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I am taking a stand, I will protect my land! My argument is that beaches are land that should be able to be owned. It is land after all. I chose this topic because I work at the beach during the summer. During my shifts, people whom do not belong to the beach club trespass onto the beach and argue with me that they are able to. It is important to discuss as, especially with Long Island, some people own beaches and other people want to use them. This often causes a predicament between the two parties that usually sends both home angry and frustrated. It also comes into play whilst buying beach front property and should affect the pricing appropriately.

In New York, the law is that any land below the high tide line is public land. Other states such as Maine allow public access below the mean low tide, while states like Washington allow for public access to the whole beach. This shows that there really is no solid choice between the states of whether or not beach lands should be able to be owned.

I claim that having the beach as public access lowers beachfront property worth. This would then further lower the worth of the towns near the coast, voiding them of that value. The citizens in these towns already pay higher taxes for living near the coast (helping to keep it clean), they shouldn’t also have to have their property values drop. If there was only public beaches, the coast would also be much more polluted. As most private beaches keep their land clean of trash, it helps to keep the coast and water communities of wildlife clean of harmful garbage. In many places which people violate the laws of private access to beaches, there are also full public access beaches within a couple miles. This in and of itself makes the need to trespass onto a beach owner’s property completely unnecessary as there is a completely public beach down the road.

Using articles from NY Times and documents explaining the laws of public access to coastland, I plan to drive home the claim that people should be able to own the land that they pay for. Although, I would probably get counterclaims that the land is everchanging and that you can’t own the water. I actually agree with these, although only to a certain point. I do not believe that these are enough to say that you can’t own whatever sand is not covered by the tide at the current time. I do believe that one should be able to walk past a beach on foot though as there is no impact of them being there for the small amount of time they are there. If you pay for land, you should be able to own it. Otherwise, no one would buy and own land near the shore and this would cause a massive reduction in the value of all lands near coasts.