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New Zealand Crowdfunds $1.7 Million To Buy A Private Beach (fastcoexist.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes an article from FastCoExist:
When debt-troubled businessman Michael Spackman put his private New Zealand beach on sale, Kiwis started a crowdfunding campaign to buy it back for the public... The crowdfunding campaign raised $1.7 million in donations from around 40,000 people. Even the New Zealand government contributed $254,000.
The BBC reports that the campaign "snubbed a businessman who offered them money in exchange for private access to part of the beach," with the campaign's creator calling this an example of technology's power to unite people for a common cause. "Sometimes you can feel powerless, so for us, it's been a marvelous experience... There's been a real feeling of coming together."
The BBC reports that the campaign "snubbed a businessman who offered them money in exchange for private access to part of the beach," with the campaign's creator calling this an example of technology's power to unite people for a common cause. "Sometimes you can feel powerless, so for us, it's been a marvelous experience... There's been a real feeling of coming together."
You missed the point of the community's move to purchase back land previously owned by a private millionaire. In New Zealand, we value the land, sea and the ecosystems therein. We made this decision to preserve a beautiful section of land and enable all New Zealand families (and even yourself, if you choose to visit as a tourist) to be able to visit freely and unrestricted. We live in an age where money can buy our coastline and islands, and prevent people from accessing this "owned" land. As a New Zealander, I applaud the effort we have made, and achieved, and hope others throughout the world may also begin to take back areas of significant natural importance.... Not too sure what pension funds and investments funds have to do with it,I guess American's value the $ over nature.. A pity in my opinion...
Nice that the NZ government pitched in.
It would be interesting to try something like this on a bigger scale. Suppose 5-10% of your taxes could be designated for public spending according to your choice. 2% - national parks, 2% - drug rehab, 2% - NASA, 2% - local police assistance, 2% - new battleship. Give people a more direct voice in spending. The technology is here. The problem is educating the voters where the problems are. Some things would be really popular, and other things would almost be ignored probably. Could be interesting though. Perhaps if they did it as, budgeted need, stretch goal, special spending. and above that it goes back to general fund.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Except for the above post. Every single Anonymous Coward who has posted a comment on this story is the same person.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, on one hand, it's great that the beach is going back to the people... then again, it should never have been owned by the guy in the first place. But I have no clue how New Zealand law works, so there's that. Here in Brazil beaches are public, period. Of course, rich people always find a way to buy property right in front of beaches, built a walled residential area or something, and then make public access difficult... and they'll pay judges and politicians to keep things the way they are. It's still unlawful to do so though. By law, and I've seen cases of very big fines being applied and complete reforms being made, it is forbidden not only to own beaches, but also to constrain public access with nearby private constructions of any sort. Brazilian law is very specific on this, if I'm not mistaken... it's not just some vague open access to the public thing. It's direct access. Like say, if you buy a plot of land right next to the beach and build a walled residential or commercial area there, you are obliged to build streets leading directly to the beach that are open to the public, even if for that you have to make streets going right throught the middle of your walled residential neighborhood, or over/under it. :P
It's like, yeah, you can make a huge walled residential area here, but if people have to go too far around it to make it to the beach, then you are gonna have to provide an alternative way to give them access.
Or maybe I'm just talking bs. Oh well.
You might find this article about the Queen's Chain interesting as well. Note:
Why did you sell a beach in the first place .. In many countries beaches /forts etc cannot be privately owned.
Wonder if we could crowdfund as a lobbyist group or something.
I love it when NZ makes Slashdot.
I miss living there :(
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
A part of the Earth that has been used for humans for centuries is then "claimed" by humans only for other humans to "buy" it back off them at a profit so that other humans can use it for free again? What a scam
New Zealand is one such country, but there are some historical exceptions.
Go Kiwi ! Real proud to call this country my home, and of the people who make it the way it is.
They overpaid for something they already had, and would have continued to have for free: unfettered access to the ENTIRE beach. The rich businessman simply wanted an off-beach building to remain private for 20 year only, when it would then be gifted to the public. What would have been more rational would be to buy an access right for say a couple of hundred thousand dollars, assuming you didn't believe Gareth Morgan was good to his word.
The joys of new zealands libertarian experiment. A faultering economy, private beaches and half the countries brightest citizens packing bags for australia
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The super-rich overgrown brats should not ever be able to buy something like a beach, or a state park.
You're insane if you think wealthy nations will do nothing to protect their beaches. In places like Florida, levees might not work due to limestone permeability, but that barely matters because Florida doesn't depend on levees ANYWAY, and never HAS. We just dredge out deep backyard lakes & canals, and use the fill dirt to raise the adjacent land high enough to be above the water table at all times. And when that's not enough to protect a building from storm surge, we build it on concrete pilings so occupied floors are high enough to remain undamaged (by flooding, at least).
The joys of new zealands libertarian experiment. A faultering economy, private beaches and half the countries brightest citizens packing bags for australia
If you are moving from NZ to Australia, it's tough to argue your among the brightest.
Probably true. However even the Australians know the difference between "you're" and "your"...
Kind of sounds like an unwise investment with the expected sea level rise to be between 1 and 3 metres. I hope that beach is deep because they likely have bought something that will become nothing.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel here - fully anonymous boards have figured this out a long time ago. Instead of the "AC" name the site can show a salted hash of the poster's IP address - that goes a long way to show if it's the same person posting or not. A regular browser session with a cookie can also help identify the same poster across multiple posts. Yes, if you want to be obtuse you can point out it's easy to circumvent these and appear as a different person on each of your posts (but you can do that with multiple registered accounts, so that point is moot). My point is that it's trivial for the site to demonstrate with a reasonable certainty that it's the same AC replying.
Quote the opposite, according to the statistics. Most ex-patriot kiwis are returning home (which is pushing house prices up massively) because the rest of the World has gone insane (the so-called 'leadership' virtue signals by helping everyone except the native-born citizens). Australia is quite a bit less safe and less chilled than New Zealand, it just has better weather and a slightly higher economic standard of living.
No they don't. That's why they spell "Beer" as "XXXX" Mind you, they are one step up from Canadians who spell "Beer" as "XXX" , at least the Aussies know Beer has 4 letters in it.
slashdot
Mexicans spell it XX.
I'm a man. So if I'm a homosexual and a motherfucker... that makes your mom a man too.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No they don't. That's why they spell "Beer" as "XXXX"
Mexicans spell it XX.
Does that mean that Australian beer is twice as good as Mexican beer?
Not in this case. Dos equis is drinkable.
I look at it like //most// crowdfunding campaigns... it will probably end with someone running off with the money and those who fronted the money ending up with nothing, or at best a picture of someone sitting on the beach.
Thirty four characters live here.
Long term vs short term thinking.
$1.7M for a 30 year lease on a beach is still cheap. If 10,000 people use it per year, that works out to 1.5 cents per person's access - I'd pay $0.015 per year in additional taxes to open up an additional public beach within 10 miles of my home. Still a good deal if it costs another $0.985 per year for the infrastructure required for public access, maintenance, police, etc. People pay $3/day to park at beaches around here.
The beach may be "free" but access is another question. It's improving in Florida, but there were many beaches in the 1980s that had no public access for miles, even tens of miles, from the land side - no place to park, no place to legally walk-on if somebody stopped and dropped you by the side of the road.
I take it your public beaches are actually free, unlike in "progressive" states of the USA like New Jersey? Here, you have to pay for a beach tag to step on nearly every "public" beach.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We'll ignore the fact that the earth existed for perhaps millions of years before such a thing as government appeared, explaining why a beach could be privately held.
A state park is essentially a legal fiction. It's not a geological fixture like a mountain or lake. Any part of the earth could be made a state park. So saying that "brats" shouldn't "buy" a state park is as nonsensical as saying they shouldn't be able to buy a government building. Meanwhile, there is an Italian restaurant in the old township building near me. It was sold when it was no longer needed and then became private property. Meanwhile, the Independence Mall (which includes Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell pavilion) is an urban national park that includes a little of what used to be privately held. So that doesn't look like a "state park" as most of us picture it, either. Many millions of acres of land are reserved to state and national parks in the USA. It would be reasonable if 0.01% of a 15,000 acre park were sold to a private owner, especially if it was part of some exchange that benefited the public more than that small piece of land.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Or an island like Ellison buying Lanai.
Mah daddy paid good money to buy that beachside McMansion, we don't want you proles cluttering up our beach.
David Geffen is still a twat.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Nice to see some positive things on /.
It's under intense pressure by the wealthy and it only takes one moment of weakness or corruption by legislators or judges and it's lost forever. Public beaches are written into our constitution and yet wealthy people are chipping away at that right.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Kind of sounds like an unwise investment with the expected sea level rise to be between 1 and 3 metres. I hope that beach is deep because they likely have bought something that will become nothing. Investing in underwater front properties at this time is likely not the wisest decision. In fact much of the underwater front market will likely end up in investment funds and sold onto to pension funds (long leased back to current owners at and then abandoned once flooded and the lease broken, bad luck for the pension funds). I wonder how many other buy back the beach crowd funding scams will kick off. There is billions of dollars of property that needs to be dumped on the public purse and I am sure all sorts of scams will be kicked off to do it, the wildest of which will be in Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (Florida the ocean wants it swamps back and it will get them).
Yeah indeed.
What you do is invest in properties a bit back from the beach and, simultaneously, invest in stuff that makes global warming worse!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Yeah, Golden Beach, FL has this problem. Over a mile of beach with absolutely no public access, except for a small park in the middle where you can't park unless you're a town resident and the police will harass you if you use the facilities there.
Beaches should be public. Period. They are a very limited resource and it shouldn't be possible for the 1% to own them and deny access.
Interesting question: here in the USA, the issue of beach ownership is a weird one. the problems are ( ocean beach only Florida ) A) how to access the beach B) where does the property line end and the ocean start? so with question A) in most places, homes were places and property lines drawn and the beach was cut off, people were nicer back then so you let a person walk the alleyway between the 2 house to get on. Trip and fall lawsuit ( sorry don't have the source for that ) in the 60's changed people's mindset about sharing the alleyway, and by the 80's it was " lock it down " no trespass. Personal experience of having a beach house forced me to close my gate to the public when some tossed a soda can into my window. Then I got a few neighbors involved in my problem, so back then, I was able to convince about 1/2 mile not to open their gates. that really caused a huge problem. locals and tourist got pissed. but the message was sent. Access is controlled by the owner and rudeness won't be tolerated. Well that was the 80's and 90's who know what the rules for the alleyway are now.
B) beach line of private property end ( start ) at high tide line. high tide to the ocean is public, BUT this rule changes when mother nature takes out a beach during a storm, property lines still exist even when under the ocean tide if the beach get's washed out ( Fire Island in NY has this problem, but the sand came back and owners were able to rebuild.)
hope this helps
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Yes, even the locals pay for the tag, but you need to know when the locals buy the tag, it's steeply discounted.
I lived in Manasquan for a while, it was early February or mid march when it went on sale. Point Pleasent was different, I forgot when it went on sale. Mantoloking, I don't recall ever buying a beach pass and I don't think that there was any easy public access to the beach, now that I think about it, I don't recall ever seeing a lifeguard or anyone except my neighbor or fishermen... this was the 80's and 90's
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Next time remind them that they have a body camera, it's a public resource ( the facilities) & harassment is still an offense. I walk that beach a lot, and those police are not nice or polite, unless it's the fat guy, he's cool as shit, he just tells you what you're doing wrong and let's you go with a warning, so don't repeat it otherwise his memory is steal trap, and your ticket it much worst. and he will catch you again!
if you see me, smile and say hello.
that's right, high tide down, but never was access to the beach,
if you see me, smile and say hello.
That's a Queensland beer.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
...and half the countries brightest citizens packing bags for australia
They're the brightest ones you're sending? Boy, you have problems...
Having said that, we visited NZ last year. Love it. Love to retire there as soon as I win the lotto and can afford a million dollar unit in Wanaka.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."