The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The fire alarms started around noon. By 2:30 p.m., the flames had spread from Agoura Hills, a small town in the Santa Monica mountains, to the shoreline 13 miles away. “It was impossible to see through the wall of flame and smoke,” one witness on the beach later wrote, “and everyone was sure their house was gone. Like sinners in the inferno, they ran in circles, blown by the winds, while lifeguards patrolled the beach to ensure that in the hysteria, no one ran back into the flames.”
It was October 23, 1978. An angry 15-year-old boy lit a brush fire during his lunch break at Agoura High School. There was already a wildfire burning in nearby Mandeville Canyon. The Los Angeles County Fire Department was preoccupied. The chaparral was dry; the winds were fast. One moment it was a normal day on the California coast, then the fire was everywhere.
Witness Wendy Wall described the chaos: One Santa Monica resident, a stewardess, “drove wild-eyed and panic-stricken down the hill in the family’s only car, leaving her husband, her daughter, and her horses stranded in the path of the oncoming flames.” Another desperately turned on all the faucets in his home before fleeing. The owners of an exotic animal farm opened all the cages, hoping the animals would save themselves. Most of them—over 500 animals, including kangaroos—died. So did three people.
By the time the embers cooled, the Agoura-Malibu firestorm had burned through 25,000 acres, destroying 230 homes and causing over $70 million in damage. A dark, scorched wound had opened up on the California coast. People would need to rebuild.
But the California Coastal Commission wanted something first. It wanted the owners of burnt-out coastal homes to open their private beachfronts to public access, permanently, as a condition for being allowed to rebuild.
Governor Jerry Brown was not happy. Two years earlier he’d signed the Coastal Act, giving the Commission power over development in the coastal zone. Now, upset by the commissioners’ response to the fire, Brown called them “bureaucratic thugs” and pushed for emergency exemptions.
The Commission was unfazed. The staff had T-shirts made: Coastal Bureaucratic Thug and Proud Of It.
‘Uncluttered by the Doings of Men’
There is an uncomfortable truth at the center of the California Coastal Commission. An ideal coast, to the Commission, is a coast that people visit but don’t live on. Some Commission staff have come close to admitting it publicly: They’d prefer the coast returned to a state of nature, like a government-owned preserve, frozen in time. Any house on the coast is a reluctant concession: a blemish.
Peter Douglas viewed the Commission’s job as keeping the coast ‘uncluttered by the doings of men.’
Peter Douglas, who wrote the Coastal Act and served as the Coastal Commission’s executive director for 26 years, said in 1999 that the Commission’s accomplishments should be measured in “things one can not see,” including “scenic vistas not spoiled” and “subdivisions not approved.” More than anyone in history, Douglas shaped the Coastal Commission and put it on its current path. He (jokingly) referred to himself as a “radical pagan heretic,” was beloved by the Commission (one commissioner referred to him as “the world’s best bureaucratic street fighter”), and was legendary for his bolo ties and his vegetable-oil-powered Mercedes-Benz. One policy analyst called Douglas “a confirmed regulatory zealot with an open disregard for Californians’ property rights.” After Douglas died, the Coastal Commission called him “Gandalf to the developers’ Balrog.” (Gandalf is the good wizard in The Lord of the Rings; the Balrog are demonic monsters.) Douglas himself said it best: He viewed the Commission’s job as keeping the coast “uncluttered by the doings of men.”
Douglas had better cause than most to be wary of what men do to the world. He was born in Berlin in 1942 to a Jewish mother and gentile German father. After their home was destroyed, the family fled Europe by boat, heading west across the Atlantic. Peter ended up in California, where he worked on tugboats and learned to surf.
Not everything can be reduced to a person’s childhood trauma. But try to see the world from Douglas’s eyes: He escaped man-made chaos for the peace and promise of a long ocean journey. “The Atlantic crossing had awakened in young Peter an intangible, unbreakable, life-long bond with the ocean, whales, and giant mantas—all of which he saw for the first time,” Thomas Osborne writes in Saving the Golden Shore.
It’s little wonder that this man would dedicate his life to protecting the sea from human beings. “The war, to be clear, has never been with the ocean,” Douglas said at one point. “The battle continues to be against our own worst impulses.”
The problem is that when you prefer the coast empty, you view all human activity as a kind of pollution. And anything that forces homeowners to retreat from the coast—wildfires, rising tides—might seem, to you, for the best.
The Rising Sea
“A problem exists because our human-built world keeps getting in the way of the rising sea,” environmental reporter Rosanna Xia writes in California Against the Sea.
Seven thousand years ago, an ancient Israeli village built the oldest-known seawall as a guard against the sea, which rose in the aftermath of the Ice Age. Since then, seawalls—bulwarks of stone or reinforced concrete—have been a feature of coastal living. Much of the city of San Francisco exists only because of a three-mile-long seawall, the Embarcadero.
But the California Coastal Commission says that “seawalls are harmful to beaches.” (As Xia puts it: “For every new seawall protecting a home or a road, a beach for the people is sacrificed.”) The Coastal Act explicitly requires the Commission to issue seawall permits to protect “existing structures.” But the Commission argues “existing” means only structures that existed when the Coastal Act was passed.
Instead of seawalls, the Commission suggests “managed retreat” from the coast: People should leave and turn their homes back into rubble, ceding the shoreline to nature.
Very often now, the Coastal Commission feels that they have a right to deny someone the opportunity to defend their homes.
Dennis Seider
The Commission punishes homeowners who build seawalls to protect their homes. Jeffrey and Tracy Katz, a Laguna Beach couple, were fined $1 million in 2018 for building a seawall without the Commission’s permission—even though their home’s previous owners received authorization for an emergency seawall years before. The commissioners argued the Katzes should have moved their home back from the beach instead of building a seawall. “In the words of Ronald Reagan, Bring down this wall,” one commissioner said.
In her book, Xia interviews the woman who called the Coastal Commission to complain about the Katzes’ seawall, leading to the $1 million fine. The woman was “horrified” by the seawall when she walked on the beach; she told Xia it was “devoid of soul.” She sent pictures to the Coastal Commission and told them, You’ve got to stop this. They did: Along with the fine came a mandate to destroy the wall within 60 days.
But for homeowners, seawalls are an ancient and necessary defense. Dennis Seider, a Pacific Legal Foundation client in a non-seawall-related case against the Commission, says his Malibu home would have been washed away in a “horrific” 1983 storm were it not for the old seawall and rock under his house. The beach in front of his house still exists, Dennis points out. “So it certainly isn’t universally true that protecting your house erodes the beach.”
The Commission sees coastal homeowners as trying to stay where they’re not meant to be. Homeowners are reinforcing “unstable places not meant for development,” Xia writes, “Returning after wildfire. Rebuilding in flood zones. The urge to outmatch nature is age-old.”
But to property owners, the coast—with all its unpredictability—is home. “Part of the joy of living here is the dynamic confrontation of forces,” Dennis says, “Static land versus dynamic sea, and the intersection of those forces. And very often now, the Coastal Commission feels that they have a right to deny someone the opportunity to defend their homes.”
A group of condo owners, supported by PLF, recently asked the California Supreme Court to allow them to build a seawall.
But the California Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
The 2025 Fires
The Los Angeles fires at the beginning of this year were far worse than the 1978 fire. This time, more than 16,000 homes, schools, churches, and businesses burned. Photos afterward looked like stills from a post-apocalyptic movie: cars melted in driveways, piles of ash where homes used to be, charred building frames leaning toward the ground.
Governor Gavin Newsom, like Governor Brown in 1978, wanted to reassure people: The government would let them rebuild. He immediately issued an executive order suspending the Coastal Act’s permitting requirements. His message seemed clear: This is not the time to push the California Coastal Commission’s agenda.
The Commission didn’t listen: It published guidance for people trying to rebuild after the fires. Newsom’s exemption applied only to people rebuilding structures that conformed with current building requirements, the Commission said. Other people—owners of older structures considered “nonconforming” because of how codes changed in small ways—would need a coastal development permit, which would delay and complicate rebuilding.
It was exactly what Newsom wanted to avoid. He shot back with a second executive order: All the Coastal Act’s requirements were suspended for people trying to rebuild after the fire, he clarified. He then dismissed the Coastal Commission’s guidance as “legally erroneous.” A Los Angeles attorney complained to the Daily Journal that the Commission was acting “like they’re a state unto themselves.”
Homeowners are now attempting to rebuild. PLF has publicly promised to help property owners defend in court their right to rebuild, if necessary.
Between the too-common wildfires and the rising sea, coastal homeowners are looking at a future where they’ll need the freedom to adapt their properties. Survival on the coast depends on it. And yet property owners are forced to battle each time with the California Coastal Commission—considered “the single most powerful land use authority in the United States”—who would rather homes disappear from the coast altogether.
