Accessing the least-crowded section of New York’s Lido Beach requires either money or insider knowledge. Anyone staying at one of the hotels on the beach can walk through the lobby, and those living in the adjoining town can waltz in through a separate gate using a residents-only electronic access code. Everyone else, though, has to come in through a public entrance half a mile away and walk over the sand.
In theory, some portion of every beach in the coastal United States is reserved for collective use—even those that border private property. But exactly how big that portion is varies widely, and in practice, much of the shore is impenetrable. Simply figuring out which patches of sand you’re allowed to lie on requires navigating antiquated laws and modern restrictions that vary by state—not to mention vigilante efforts from landowners intended to keep people out. Lido Beach is a classic (and absurd) example: Like the rest of the New York coast, it’s technically open to everyone up to the high-tide line, but actually reaching that public strip is difficult without trespassing on private land. A trip to the ocean has never been more confusing.
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Visiting a completely public spot, such as Myrtle Beach in South Carolina or Santa Monica Beach in L.A., might seem like the most drama-free way to get time in the waves. But “in some states, you don’t really have that option,” Shannon Lyons, the East Coast regional director for the Surfrider Foundation, a group that tracks beach-access laws, told me. The nearest totally public beach might be a long drive away or far from public transit. Plus, there just aren’t enough of them. Although plenty of cities and states own entire beaches outright, much of the property bordering the shoreline rests in private hands. In New York and Florida, only about 40 percent of land by the coast is owned by the government. These numbers decrease as you travel north: In Maine, somewhere from 6.5 to 12 percent of the seaboard is fully open to anyone, depending on the source; in Massachusetts, it’s less than 12 percent. Of course, the remainder of the shoreline in those states isn’t entirely private; it’s most likely just adjacent to private property. But as oceanfront land has become some of the most desirable and expensive in the country, actually getting onto the public sections of those partially private beaches has become harder and harder.
Beaches did not always hold the allure they do today. Two centuries ago, they could be used as sites of trade, not leisure, and were clogged by vendors, shoppers, and fishermen. Real-estate agents also saw little value in them: Until 1898, in Connecticut, they were often included for free with the purchase of any nearby property, Kara Murphy Schlichting, the author of New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis From the Shore, told me. But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a peculiar combination of factors made the beach into a cultural obsession. Doctors began prescribing trips to the sea as cures for “melancholy,” and beaches came to be seen as places of relaxation. Soon after, a new industrial work schedule gave middle-class workers weekends off and the possibility of vacations. Some used that time to go to the ocean, eventually leading to the rise of urban beaches, such as those in Coney Island and Santa Monica. The real-estate bundles went away, and oceanfront property became a moneymaker. In Connecticut, by 1910, land along the water that a decade earlier had sold for $400 to $1,000 an acre was on the market for $3,000 to $10,000 an acre.
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Seaside homes quickly morphed from something relatively accessible to people across class backgrounds into a luxury for the wealthy. These rich newcomers pushed out working-class and Black communities who had long lived on the coast, Schlichting told me. They also began to accuse beachgoers of trespassing. Invoking a legal threat like that, Schlichting said, was “very useful to landowners,” who might hope that the prospect of a fine or a night in jail would scare off sunbathers.
In many cases, however, visitors weren’t actually trespassing—a reality that holds true to this day. According to the public-trust doctrine, a principle dating back to ancient Rome that has also been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, some section of the entire shoreline must be open to anyone. But states interpret how much of the beach that applies to very differently. In Oregon, all of the dry sand is public, up until the vegetation starts. In Rhode Island, too, people can legally stroll much of the beach, provided they don’t stray more than 10 feet above the high-tide line—although how many people will be able to measure that out at a glance? In Maine and Massachusetts, by contrast, only the space that is essentially always underwater is open for public recreation.
State laws become more complicated from there, and visitors are frequently left to piece together this complex legal picture on their own. Where they’re allowed to be might also depend on what they’re doing. In Massachusetts, for example, hunting and fishing are fair game in the intertidal zone, meaning the wet sand between high and low tide, but sunbathing and most other types of recreation are not; swimming is permitted, provided, per a 1907 court ruling, that your feet don’t touch the ground—a tough law to follow, given how shallow the water tends to be in that zone. So if you’re reading a book near an oceanfront house in Cape Cod, you could be accused of trespassing. But if you have a fishing pole or gun in your hand instead of a novel, your right to sit there is legally protected. “It’s kind of kooky,” Josh Eagle, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies beach access, told me.
Even if you master your state’s particular laws, other obstacles may make actually getting to the ocean difficult. Some places make you buy a pass, which can be pricier for out-of-towners: Westport, Connecticut, charges nonresidents 15 times more than residents for season passes. And recently, a Texas legislator proposed a bill that would let people living by the sea block visitors from using footpaths on their land. This could lead to a similar situation to the one playing out at Lido Beach, in which part of the shore is public in name but challenging to reach.
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Other roadblocks skew more rogue: In Malibu, California, homeowners have repeatedly put up illegitimate Private Property signs in the sand or placed traffic cones and unauthorized No Parking signs in nearby lots, trying to scare away outsiders. Elsewhere in the U.S., homeowners have constructed questionably legal barriers that separate their property from the rest of the beach—but also mean that anyone attempting to get to the water would have to climb over a fence.
Some people are trying to democratize beach access. A writer and an activist named Jenny Price co-created an app, Our Malibu Beaches, that spells out exactly where visitors are allowed to go—and which bogus signs, put up by residents, to ignore. In Malibu’s Broad Beach, for instance, the app reminds users that they can park in spaces blocked by traffic cones, which “have no possible legitimate or official purpose.” Meanwhile, in Connecticut, residents built fences and made getting to the beach so difficult that, starting in 1999, the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection began erecting signs that outline the public’s legal rights to Connecticut’s shoreline. Dave Kozak, who worked as a coastal planner on the project, told me that local politicians complained to him that the signs were causing overcrowding. Some homeowners would simply take the signs down. But the state kept putting them back up.
Indeed, keeping the beach a common resource has become a practically Sisyphean struggle. Over the past century, just as more people in more regions have come to recognize the value of these prized natural spaces, they have been, sometimes literally, walled off. The public-trust doctrine is remarkable for guaranteeing a public right to the beach, regardless of private-property claims. But it means little in practice if beachgoers have to continue to wade past fake signs…
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