The Houses of the Very Rich

Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal featured in its “Mansion” section this article about houses in Malibu, CA. Malibu, which stretches along more than 20 miles of California’s coast, is home—or at least second home—to many Hollywood celebrities and other wealthy people. The article’s focus is on the city’s booming rental market. Beachfront condos, it notes, typically rent for about $20,000 a month during the peak summer season, while a luxury beachfront house might be closer to $35,000. Higher-end homes—those with tennis courts, pools, private gyms, screening rooms, and high-walled privacy—can rent for up to $750,000 a month. One foreign family last year paid $33,000 per night—yes, that’s per night—to stay in a Malibu compound, hiring chefs from Los Angeles to cook for them and a private helicopter to take their kids to Legoland. These people live differently than I do.

And yet—time and tide and all that. As I glanced through the photos accompanying the article, I was struck by the very first caption, which points out that at least two local beaches have eroded so much that sections of them have no sand. Others are virtually unwalkable at high tide. Generally speaking, the properties that command the highest rents are on the sandiest beaches. An especially coveted feature in a rental home is a private beach, one that’s not accessible to the public. It’s a controversial issue in many parts of the state—as it is in other states like Texas with an open beach act—as homeowners’ privacy clashes with the public’s right to have access to the beach.

The fact is that if sea levels change according to even the most conservative predictions (those predictions range from around 3 feet by the year 2100 to more than twice that much), many of these pricy areas will be in trouble—as will thousands of miles of coastline occupied by the less-wealthy, and by critical transportation and energy infrastructure, and by sensitive wildlife habitats. A couple of months ago I wrote about the issue here and linked to an article about the growing alarm in parts of Florida. It’s a subject we’ll continue to explore in Erosion Control and some of Forester’s other publications, especially Water Efficiency and Stormwater, as we consider the implications of, among other things, saltwater intrusion on drinking water supplies and changing flood control strategies.

For the moment, I’m taking a rather perverse fox-and-grapes view of the (admittedly gorgeous) houses in Malibu and telling myself I’m glad I don’t own one, or even aspire to rent one for the summer. But I know that the threat from the sea is one thing, at least, that we’ll all eventually have in common with the very rich.