Month: August, 2006

On the beach: Part 4, the civitas

31 August, 2006 (13:11) | Uncategorized |

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 3; Part 1 and Part 2 here.]
 

… to divide land rights and share some in common.

What we have seen, in the small clash between neighbors in a little spit of land in Hingham, is a battle over philosophies of landownership:
 

Now, let’s have a good clean land-use argument.

The [...]

On the beach: Part 3, the Enclosure Acts

30 August, 2006 (11:14) | Uncategorized |

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 2; Part 1 here.]

So far we’ve seen that whether owners of beachfront property can preclude members of the public from crossing their property to get to what is indisputably a public beach is a critical matter of US land-use jurisprudence – but the moral and practical arguments go even deeper.
 

“I [...]

On the beach: Part 2, the Supreme Court

29 August, 2006 (10:02) | Uncategorized |

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

If the beach is public, who owns access to it? And can an intervening landowner prevent access across his or her land?

At issue is a fundamental public-policy question of land use: if there is public property (like a beach) that can be accessed only through private property, [...]

On the beach: Part 1, the padlock

28 August, 2006 (10:50) | Uncategorized |

Now and then the smallest incident may in its way force the weightiest philosophical issues. Our story begins with the placing of a padlock and a decidedly un-neighborly sign:
 

A locked gate blocked access from Melville Walk to the beach in the Crow Point section of Hingham.
 

Before it ends, we will visit the [...]

Upside down, looking in: the US from an Australian perspective

25 August, 2006 (09:51) | Uncategorized |

 

As you can see, Australia’s at the center
 
Jarrod Gitsham of Australia, who recently visited the US on a three-city, multi-agency study tour, has now completed his Hugh Stretton report for the Government of South Australia and the South Australian Housing Trust; the full report (5 meg .pdf) is now posted in AHI’s research library.
 

All reports [...]