A little background. The median price of a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, long thought of as unattainably high for almost everyone, is $554,560.  Comparing that to $320,720 for Los Angeles County and $363,930 for the State as a whole, the San Francisco area seems to be a place for the very rich only.  However, those living the high life in the Bay Area are relative paupers compared to the residents of Santa Barbara County, where the median priced home is $825,000 and is projected to exceed a million dollars within 24 months.

The result of this twenty-first century land rush is that the very fabric of the community is drastically changing.  The people who form the core of the public service sector (police, fire and teachers) cannot afford to live there; more than half of them commute a long distance to work and cannot be readily available in a civil emergencies.  Older people are moving in and younger ones are moving out, resulting in a steady decline in school enrollment, dwindling participation in PTAs and Little Leagues and even difficulty finding coaches and parent aide in the schools.  One community leader has describes this as a "cultural drain," meaning the loss of the best and brightest young people from the population base.

So, what's the big deal?  If one believes the Pacific Coast is the common property of all of the people of California and should be available to be enjoyed by everyone, it means that beaches and coastline of our state is fast becoming the private province of the wealthy with the rest of us relegated inland in economic exile.  It used to be that the state Coastal Commission had the power to require affordable housing within the coastal zone, but that power was stripped away from it in the early 1980s, leaving the door open for the present hyper-gentrification of the coastline.  There are individual small cities like Malibu and Manhattan Beach where the home prices are higher, but there is no county which even comes close to Santa Barbara County in land values.

This phenomenon does not bother everyone.  In a statement which echoes the pre-revolutionary pronouncement of Marie Antoinette, "Let them eat cake," a Santa Barbara resident named J. J. Hollister III says, "I don't see a problem so far.  The people who make things go here want to keep the Santa Barbara style of life, and that has to do with lovely homes and open space.  That may be hurtful for the people who have to drive two hours to clean the homes in Montecito, but that doesn't really trouble the people who live there."  Those words must provide great comfort to Mr. Hollis' housekeepers.

At the heart of this issue is the bedrock fundamental issue of to whom does the Pacific Coast belong?  If we permit the ownership of private coastal and near-coastal property, to what extent, if any, should the government seek to control the nature of that ownership of that land or the nature of the structures which rest upon it?  If we do not wish the coastline to turn into a long string of unimaginably expensive mansions and estates, There will have to be some degree of government intervention, which will inevitably raise shrill cries of social engineering and confiscation from those sitting on the verandas of the mansions and estates.  However, the notion of the taking of private property for the public good is as old as our nation itself and is embodied in the system of laws known as condemnation proceedings.  Or perhaps the best solution is to make the entire coastline state property, thus assuring that everyone from the wealthy to the impoverished, will be able to walk the beaches and shores of our state.

Whatever the solution may be, it is clearly an issue which needs to be addressed quickly and aggressively.  Failure to do so will result in the consumption of access to our greatest state treasure, the coastline, by a few privileged patricians, a situation, in the words of the aforesaid Mr. Hollister, "really doesn't trouble the people who live [t]here."