
Vinod Khosla Wins Ruling Threatening Public Beach Access - chollida1
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-26/billionaire-khosla-wins-ruling-threatening-public-beach-access
======
choppaface
Vinod wants you to think this debate is over property rights, but it's really
just a game of expensive cat and mouse between him and the government for his
own amusement. The road in question services over a dozen homes, and he has no
building or presence on his property, so logistically there's no warrant for
the gate. The gate was re-opened (for at least daytime hours) a few years ago.
The beach had previously been accessible to the public for nearly 100 years.

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...](https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-mateo-
open)

[https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-
beach](https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach)

~~~
burtonator
It's also a horrible business practice for his VC fund. As an entrepreneur
there's no way I would want to work with Khosla ventures. He just comes across
as an asshole and a bully in this fight.

Beaches and rivers belong to all of us.

~~~
bhb916
"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?

~~~
groby_b
What makes you think this shouldn't extend to all geographic features? Why do
we have property rights to land?

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.

~~~
riantogo
I'm curious to know what alternate, practical solutions there might be. The
current system mostly work. Are you proposing no one can own land and hence no
one can build exclusive homes/establishments? Anyone is free to build anywhere
and pray no one else wants to move in at will? How will such a system work?

~~~
madhadron
The place to start looking is Journal of the Commons. Communal ownership with
limited privileges of individual use have been a regular feature of mankind's
societies for a long, long time.

------
gorgoiler
It’s a shame to read about these legal arguments that hang on technicalities
(whether previous access was tied to private parking or not) as opposed to
what surely must be the actual issue: the public’s right of access to the
scarce national resource of beaches.

~~~
ISL
Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the
formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the
law determined.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Technicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at
> the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and
> the law determined.

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.

~~~
jdsully
The legal philosophy is actually the opposite. Common Law is heavily based
upon precedent and what the norms of the community are to “fill in the gaps”.
The vast majority of what goes into a decision is this historical case law.
The actual legal text is more of a framework than exhaustive guide.

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.

~~~
basch
In theory, civil law can still be technical or principled. It's a set of
instructions used to make a decision. The interpreter then decides, maybe
based on law maybe based on precedent, or a mix.

~~~
beerandt
>>The US approach leads to more precise and consistent

Technical and principled? Yes

Precise? If that particular scenario has been anticipated and coded for, yes.

Consistent? No

~~~
jdsully
If a case has been litigated in the past then you should get the same result
if the facts are the same. It's the party with the case law on their side's
responsibility to demonstrate past rulings that support them. If you spend
time watching legal shows you'll see them use the word "precedent" a lot for
this reason.

Of course the facts being the same is the big "if". Jury verdicts are also not
strictly bound to precedent the way judges are.

~~~
beerandt
What you're talking about is a feature of common-law.

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...

------
JMTQp8lwXL
> the three-judge panel upheld a trial judge’s ruling in Khosla’s favor,
> finding there was substantial evidence that the previous owners didn’t
> intend to dedicate the road for public use because they charged fees.

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.

~~~
cjensen
The law is not implemented like that. Basically if there is a property which
does not provide through-access to the beach, the law does not require them to
provide it. If any change is made to the property, including improvements,
then as part of the permitting process a requirement will be made to provide
the access.

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.

~~~
baggy_trough
He is literally entitled, because he owns the land.

~~~
happytoexplain
The concept that property is so religiously sacred that simply owning of a
thing entitles one to cause external harm using that thing, even passively, is
sickening.

~~~
wil421
The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America
in the beginning. Instead of paying a Lord 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.

In this situation is sucks for regular people but in a lot more situations it
benefits everyone else.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> The concept of property being sacred is what drew a lot of people to America
> in the beginning.

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](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.

~~~
wil421
I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws
like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t
visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and
then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home
owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second
home trashed.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> I don’t believe in squatters rights and I’m glad my state doesn’t have laws
> like the West Coast. There was a Reddit post recently where someone didn’t
> visit their property for 2-3 weeks. Someone moved in, broke everything, and
> then preemptively called the police to get squatters rights. Now the home
> owner has to go through a complicated eviction process and have his second
> home trashed.

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...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-state-rules-adverse-
possession.html)

------
harryh
This case is misunderstood in a lot of ways. A couple of things worth noting:

\- 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.

~~~
Analemma_
> 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.

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.

~~~
harryh
I covered access in my third bullet point. You are responding to something I
said in my second bullet point. The conflating of these two distinct points is
one of the core areas of misunderstanding surrounding the case.

------
cjonas
The amount of public land that is locked in by estates (basically making them
private to the estate holders) is astonishing.

~~~
majos
I'd never thought about this before. How do property rights apply to enclaves?
If I own all the land encircling another piece of land, what prevents me from
barring access to the encircled piece of land? Are there laws forbidding this?

~~~
saluki
Typically the interior property will have a cross access easement, a legal
document that gives them access across the encircling piece of land. This is
also pretty common in commercial developments where you have to cross a parcel
to get to an outlot in a development.

~~~
dghughes
My grandparents' house had a small lane beside it which was a right-of-way or
easement (not sure the terminology used here). It was for horse drawn coal
wagons so they could reach the building behind my grandparents house. The rear
house was facing a main street but there wasn't any driveway or way for the
coal wagon to reach the rear of the house.

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.

------
zaroth
Personally I think Khosla is doing everyone a favor here. All the free
publicity over CA’s right to public beachfront, and it’s great motivation for
the legislature to strengthen the laws around guaranteeing that access.

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.

~~~
harryh
_if I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an
opportunity_

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.

------
irrational
I don't know the area, but could someone setup a little business nearby
ferrying people to and from the beach on a boat? How much did the previous
owners charge for access? Would the same amount of money per trip make a
ferrying business viable?

------
sharemywin
Somebody should create a charter service to the beach.

~~~
jackhack
"Thank you for choosing Streisand Effect Charter Service, providing daily
access to the hotspots of entitled Billionaires who abuse the legal system
since 2019..."

------
cj
It's a shame that so much energy is put into blocking public access to
beaches.

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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511)

------
arcticbull
The case against this here is fascinating. It’s basically a bunch of people
who will likely never be able to afford their own beaches cheering on a
billionaire as he takes the beach they currently have access to away from them
because “freedom.” Yeah Mr Khosla, you take my beach! Wooo! You’re right, I
_shouldnt_ be allowed on there, I am the rif-raf after all.

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.

~~~
aetherson
It seems on-the-face-of-it unlikely that any significant population imagines
that they will one day be able to own a private beach, even if they are
unjustifiably optimistic about their future wealth. I've been around a lot of
people who have hopes about their level of future wealth, and that's not a
level anyone thought they would achieve.

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

~~~
arcticbull
You are of course right that I was being neither tactful nor political and
wasn’t really expecting to sway anyone already committed to the idea. However
I’ll ask openly and genuinely: what does anyone stand to gain by allowing a
wealthy individual to cudgel away their right to access a large swath of
beachfront as enshrined in the California state constitution? To what benefit
to ones self can you possibly point?

~~~
nyxxie
I couldn't care less about this rich person's beach nor the people who want to
surf on it, but I do care about the property rights issue at play here and how
it intermingles with popular perception and treatment of "rich people" (a
relative term that, for most people reading this, almost certainly is applied
pejoratively to them by those who have less than they do). I don't like the
idea that someone feeling entitled to something I own factors into the
question of control over that thing -- I worked and paid for it, I should get
to do what I want with it. It seems to me that this simple principle is thrown
out when the owner is deemed "rich", which is frightening to me.

> 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 :)

~~~
geebee
I agree with you generally about property rights and "rich"people, though I'm
not sure, based on this thread, if you know what is actually happening in this
particular case. In California, you can't use private property to prevent
people from reaching the ocean past the median tide line, which is public land
by the state constitution.

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.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam)

------
nathanaldensr
So because I have to pay to get into a public park or reserve, it's suddenly
not "really" public?

~~~
jermaustin1
A "public park" is simply owned by a public entity, it does not mean you get
unlimited unrestricted access to it. If the city/county/state/fed decided to
wall it off and not allow anyone in it, it would be their prerogative.

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.

~~~
daenz
>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?

~~~
learc83
Yes there is. Just look at the average property values of beach front
property, riverfront property etc... There are other "special" types of land
as well with additional value that governments have decided to regulate
differently.

~~~
daenz
I acknowledge that it is valued differently, I'm asking why we collectively do
it.

~~~
jeffdavis
Access to navigable waterways has always been immensely valuable to humans.
It's much easier to trade, travel, and transport.

~~~
big_chungus
Have you heard of anyone who has been unable to trade, travel, or transport
because he could not use Vinod Khosla's beach as a loading dock, port, and
harbor? Waterways have ports which are often publicly-owned or operated for
commercial use.

------
didibus
I see law the same way I see a computer program, and court as a computer.

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...

------
vaseem
Irony is not lost, just like this pay-walled article

------
rcMgD2BwE72F
In France, _la Loi littoral_ guarantees public access to the shoreline,
everywhere. Or at least it should since it's often compromised by private
interests. But it's still quite good for anyone who likes the sea, ocean and
coasts. I'd love France to also have a "right to roam" law like Norway.

Are there such laws in your country? How well is it enforced?

~~~
wil421
In most states no. It’s a feature not a bug. Property rights are considered
sacred. Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on
their property. It’s bad in this situation but good for owners in plenty of
others.

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.

~~~
arcticbull
> Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their
> property.

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...

~~~
wil421
Could I buy property zoned for industrial use and build an industrial or
chemical facility? Yes.

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.

~~~
arcticbull
You're actually kind of making my point here. You're accepting the governments
intrusion (defining what can and can't be done on "your" tract of land via
zoning and law). And that's my point. Once you accept that it's a question of
where you draw the line -- you're debating shades of grey and not moral black
and white.

------
parliament32
Unpopular opinion but I'm kinda on his side on this one. It's a liability
issue.

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.

~~~
thesausageking
> Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault
> in the US.

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.

------
NetBeck
This sounds like a job for The Boring Company.

------
mdszy
Time to find out the exact borders of what is considered "his" beach and crowd
the ever living shit out of it, just outside of what could be considered
"his". "I'm not touching you!"

~~~
kens
Under the California Coastal Act, everything below the mean high tide line is
public. But that's not the issue here; the issue is getting access to this
beach.

~~~
LinuxBender
So you could bring in house boats and floating docks. This is common in some
regions. I am not sure if the coast guard would have any say in it though.

How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?

~~~
adammunich
The waves at this beach are huge and surfable...

~~~
LinuxBender
Oh in that case, just drop a note on some of the surf forums and tell them
they are not allowed to surf there.

------
ec109685
It would be ironic if a mega billionaire bought the land surrounding his land
and worked with the county to route the road around that surrounding property.

~~~
sjg007
That would include highway 1 so it is not actually feasible.

------
14
Could one not walk up to this beach by foot following the road built? I ask
this because the article said the previous owner charged for parking not
access. If so I don't agree with the judges assessment because that would mean
anyone from the public could just walk to this beach and use it as they are
arguing it has always been open to the public which seems true to me from what
I've read.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/EF77s](http://archive.is/EF77s)

------
sytelus
If this irritates you then you should also read about how Larry Ellison owns
80% of a Hawaiin island. I can envision the world's prettiest places
eventually closed to the public and existing for the sole enjoyment of
billionaires and their future generations.

------
pulse7
In my country, no one can buy land up to 4 meters (13 feet) away the sea,
rivers and lakes because it is a public domain. Because of this, tourists from
other countries like to come here and enjoy every beach...

------
chasing
It's amazing how much he's willing to ruin his reputation over this.

~~~
slowenough
You misspelled admirable.

------
joyeuse6701
Maybe someone ought to make a nice business out of this. Ferry interested
parties to this exclusive public beach as part of an interesting tour about
history and minutiae of treaty and law.

------
nikolay
Well, he actually will lose much more money now, because we all know for sure
what exact order of magnitude of an asshole he is.

------
mceoin
I like surfing at this beach. It is a shame an amicable solution could not be
found. This is a big loss for the public.

------
cryptica
If this beach gets any more famous, someone will build a ferry to brings
tourists to it via the sea.

------
paggle
Can’t the state eminent domain an access road and compensate Khalsa for the
taking?

------
dawnerd
Guess that leaves one option, park a bunch of ugly boats right in his view.

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minimuffins
There's a good Lucy Parsons quote about this type of guy.

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justinzollars
Few people are this small. The dude is pretty old (64 years). He'll probably
only be able to live on his own for 10-15 more years. The beach will be open
again when someone else buys the property.

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tzs
1\. My understanding is that the issue is getting to the beach, not being on
the beach itself. Everything below the mean high tide line is public, but all
routes to the public area pass over private land and in Khosla's case he's
having success arguing that there is no easement.

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.

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dr_dshiv
Is there a ferry service?

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azinman2
Can someone who isn’t paywalled summarize?

~~~
gpm
If you use ublock origin, blocking javascript breaks bloomberg's paywall. You
can do that for bloomberg.com (and nothing else) by opening the site, clicking
the ublock icon, and clicking the bottom at the far bottom right.

~~~
jddj
Alternatively, using just Firefox: stop (X) the page loading after the content
has loaded but before the giant JavaScript bundle has downloaded, and then
enter reader mode.

~~~
Analemma_
Opening it in a different container (with a right-click) also works.

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downerending
To paraphrase the quip: There's a difference between rich liberals and the
rest of us--they have more money.

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slowenough
Is it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach.

~~~
chasing
Is it so preposterous? Let the public have access to their beach.

~~~
slowenough
Is it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach.

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?

~~~
Gabriel_Martin
They can pay for his boots to be licked, no need to provide the service for
free.

~~~
orthecreedence
I think the person you're replying to is being facetious.

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gruturo
The Bloomberg article about this is itself paywalled.

Sad, but poetically fitting.

~~~
khazhoux
Bloomberg is creating content. Their article is presumably of value to people.
Hence, they're charging for it.

~~~
throw_m239339
Bloomberg also wants to have it both ways, they want their content to be
referenced on Google, and a select number of people to share the articles they
read for free, while disallowing others to do the exact same thing.
Fortunately no nobody can prevents people from screenshooting and sharing the
screenshot for free instead of the article directly.

Bloomberg can't have it both way.

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nothal
I think that the level of discourse in threads on paywalled articles is
frequently disappointingly low. I think there should be a rule against
articles on paywall.

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ralph84
Nowhere else in the world other than California could Khosla have amassed the
wealth he has in the way that he did. You'd think at some point he'd want to
"give back", but I guess sociopaths gonna sociopath.

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algaeontoast
CA really deserves a slow clap for this one... Can't wait to see them try to
regulate their way out of this bit.

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thrownaway954
dude... that dude is 64?!?!?! he looks like he's 84. dude must of had a tough
life.

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.

~~~
hendzen
There are no private beaches in CA by law. He owns the only road leading to
it, which the previous owner allowed people to drive through for a small fee
for many years.

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frankbreetz
Is this not a text book case for imminent domain? Can't the government just
"buy" the land from Khosla?

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option
FYI: khosla funded companies [https://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all-
companies](https://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all-companies)

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drak0n1c
I know many of you are dismayed, but there is a silver lining of ecological
benefits. Studies show that relatively inaccessible beaches and wilderness
(whether public or private) have healthier ecosystems and less litter.

For example, even mere regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the food
chain:

[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0161905)

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cde-v
The rich are just begging to be eaten up these days.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

