Tag Archives: Coastal Commission

CEQA, Housing

‘Terrified’: Latest billionaire acquisition in Carmel sets off alarm bells

By Andrew Pridgen : sfgate – excerpt

You haven’t heard about AB 2560 yet!!! It will allow density bonus projects (think Sloat) in our coastal zones!!! For the entire state.  Carmel’s coastal zone goes 1 mile in from the beach. Holy holy holy. Attached is the SB 951 letter sent to all local electeds on the coast. Next is my draft of the next one that includes AB2560. WAKE UP!! I’ll have to reach out to Carmel directly. I met some of them at the League meeting last year and they 100% were supporting ONV.

Carmel-by-the-Sea is being quickly bought up by Monaco billionaire who reportedly wants to ‘crush everyone’

On the surface, the La Rambla building in Carmel checks the box of nearly every ideal associated with the tiny village by the sea: It’s a two-story Spanish-style stucco building built in 1929, with space for retail on the ground floor and a pair of apartments on the second level, both featuring Juliet balconies facing the street.

Located on the corner of Lincoln Street and Ocean Avenue in the heart of the village’s main commercial corridor, the building’s defining feature is a courtyard, a little hideaway from the street that is decorated with a variety of tiles and hand-carved stone urns.

The building’s seemingly innocuous January sale for $7.5 million — the property was originally listed by local real estate agent Tim Allen for $9 million in 2020 — has stirred some into action here. Why? Because it was yet another cherished spot scooped up by Patrice Pastor, the Monaco billionaire who has quietly been accumulating more than a dozen such favored properties in Carmel, including the L’Auberge Carmel Hotel, the Brown-Spaulding Building and the Eastwood Building, over the past nine years…(more)

This looks like another addition to the coastline under threat by the Wiener anti-SF bill SB 951. You can line them up down the California coast and see the Miami towers coming unless some actions to stop it are taken soon. Wonder how much the owners donated to Scott’s lobbying efforts support SB 951, through a PR firm no doubt.

CEQA, Housing, Politics

My house or my beach? How California’s housing crisis could weaken its coastal protections

By Ben Christopher : Calmatters – excerpt (includes audio track)

For more stories on inequality in California, sign up for Inequality Insights, a weekly must-read on one of California’s most pressing issues.

California lawmakers have been busy over the last decade trying to make it easier to build homes across a housing-strapped state. But there’s an 840-mile-long exception.

In an undulating band that generally runs 1,000 yards from the shoreline, the 12 members of the California Coastal Commission have the final say over what gets built, where and how.

Voters empowered the commission to protect the state’s iconic beaches in 1972, responding to a crisis of despoiled seas and the prospect of the Miami-fication of the California coast.

But five decades later, the state faces a different crisis as millions of Californians struggle to find an affordable place to call home. Now, a growing number of legislators and housing advocates are trying to wrest away some of the commission’s power…(more)