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Comment by metei | Hacker News Reader

Public access laws like what California and Washington State have require the property owner to allow access to the beach. This means a property owner has to provide a reasonable right of way to access shoreline on their property. Anything less is illegal, up here in Seattle people get hauled to court (or worse if they refuse to allow access repeatedly).

Stealing a beach from the public domain is illegal, and Cali seems to have serious enforcement problems. No property owner has a right to steal public beaches

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But then, the state should not have allowed the sale, right? What is the meaning of ownership if the land is not really yours?

> What is the meaning of ownership if the land is not really yours?

You can't own the beach. And you can't de facto own the beach by buying all the land around it and then restricting access. These were both well-understood when Khosla bought the land. He knew exactly how California interpreted land rights in this particular case.

Land purchases regularly come with both private (contractual) and public (statutory) limitations/restrictions on use.

Landowners are not kings, and private properties are not sovereign borders.

> But then, the state should not have allowed the sale, right?

I guess that's one way the state could react to these sorts of lawsuits. That would be unfortunate, because it'd probably end up meaning that one asshole prevented a whole bunch of reasonable people from buying beachfront views with their hard-earned money.

> meaning that one asshole prevented a whole bunch of reasonable people from buying beachfront views with their hard-earned money.

I don't understand this point. You don't have to purchase the road leading to the beach to own beachfront property.

But in practice many developments do have the effect of blocking off access to a piece of beachfront. The state doesn't interfere with those developments, working off of the assumption that the owners are reasonable folks and will follow public access laws.

If the only way to get people to behave reasonably is to not issue building permits, then everyone loses. What you're suggesting is that California should choose the defect/defect quadrant of a game. But there's a more optimal solution -- just tell people like Khosla they're not allowed to defect on this question.

In other words, why should I be prohibited from owning certain types of land or having the chance to purchase into certain types of developments just because Khosla's being an ass about restrictions he knew about when he bought the property? What you're proposing is the "if I can't have it then burn it all down" solution. Which I guess is a way to vindicate Khosla in a sort of pyrrhic way, but everyone else loses.

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