There’s a scene in the film “Doctor Zhivago” where the title character, played by Omar Sharif, returns to his family’s home after military service only to find it turned into a Soviet-style boarding house. “There was living space for 13 families in this one house!” berates a woman from the Residence Committee. Zhivago surveys the decrepit condition into which the once beautiful home has fallen and sarcastically retorts, “Yes, this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just.”
Lest anyone think that such ideas died with the Cold War, one need only consider the rhetoric used to justify the Draconian restrictions in the Coastal Commission’s still-disputed Malibu LCP. But the extremist agenda is broader still, encompassing a wide variety of initiatives that threaten to demolish property rights, civil liberties and the very foundation of municipal governance.
The latest volley is AB947. Sponsored by Assemblymember Jackson, chair of the Natural Resources Committee, this bill would effectively outlaw and eventually seek the elimination of coastal protection devices like seawalls, denying countless homeowners the right to protect their homes from the ravages of the sea. The purported reasoning is that such Draconian measures are needed to help protect the coast and insure normal beach erosion, even though no reliable scientific evidence has ever been reported to support such a notion.
What’s really behind AB947 is the belief that society’s most valuable and beautiful assets are ultimately too precious to be owned by anyone in particular, much less monopolized by a privileged few – basically old school Marxist “land reform” hiding behind a New Age banner of “environmentalism” with soft-sounding euphemisms like “managed retreat” substituted for “state seizure of private property.”
Both AB 947 and the fight over the Malibu LCP are but small battles in a larger conflict that involves a wide assortment of adversaries including the Coastal Commission, State Parks and the major land conservancies. To appreciate what some day might happen to Malibu we need look no further than our neighbors in what was once the thriving community of Lower Topanga where California’s last enclave of low-income coastal housing is being systematically destroyed to make way for parking lots, barbecue pits, trailheads and other “visitor-serving” facilities. It is nothing less than the eradication of an entire community, a piece of Southern California history. It is a microcosmic example of what could easily happen to Malibu if bills like AB947 are allowed to pass.
May we never find ourselves in a position to comment on the sorry state of a bureaucratized, once-beautiful ex-community and mourn, like Doctor Zhivago, “Yes, this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just.”
Wade Major