their own public beach and brags that he's never even set foot on the property and couldn't care less about it besides the "principal" of property rights.
Second, since the time of Justinian (527-565 AD), the public trust doctrine applied to the land up to the high tide line, and covered navigation and fishing. Then in 1971 the California Supreme Court discovered the right to surf and sunbathe in that ancient doctrine. Gee, it was hiding in there the whole time! California 100% deserved to be one-upped by Khosla. The fact that Khosla did so by invoking his rights under a treaty that pre-dated the state of California itself just makes it all more delicious.
Third, the California Coastal Commission proved itself the bad guys. It wasn't happy with even the California Supreme Court's made-up version of the public trust doctrine. It's inconvenient to sunbathe on just the tidal land, so the CCC demanded that Khosla run a public beach on his property. An unelected agency extracting concessions from a private property owner beyond what the law provides for is third-world country levels of government abuse.
The only thing that could make this better would be if Khosla sued the CCC for wasting his time and money.
In California I am pretty sure that private property starts at high tide for the ocean and low tide for other bodies of water.
So you are not talking about proposition 20 which starts at high tide and extends 1000 yards inland, you are talking about the land between high tide and low tide which I am pretty sure Vinod does not own.
I am not sure what you think he won in this particular case. Proposition 20 still holds (from everything I can tell). To overthrow prop 20 he would have to overthrow the will of the people. This is (by the way) why most of us oppose Vinod. He might be a great guy in other ways.
I will go back to not worrying about this case. I was worried Vinod was overturning California law which would really irk me.
Yes, absolutely. I’m a high taxation statist. But tax me, spend it in whatever public services you want, and then leave me alone. This sort of case-by-case exercise where state and municipal governments impose random unfunded mandates on individuals is incompatible with the idea of “government of laws, not if men.” The government shouldn’t make anyone keep running a public beach just because there used to be one in the property. Especially where there was no public vote, just an agency making a case by case decision.
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.
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.
> 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 government gives out a property right, because it doesn't have the capital to develop the property itself, and then tries to get more than it bargained for once someone has taken the time to develop that property. One of the things that has made America so successful is that we don't do that. (And instances where we have done that, such as with treaty obligations to Native Americans, are rightfully a source of national shame.)
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.
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.
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.
- The beach up to the mean high tide line is public land by law. No one, including Khosla, disputes this.
- The sandy beach above the high tide line as well as a convenient parking lot was previously accessible to the public for a small fee. This is what Khosla wants to shut down and what Friends of Martin's Beach & The Surfrider Foundation have sued over. It seems fairly obvious to me (though perhaps not to others) that Khosla is in the right here. The private land is his. He can do what he wants with it.
- Kind of in the middle of these two issues is actual beach access. FOMB has insinuated that shutting down the parking lot and access to the sandy beach constitutes complete removal of access to the beach. This, however, isn't really clear. FOMB could very well lose their lawsuit while beach access was maintained via a small road or walking path through Khosla's property. Despite what most of the press has indicated, the actual lawsuit isn't really about this.
For example, the Coastal Commission just prohibited hundreds of homes in Newport Beach from putting outdoor furniture on the sand, on their own private property (hundreds of meters from the actual water).
You and Khosla are both wrong. If an area is designated public land, you cannot de facto prevent all access by buying up all the land around it and refusing to provide any point of entry; you must provide an easement (and you can even charge a small fee for it, if you want). This is a very well-established bit of property law, and Khosla is only weaseling out of it on technicalities.
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...
Without entitled billionaires fighting the system, it would be much harder to drum up support for stronger protections enshrined in law. They could call it the Khosla Act.
In all seriousness, CA should enforce the law they wrote, not the law they wish they had. But also, good luck if Khosla wants to so much as upgrade a circuit breaker, if I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an opportunity for the local building inspector to require a new public access road to be put in.
FWIW, this permitting process is precisely the law that Khosla is challenging. He asserts that the state government doesn't have the right to such fine grained and arbitrary control of private property.
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
This is basically the problem in a nutshell: people voting against their own interests because one day they may be rich (they won’t though, probably, because if everyone was rich nobody would be) and when they get there they want their own beach too. So they give their beach away to the wealthiest, and now nobody but Vinod has a beach. If instead they just agreed to share the beach they’d all have it now, but of course that’s un-American, apparently.
So, look, have you considered that when you try to make common cause with the whatever non-super-elite class of people you're trying to make common cause with, you do it in a way that doesn't make you a patronizing asshole? Because you're assuming that people are too dumb or brainwashed to "vote their interests" rather than that they have a different conception of their interests than you do
I say, forget what the previous owners thought. If the public needs a way to access some public land (the beach), build a public road. If the way is blocked by private land, that's what eminent domain is for. Seize some land and compensate Khosla. That's what would happen to regular people.
The case hinges on the previous landowner performing "public dedication" of the road by letting people use it. The concept of "public dedication" without the previous owners of the land creating any legal documentation, and possibly unaware of the legal consequences, that they are willingly performing public dedication of the road is absurd.
The question of whether this dude's property rights do or ought to trump public access to the beach is a detailed point of law, and, I mean, clearly is not as black and white as some posters are making out (neither side trivially prevailed in a summary judgment through the courts). But this subthread is not whether the case was decided correctly on its merits, but whether people who think that Khosla should be able to fence access to the beach through his property are deluded idiots who wrongly imagine that they will someday own beaches themselves, and are agitating for this particular wholly imaginary self-interest, or whether they might have other reasons to believe as they do.
Is it still public?
That is the issue, not property rights.
> To what benefit to ones self can you possibly point? I worry that tolerating the entitlement of the many over the rights of the few will result in a degrading of those rights. It's this dude's beach today, what about a website that I suddenly charge for tomorrow? Or hey, lets be realistic here, what about my future beach when that aforementioned website makes me my billions :)
Every bit of this was in place and well understood when Khosla purchased this land. The easement already existed. This isn't as situation where the government is coming in and seizing someone's private land, it's simply enforcing the easement that has existed for the last 100 years.
I apologize if you are aware of all this and are making a narrower point, that property rights shouldn't stop mattering because the person who owns it falls within the category of "rich people". However, there are all kinds of land use laws (another is "freedom to roam"[1]) that predate and preclude certain types of ownership. In other words, you can own property, and you have broad rights to do "what [you] want with it", but if you purchased it under conditions that were reasonably knowable at the time you made the purchase, it doesn't make sense to complain about it later.
Lastly, yeah, there is a problem here with rich. We're talking about a Silicon Valley billionaire showing up and denying access to a beach that the surrounding community had access to - as guaranteed by the California constitution - for the last 100 years. I'd say Khosla created his own popular perception of "rich" people in this case. It's the sort of thing were I can image other "rich" people cringing, like, dude, Americans still don't resent the wealthy, what are you doing here.
When it’s a house or a table or a bicycle shop, this approach makes sense and I agree with it.
When it’s land or natural resources, it is perfectly sensible to place some general restrictions on what people can do. Those pillars of our existence were here a million years before the current owner and will be there for millions of years afterwards. The entire society depends to a lesser or greater extent on land and natural resources. It is irresponsible for society to allow the owner to do anything they want with it.
Now that’s not to say that nothing should be allowed, but for instance the right of travel for people that don’t cause the place harm in doing so, espesially if it is to their homes, should really win over the right of any individual to close of access to a working road for a place they never even go to.
I don’t hold strong views on this case in particular, but I felt compelled to rebut the general idea that land and natural resources are ‘property just like any other’.
I think I benefit if the rules are explicit, well-written and apply to all players, without a 'we want to screw this rich guy' escape clause. I would also like it were it easier for everyone, not just a really magnificently rich guy, to defend his legal rights and privileges against the government.
I'll never have more than a rounding error of his wealth, but I may every well someday be the recipient of the same sort of bile that he's receiving, and I think that in that case I would benefit from a fair government and laws, rather than a howling mob.
The French Revolution is not a good example of good behaviour.
The government is the reification of will of the people, including yourself. It acts out the will of the people, and the will of the people is that the beaches are everyone's property. Sometimes the government is right, sometimes wrong, and having processes to mitigate and remedy is important, however it's not some towering obelisk of Mordor smiting left and right.
Essentially it erases the question of whether this might be a case of protecting the fundamental rights of our society from erosion, and reduces the problem to the immediate material circumstances. With all of that difficult nuance and caution gone, anybody who disagrees with the foregone conclusion is just a poor and stupid rube.
Next we'll be talking about "eroding the rights of people to buy the ocean".
See [PRC Division 20 Ch3](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...)
Particularly:
> Development shall not interfere with the public’s right of access to the sea where acquired through use or legislative authorization, including, but not limited to, the use of dry sand and rocky coastal beaches to the first line of terrestrial vegetation.
This is an access point that has been used by the public for decades.
This isn't a fictitious question either, because some countries do have such laws (with some level of exception for actual places of dwelling). At the core is the notion of being able to own something, which itself is something we feel is simple because of how common we engage in the act, but which philosophically is far more complicated to deal with than people give credit (even more so when one considers nature gives no sanctity to the body).
In general governments have 'good enough' laws that make enough people happy without getting to the real philosophical questions, but in doing so leave open edge cases which have unsatisfactory answers because the philosophy cannot be reconciled with the practice.
My point being sometimes people vote or defend ideas that they believe are fundamentally right -- regardless of whether they themselves benefit from those ideas.
I'm suggesting that as someone who doesn't want crime to happen to them, this is the kind of thing you'd optimize for anyways. Jailing people in and of itself doesn't reduce crime, in fact, the US recidivism rate is so high, if you locked up innocent people and people guilty of low-level crimes you'd probably increase the crime rate. That's how ineffective America's police/prison industrial complex is at reducing crime. As such these procedures are something you'd want to keep people out of America's wildly ineffective prisons.
> My point being sometimes people vote or defend ideas that they believe are fundamentally right -- regardless of whether they themselves benefit from those ideas.
Sure. However, a rich man refusing to let the people of California onto their beach in support of exercising their constitutional rights isn't one of them.
I'm not saying rich to engender animosity against his wealth, he earned it, that's great. I'm pointing out how many other options he has. He could literally use his money to build his own synthetic ocean in the middle of California and put a beach house on that. Instead, he's chosen to spend his largesse to keep Californians from being able to exercise their constitutional rights so he can have a slightly better view. That's the definition of a dick move.
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.
The current legal code is never wrong in what it does. It simply executes and terminates. The courts define interpretation and execution semantics for it.
If you do not like the result, you've just failed at implementing the correct legal code.
It's futile to blame laws and court rulings. Caveat to some extent obviously, since laws and courts have informal specs, it does mean that two different court (in my analogy computers) could end up on slightly different results.
But most importantly we should focus on changing the legal code itself if we don't like the results.
If anything, the bigger issue with laws and courts is the cost of execution. Just to know what outcome the current legal code results in given a concrete situation takes years, lots of money, tons of appeal, etc. If we could make that much cheaper and quick, it would greatly improve things. Think development feedback cycles. Imagine it took you years to test your code on a few scenarios? That's what happens with legislation today.
So back to the article. It's not up to the courts to decide the desired behavior. It is only up to them to define the result of the currently described behavior. And it might seem in this case, the describe behavior maybe has a bug with regards to the desired behavior of some of the users...
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.
If you open a "public access road" through your property, and there's a pothole that damages someone's vehicle, you can get sued. If you don't put up fences at the cliffs and some dumbass drives off the edge, you can get sued. If someone decides to camp at the edge of the road and a tree falls on them, you can get sued.
Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault in the US. Allowing the public onto your property, especially when you're not making any money off of it (so you could, you know, pay for insurance like the previous owners definitely did) is a terrible idea.
That's not true. California has a Recreational Use Statute (Civil Code Section 846) which makes private landowners immune from liability for people who enter their land, as long as they don't charge a fee. Most states have similar laws.
How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?
But that only applies to routes over land, right? I wonder why no one has started some kind of shuttle service that runs boats from a place the public can reach by land to Khosla's beach?
Charge people $15-20 for the trip, and also offer snack and drink and suntan lotion sales, beach umbrella and beach chair rental and other things like that.
2. I haven't really been following this case, but I recall that at one point he was making an argument based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was the treaty between the US and Mexico that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. I haven't seen any mention of this aspect of the case in quite a while--was it dropped?
It was this treaty that gave the US ownership of California (and much of the rest of what is now the western US). Part of this treaty was a guarantee that the US would honor existing property rights of people in those territories that were switching ownership from Mexico to the United States.
The argument went something like this, I believe. Under Mexican law, private ownership of beaches was allowed, and many California beaches were private. When California became a US territory, those beaches remained private under the Treaty. When Calfornia became a state a couple years later, in 1850, its Constitutional provisions making beaches public did not apply to beaches covered by the Treaty.
This seems like sound reasoning up to that point, at least in the case where the beach was still owned in 1850 by the same person who owned it when the Treaty was ratified.
Where it gets iffy is dealing with changes of ownership. Usually in the case of real property you can convey all your rights to the next owner. You can probably make a decent case that this means that if one of those original owners sold their private beach to a third party, or passed it on via inheritance, it should stay private, because the right to convey such ownership was one of the property rights they had when it was part of Mexico, so should be covered by the Treaty.
But what about the conveyances one step beyond that? Two steps beyond? Surely the intent of the Treaty was not to forever make Mexican property rules apply in former Mexican parts of the US. It was to provide a fair transition so that the current owners would not lose out as those territories transitioned from Mexican rules to US rules.
I'd expect most beach property to have changed hands enough times since 1848 that it should be considered fully transitioned to US rules, and California law would fully apply.
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?
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.
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.
For example, even mere regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the food chain:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...