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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

What does this do to “residents only” beaches?

What Palo Alto might do is what other cities do and it’s charge some ridiculous entrance fee. There are a few of these in the Bay Area.

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Residents only beaches are illegal in California since the entire coastline is public land.

Sure, but the ACLU has lots of options to open them up in other states that do allow that. Even Nevada for example doesn’t have the concept of “public easement” that CA does. You cannot get out of your canoe and walk on the beach on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe that is private.

As a non-resident, I love this. I really wish we would do the same thing for rivers here in Utah (we've gone back and forth on that).

I visit California every couple years and it's one of my favorite vacation spots. My favorite beaches are the small ones with tiny walkways between residential homes. You feel like you're trespassing, but you're not.

I've also made use of dozens of parks in CA as my son was a professional BMX rider for a time and we went on a tour of as many CA skate parks as he could ride. It was a good time and we were allowed access to every park we visited.

Opal Cliffs used to do this. It was dumb, considering you could just walk down the beach or paddle down.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/Santa-Cruz-s-priv...

One compromise is, like many public botanical gardens and parks do, is to enforce operational hours and make entry free for residents with proof of residency in the zipcode/city/county. My example would be the SF botanical garden which is free to residents with id and/or utilities mail with your sf address. No visitors after operating hours.

It would be a sad day if SF allows encampments in the gardens, welcoming urban decay into an urban escape.

Presumably Palo Alto could charge some reasonable fee, connected in a way they could justify to a judge to the expenses of keeping the park up, and then offer residents a discount. But there's no "gotcha" where they can recapitulate the current policy of outright restricting nonresidents with absurdly high fees; the law doesn't work like a computer program, and a human judge will shut you down if you try to treat it like one.

As someone down thread has pointed out, SF botanical gardens within golden gate park is free for residents, but charge $9 ($12 weekends) for non residents. It’s not “high” but I’d consider $30 “high” if they went up that far.

Another tactic I’ve seen in other circumstances is you have to get a “reservation” ahead of time.

> But there's no "gotcha" where they can recapitulate the current policy of outright restricting nonresidents with absurdly high fees

In particular, in California, fees cannot be higher than the cost of providing the service. In drought years, there have been proposals to allow people to use water as they wish, but charge (steeply) progressively-increasing fees for each gallon of water used. The theory being that excess revenues could be put toward obtaining more water (via, e.g., desalinization). Such proposals have been shot down because the cost of providing water doesn't support the high fees that would be necessary to discourage frivolous use.

What they do in Shanghai is have the park inside the apartment complex. (小区, a small walled residential district containing usually several buildings as well as other amenities like bicycle parking and, perhaps, parks for little kids. Amenities vary with the ritziness of the complex.)

The park in question here is on a rather different scale than what you're thinking of. The Foothills Park is an open space of roughly 1,400 acres (570 ha).

At that point, "residents" doesn't seem like an applicable concept.

Can you name them for us?

Beach access is a right, actively defended by surfrider.org, who can use your support.

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