Barefoot with Tape Measure
Coexistence
on Malibu’s Carbon Beach
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.
There was a time when all of Malibu was privately owned. The Rindge Family purchased 13,330-acre Rancho Malibu for $10 an acre in 1892. In subsequent decades, as railways and roads were forced through, the land was parceled out to private owners, some of whom used train boxcars as summer cottages. As time passed, prize sections of beachfront were snapped up by Hollywood celebrities and developers.
The current emotion-charged conflict started in 1972, when the people of California, outraged at being increasingly walled off from beaches, passed Proposition 20. That voter initiative created the California Coastal Commission, which was made permanent by the California Coastal Act of 1976. After 1972, any development on the coast needed a Commission permit.
Linda Locklin, the Commission’s coastal access program manager, says if a building proposal is substantial enough, the Commission can require that some land is set aside for public access, or that a passageway to the beach be opened to the public across privately owned land. The mechanism for that was the “offer to dedicate” (OTD) an access easement.
Over time, as permits for bigger and better homes were sought in Malibu, more and more land began to be offered to the public. However, at Carbon Beach, no one could get through the wall of villas, so nonresident beachcombers remained rare.
That changed in 1981. Following a colorful fight with Carbon Beach homeowners, a public passageway was opened at the western end of the beach. The travails at Billionaires’ Beach were sardonically penned by Garry Trudeau in his Doonesbury cartoon strip, with the result that the walkway was named after his layabout character Zonker Harris.
The Zonker Harris passageway sent barefoot and barely-dressed citizens traipsing across beachfront that provides second or third or fourth homes to celebrities such as Oracle boss Larry Ellison, Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, and philanthropist billionaire Eli Broad.
But Zonker Harris was well to the west end of 1.5-mile-long Carbon Beach, and most visitors plunked down close to the entrance. It was another two decades before a second walkway opened on the beach’s east end--the very passage that led to the unruly events of this July 4th.
But to backpedal just for a minute: For many years Carbon Beach homeowners had been making offers--on paper--to allow public access on their beachfront in return for building permits. But most of them continued to enjoy their privacy, not only because there was only one public accessway, but because, by law, some person or group had to “accept” the homeowner’s offer to dedicate the area to public use, and open the accessway. On Carbon Beach, nobody did that. In 1983, David Geffen wanted a permit to build his megamansion over three beach lots. To get it, he offered some beachfront (a lateral easement) and an OTD for an accessway alongside his house, leading from the road to the sea. For 18 years, nobody picked up Geffen’s offer. To do so would have required readiness to face the wrath of beachfront homeowners and their lawyers.
Then along came Access for All. Executive director and ex-Sierra Club staffer Steve Hoye says he formed the nonprofit group in 2000 to take on the job of accepting these OTDs, after he learned there were 1,300 of them on the California coast that were still not taken up, leaving large sections of beach closed to the public.
Hoye’s first target for liberation was the offer for passage alongside Geffen’s house, which could provide a second accessway to Carbon homeowner Beach. Hoye believes Geffen was stunned when he learned his OTD was more than a public relations exercise.
The legal battle that followed drew in the City of Malibu--which backed Geffen--and led to a proposed bill in the State Assembly that would have retroactively stopped nonprofit groups such as Access for All from accepting an OTD. “We sunk it,” Hoye says.
On Memorial Day in May 2005, the soberly named “Carbon Beach East” accessway opened between Geffen’s home and a neighboring property. Hoye reckons about 5,000 people now use the high-walled entrance each summer. Access for All maintains it with a grant from the Coastal Conservancy.
The first summer, Hoye says, beachgoers were confrontedby aggressive private security guards hired to ensure not a sunburned toe went over the invisible line onto a private beach.
“It’s been terrible,” he says.
A Victory for the Public?
Just two days after the dancer incident on July 4th, I went down myself to Carbon Beach to see how the public and the homeowners were getting on. If it wasn’t for the brown footprint sign reading “Coastal Access” on the Pacific Coast Highway, I would never have found the nine-foot-wide entrance, which was tucked into a seemingly impenetrable wall of hedges, rock pillars, and bricks.
I arrived at the shore and looked around. It could have been a Sunday afternoon on any California beach--except that the sunbathers, volleyball players, joggers, kids, and dogs all had plenty of room to breathe. No sand-kicking crowds. No hordes of screaming kids. Just some jolly white waves, pelicans, and scattered tan and white bodies.
As for public liberation . . . it was being demonstrated to excess. Several sunbathers were parked with their towels, unperturbed and undisturbed, on private beach lots.
“No, I didn’t know,” said Danielle Gordon, a Santa Monica sales representative, when I told her she was on private property. “I come as regularly as I can, and I always choose this spot,” she said. A family of four sitting on another private site expressed the same surprise. Both parties said they had never been hassled.
Their logistical mistake was not surprising. I had printed out the Coastal Commission map showing Carbon Beach’s patchwork of private and public beachfront. It covered four pages and was color-coded with seven different sizes of public easements. Some extended from the Mean High Tide Line (an elusive average) to the private homeowner’s“structure.” Others extended from the “Daily High Water Line [wherever that is] inland 25 feet and no closer than 10 feet” from the structure. If you come, pack a tape measure.
Other visitors carefully kept to the wet sand as they strolled, or put towels down a respectful distance from the homes behind them. The “no dog” rule was being joyously flouted.
Jennifer Simpkins, from Santa Monica, said she had stumbled on the “Coastal Access” sign for the first time that weekend and had come back with her two Italian greyhounds.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my heavens, what a blessing,’ because I’m always looking for somewhere besides a dog park to take my dogs,” she said.
The big scandal of the day was perpetrated by two people who hung a pair of wet shorts on a low wall in front of the thick glass fence protecting David Geffen’s estate home. A cropped-haired security guard in sunglasses and a black shirt swung onto the beach and asked for the shorts to be removed.
“He was nice about it,” said Tanya O’Quinn, a teacher from San Fernando Valley, who was there with her two kids.
I stopped one green-capped homeowner walking on the beach and asked to talk. He declined to give his name, but complained bitterly about the “bags of dog poo left on the beach,” the garbage, and “these Access for All people who bring 60 people down to the beach with tape measures and tell them all to have a good time.” (It is the L.A. Urban Rangers who give small groups “educational tours” about public access.)
The homeowner’s irritation won sympathy from some sun seekers. “I mean, they pay a fortune to live here, and I can’t afford it. So I’ll go to the public (beach) if it’s a problem,” said Carrie Kennebeck, a hairdresser from West Hollywood who was playing volleyball on the wet sand.
As the sun sank and the beach cleared, Jack and Mary Ann Heidt, who have lived on Carbon Beach for 60 years, came out on their porch. Jack Heidt said they “like to see the people here.” But he listed a long series of problems, including people asking to use their bathroom or shower, or even to be let through the house to the road if the access gates are closed. (Access for All opens the gates at sunrise and closes them at sunset, because Geffen would not agree to a gate that allows 24-hour exit from the beach. All other Malibu accessways have such gates.)
“We ask them to leave, but some are quite belligerent and say, ‘This is our property,’” Heidt said. “We’re very upset about this.”
Nobody is saying the system is perfect. The Hollywood stars are now hounded by the paparazzi and deprived of privacy--while the public struggles to find the beach or parking and goes without toilets.
But at the Coastal Commission, it’s felt progress is being made. Linda Locklin says about 85 percent of the 1,300 coastline plots that were on offer to the public in the 1990s have now been taken up. In the 27 miles of Malibu coastline, there are 13 walkways to the beach, four of which are on easements on private land. That’s only one every two miles, on average, but it’s a good start.
“Before, the only way to get in (to Carbon Beach) would be to surf or swim in,” says Locklin. “Now, on one weekend, several hundred people are able to go to the beach. That’s progress.”
Access for All plans to put a 16-foot map detailing the public and private areas on the wall at the Geffen accessway and is looking into other issues of contention. “If we could cooperate, I think we could solve a lot of this stuff,” Steve Hoye says, reflecting on the years of verbal and legal disputes.
Unhappily, the clash of interests on July 4th does not bode well for a lasting peace. But even the obstinate King George III let America go to the colonists eventually. Of course, that little war took eight years. The clash of the beach colonists and the kings and queens of Hollywood might take a bit longer.
Shirley Skeel is a radio and print reporter based in Bothel, Washington. She last wrote about “Living Below Sea Level,” for Coast & Ocean Vol. 23, No. 2.
To see the Carbon Beach access easments in detail, go to www.coastal.ca.gov/access/Carbon_Beach_Access.pdf
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