Crowds Thin at Broad Beach Despite Welcoming Measures

On Broad Beach in Malibu on Saturday, few people were taking advantage of a newfound freedom: to sit on dry sand.

Lined with 108 multimillion-dollar homes, the site has been at the center of a contentious battle over whether the beach in front of the homes is private or public.

Its homeowners -- who include Hollywood celebrities and power players -- have argued that much of the dry sand is private, theirs to enjoy.

The California Coastal Commission, though, recently provided beachgoers with detailed information about where they are free to sunbathe and has ordered an end to homeowners’ no-trespassing signs and security guards on all-terrain vehicles who shoo visitors off the dry sand.

But Saturday, the signs were still lined up like sentries in the sand, about halfway between the houses and the water. Two guards, employees of the Trancas Property Owners Assn., stopped their ATVs long enough to say that their orders had not changed.

And there were few beachgoers.

Sitting on the beach with his family, Calabasas resident Michael Kewley said he had heard the news about the Coastal Commission’s actions, but remarked that the beach was “less crowded than normal.”

Most beachgoers who stopped to talk remarked that Broad Beach was a place where families could frolic without fear of losing a child in crowds and young surfers could practice their moves before showing off for their friends at nearby Zuma Beach.

A gray-bearded boogie-boarder named Paul, who declined to give his last name, said he had been visiting Broad Beach since he was a child. He said he had watched as the coast, once building-free, became littered with houses. Steven Spielberg, Goldie Hawn and Dustin Hoffman are among the property owners.

“We let them live on the beach, and they own all the property?” he asked when questioned about the ongoing fight between homeowners and beachgoers. “They don’t have the right to take it away from us,” he said.

Kewley’s wife, Kelly Jones, another Broad Beach regular, was sympathetic to the homeowners. She said she lived in a planned community and understood that it can be “really obnoxious when you are swimming in your pool and some stranger comes up and asks to use your bathroom.”

She said she had been coming to Broad Beach “forever” and during the summer she makes it a regular destination. “There’s no one here, and there’s no one in the houses either.”

“The boys like it,” said Jones, 41, who had brought her 13-year-old son, Truman Kewley, and his friend, Sam Fettig, 14.

The family was parked by a “no trespassing” sign, in front of a house that bore a striking resemblance to one recently featured by In Style magazine.

“We like to pretend that one day we’ll have one of these houses,” Jones said.

The beach’s sleepy quality appealed to her, she said. And she’d noticed that the guards were “less obnoxious” this summer.

Saturday morning, they drove by and waved, she said, “as friendly as clams.”