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Barefoot with Tape Measure
Coexistence on Malibu’s Carbon Beach

Shirley Skeel

The day began hot and sunny as revelers prepared to celebrate July 4th at Carbon Beach--a stretch of sand on the Malibu coastline fondly known as “Billionaires’ Beach.” The billionaires themselves, and their more modest millionaire neighbors, were preparing for a relaxing weekend on their private beach sites, which are stitched together in a ragtag fashion with the public spaces on one of the most beautiful stretches of white sand on the California coast.

A group of Los Angeles dancers were also looking forward to a day on Carbon Beach. In the early afternoon, the TaskForce dance company, trailed by about 50 spectators, spilled through a public accessway and began performing up and down the beach as part of its Liquid Landscapes project.

But the jubilant spirit of July 4th independence did not last long. Instead, the old English common-law right to a “quiet enjoyment” of your land rose in a war cry from a handful of the wealthy homeowners and their guests.

“We had people screaming and yelling at us at the top of their lungs,” recalls Jenny Price, a writer and member of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, a nonprofit group that runs public beach tours.

“People were tossing footballs over our heads and running back and forth interfering with the dancers, saying, ‘These are really sad people; these are really unhappy people,’” Price said. “One guy was just screaming, saying ‘Go back to the valley.’ He got so bad, his own family was telling him to stop. It was ugly, really ugly.”

The events at Carbon Beach on this particular day typified an ongoing struggle over private and public use of California’s beaches--and a steady gain for the public--that many private homeowners are still coming to grips with.

The homeowners’ shock and anger is hardly surprising. Only three decades ago, large strips of Malibu’s 27-mile coastline were strictly privately owned (that is, up to the mean high tide line, as seaward of this is state-owned). Today, those private beach havens are liberally dotted with areas where the public is allowed--but there are few public entranceways between the cheek-to-cheek villas lining Pacific Coast Highway, so swaths of beach still remain largely untouched, while the public clusters near the accessways.

At Carbon Beach, in particular, the idea that just anyone can come and play in the “front yard” of Hollywood stars and reclusive billionaires is still sinking in. There are just two public entrances to this 1.5-mile beach east of Malibu Pier, and one of the walkways opened only three years ago. Its opening in May 2005 ended a four-year melodrama, with entertainment mogul David Geffen as its reluctant star, and it was just this summer that a map outlining the public areas of Carbon Beach went up on the California Coastal Commission’s website.

The battle at Carbon Beach has indeed been ugly so far. Police, movie producers, lawyers, dog-catchers, cartoonists, and drunks have all played walk-on roles in the ongoing saga. Homeowners complain about noise, garbage, and dog poo on the beach, and about sunbathers asking to use their bathrooms. Public-access advocates accuse the homeowners of posting deceptive “private property” signs and decry the high walls and even barbed wire that line the sidewalk, preventing passersby from even knowing a beach is there.

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