Malibu’s Beach Uproar and the Art of the Deal

It is possible, driving down the coastline that has made Southern California so famous, to forget entirely that, from end to end, it’s a public coastline. There are stretches of beach frontage where you can roll for miles with no more than an occasional glimpse of the blue Pacific--just fences, walls and “private property” signs.

But the property rights only go so far--a fact that, while often ignored by the rich and suntanned, actually is encoded in state law. Generally speaking, if you enter via a public access and stay on the wet sand, you can follow it to Mexico and not be trespassing. Everything beyond the “mean high tide line”--which, in most spots on most days, roughly translates as whatever was under water last night--belongs, with rare exceptions, to everyone.

This is useful in considering last week’s beachfront uproar in Malibu. In a vote destined to become a full-employment act for real estate lawyers, the California Coastal Commission gave a thumbs up to a fresh obstacle between you and me and our public coastline--three new mega-mansions on the sand.

Eli Broad (the home builder and investment deal-maker), Haim Saban (the TV deal-maker) and Nancy Daly Riordan (wife of L.A.’s deal-making Mayor Richard Riordan) got permission to scrape three lots along Pacific Coast Highway and erect lot-line-to-lot-line beach estates. The homes will block former “view corridors” that used to offer mini-glimpses of that wet strip of coastline that, remember, is our real estate.

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To compensate, the deal-makers bought and donated what was billed as a whole new beach, with not only a peek of coastline for the public, but access for sunning and swimming too. The catch was that this philanthropy was in somebody else’s neighborhood.

Hence, uproar. But misleading uproar, in that the arguments involved didn’t ring entirely true. The donated lot, for example, was cast as a gift and the neighbors’ outrage as the sour grapes of rich NIMBYs. But it turns out that the lot--which belonged to Pepperdine University before Broad and friends got it--has actually been more or less public for many years.

“They call it The Cove,” a friend who grew up there told me. “As in ‘Dude! The Cove is cookin’! Let’s go check it out!” It’s a hangout, though surely not destined to be a rabble magnet. A good-sized beach blanket would cover the nonrocky dry sand, and at high tide, it’s almost completely submerged.

If asked, the neighbors will concede that, OK, they’ve put up with visitors there forever. But what about the health hazard? they ask. The Cove is barred off with a rusty, locked, chain-link fence and has no official parking adjacent. Its neighbors say that nonlocals will end up parking along one of the worst blind curves of PCH.

But The Cove, as it turns out, is easy to get to--and without setting foot on the deadly highway. You just park behind a nearby county fire station, walk down to a gully that runs next to the building, and within steps, you’ll come to a concrete tunnel that serves as a storm drain. It’s maybe a minute-long walk to the wet sand next to the big, view-blocking house of the famous record producer Lou Adler. Firemen say the locals use the passage constantly.

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The fact that this “new” beach was neither new as a gift nor as an intrusion didn’t come up at the commission hearing, but it has fueled much speculation in the aftermath of the vote. If the fight--and it runs deep--isn’t based in some sudden risk of wrecks and rabble, what’s the deal here? Inquiring minds want to know.

Some say status envy: The deal-makers’ lots are on swanky Carbon Beach, where some major moguls have second homes. The donated land is one beach down, at the far edge of a beach called La Costa, which--though Ryan O’Neal has lived there, and Aaron Spelling is said to drop by sometimes--is slightly narrower and thus lesser. Ergo, simmering resentment between the haves and have-mores.

But a personal theory is that it’s the deal that’s bugged people. By this I do not mean the complaint of another developer who claims he had dibs on The Cove until Pepperdine sold it out from under him. No, it was the way in which the whole swap was conducted, the chutzpah, the breathtaking ease of it. It was the blocking of this priceless beach and the horse trading of that priceless beach and the certain understanding that the public would, of course, leap at even the semblance of having been cut in. It was the reminder of that other fact that’s so famed yet oft forgotten: that Southern California is, above all, a land built on deals, from end to shining end.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.