Beyond free access: UC Santa Cruz study exposes the hidden barriers to California’s beaches

While California law guarantees universal access to its coastal areas, factors such as gender, socioeconomic status, racial identity and geography all collide to influence beach access based on historical discrimination and dispossession, according to a study by UC Santa Cruz researchers. 

“The physical right to enter and the ability to derive benefits from an area are not the same,” said lead author Timothy Frawley, a project scientist in the Fisheries Collaborative Program at UCSC. “You physically can be permitted to go, but whether that means you can go and whether you’re able to utilize it and maximize your benefits — those are two different things.”

Frawley and the researchers set out to understand why the majority of people who are out enjoying what California’s beaches have to offer are white and upper class, which he said “is not representative of the rest of the state at all.”

They say access is more than having the physical right to go somewhere. So they set out surveying people from San Francisco south to Ventura and Oxnard, in affluent and non-affluent areas, and community hubs like farmers markets and laundromats. The researchers asked about how often they visited the ocean, their household income and what benefits they received from visiting coastal areas. 

Published in the journal Nature Communications on July 13, the study examined survey responses from 1,691 people across central California – including 229 from Santa Cruz County and 152 from Monterey County. 

“The analogy we use is the ‘coastal curtain of California,’ where there’s this strip of geography that bands the coast most of the way down,” Frawley said. “Where it’s just wealthy, affluent people, and we just wanted to understand why this is, because California also has like the strongest access laws in the country.” 

For example, the survey results showed that people in white households and those with higher incomes were more likely to participate in adventure water sports like surfing, snorkeling and scuba diving, while households with lower incomes were more likely to participate in family or group gatherings with beach games or contemplative activities like meditation or viewing sunsets. The surveys also showed that respondents identifying as Black or Asian were more associated with reporting more barriers to accessing the coast. 

The study authors wrote that “what may appear as disinterest among [these] communities often functions as a protective disengagement from hostile spaces where they have experienced discrimination or marginalization.” They cite the removal of tribal communities in the 19th century, the state-sponsored policy of excluding people of color from coastal areas in the 20th century, such as the removal of Asian American fishing villages and the forced displacement of Black coastal communities. 

Based on their findings, they recommend several policy solutions, including providing cultural competency training for public safety and resource protection staff along the coasts, hiring personnel that reflect local demographics, partnering with Native tribal groups to co-steward coastal areas, examining how to increase investment in neglected areas, reducing parking fees and improving public transit to beaches. 

For Nancy Faulstich, executive director of Regeneración – Pajaro Valley Climate Action, this study struck a chord. 

“I would hear so often that people living right here in Watsonville had never been to the beach, and many people don’t know how to swim,” she told Lookout. “The early experiences you have — or don’t have — can later open pathways for careers or close them.”

Regeneración – Pajaro Valley Climate Action is a Watsonville-based organization focused on community-based solutions to support marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by climate change. Faulstich said Regeneración helped the Frawley team early on in its study to connect team members with people to include in the study and helped organize focus groups to discuss survey results. 

She said she liked that the study pulled “back the curtain” on what’s happening on the coasts, to show how society needs to move away from “seeing the ocean as a resource to be exploited” and instead as a living ecosystem to coexist with – which includes protecting and investing in the whole coast, regardless of whether it’s in a lower-income area. 

Faulstich appreciated the findings that support improving public transit to beaches and said Regeneración is currently helping with a study analyzing public transit from Watsonville to local beaches to eventually put some routes into place. 

“Ocean space will be unknown, underused and undervalued unless there’s real structural change put into place,” she said. “Which is going to require targeted investment as well as policy reform.”

Similarly, Santa Cruz County Supervisor Justin Cummings said the study acknowledges something many people have long known: “If you look at the demographics of who owns property on the coast and who lives on the coast, it’s predominantly white.” But, he said, he feels that the study authors didn’t do enough to show what the state and local efforts have already done to help increase diversity at beaches. 

An environmental scientist, Cummings represents the Third supervisorial district, which spans the county’s northern coastline, and previously served on the California Coastal Commission. The 12-member group oversees land use and development along the state’s coastline. 

He said many parking lots on the coasts are free or lower cost compared to beaches in other states such as Florida, for example, and local groups like Black Surf Santa Cruz are creating welcoming spaces for people who wouldn’t have previously visited local beaches or surfed. 

“When you compare California to other states, we do a lot to make sure that beaches are accessible — more so than many other places,” he said. “I think many of us know that the problem exists, and I think now the question is, for all these solutions that we’ve been implementing, how effective have they been?

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