Articles - MALIBU'S TOPSIAN RURAL MYTH

The broad distinction of developed land use as urban, suburban, and rural is generally understood, but in the literature it seems to be lacking specific criteria to determine which is which. For Malibu, the distinction between rural and suburban land use is especially germane. In general terms, "suburban" seems to be applied to planned "bedroom" communities at the periphery urban areas not directly impacted by day to day urban activities. Rather, they contain mostly residences with islands of business such as markets, specialty stores, and perhaps office building, all intended to serve the local community. Single-family lots are dominant, fewer multiunit developments. Perhaps the best criterion defining suburbia is that it is served by all the common utilities. In contrast, "rural" land is characterized by large properties having little or no relationship to surrounding other properties. The concept ruralness implies farmland or ranches out in the "country" where there as a result rural electrification projects there usually is the power utility, but with water and sewage facilities "on-site." This emphasizes the perverseness of Malibu's land-use character.

MALIBU SUBDIVISIONS

Malibu has undergone subdivision under two distinctly different phases of government control. Earlier, Malibu was viewed as essentially rural and subdivision presumably was begun in a manner thought to be more or less consistent with rural land use. Later, when population pressure made it clear that subdivision required careful planning for optimum use, there was relatively little land left in Malibu suitable for the sort of planned subdivision characteristic of modern suburbia. There are now some thirty multiunit developments in Malibu including duplexes, apartments, condominiums, townhouses, two mobile home parks, and an overnight trialer park. Clustered along or close to PCH, they can be ignored when considering Malibu as a rural area.

Early Subdivisions

Under direct Rindge family ownership, from 1892 to about 1925, Malibu was simply a large ranch otherwise undeveloped and clearly rural. With a decline in the family resources, isolated tract development was introduced sometime prior to 1929. Malibu Hills, also referred to as El Nido, and Malibu Bowl, both off Corral Canyon Road, and Malibu Vista off Latigo Canyon Road, were among the first. At about the same time, the La Costa area, beach lots west of Las Flores Canyon, and the Malibu Colony were subdivided.

The most extensive residential development in Malibu has been accomplished through a rather murky process of lot surveying in some cases designated as "tracts" but having no discernible planning characteristics associated with the tract development process of today. It appears that the Marblehead Land Company, and some of its successors in interest, simply divided the land by surveying lots of arbitrary dimensions and roadways for access, all apparently determined simply by the natural topographic conditions. In other words, like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy, lots came about pretty much as the natural circumstances demanded and entirely lacking the controls required by today's Subdivision Map Act.

County Records of Survey of these Topsian lots, it is understood, were initially made simply to assure title. Smaller subdivisions of this kind include the original Serra Retreat and Malibu Knolls. The larger ones are located from Latigo Point west to Steep Hill Canyon, which is about a mile west of Trancas Canyon Road. Within this stretch of the coast are the especially larger subdivisions including Point Dume and Malibu Park. Coastal bluff land south of PCH and west of Broad Beach was similarly subdivided, although because of the limited distance between the highway and the beach, the area would not have lent itself to modern subdivision design.

Later Subdivisions

Trancas West and the more or less still-born La Chusa Highlands of the early 1960s, Big Rock Mesa in the 1970s, Malibu County Estates in the early 1980s, and the Paradise View Estates in the later 1990s, are the only tracts developed in Malibu according to various Subdivision Map Act design standards and therefore have the certain characteristics commonly attributed to modern suburbia. Excluded here are several isolated condominium and mobile home park developments, the presence of which has no particular significance with regard to Malibu's rural character, such as it is.

This was the Malibu handed to the City by the County in March, 1991. With increasing pressure from the Coastal Commission, a Local Coastal Program was finally adopted in 2002, a sort of better-late-than-never approach to land-use planning. Through various controls exerted by newly established zoning, the overall purpose of the LCP with its usage policies and implementation constraints, now limits future development in Malibu with special attention to environmental protection and public access for recreation. However, as far-reaching and stringent as these controls may be, and as questionably as they are sometimes applied, the application of LCP principles remain within constraints imposed by a previously subdivided Malibu.

MALIBU LAND USE CLASSIFICATION

The demise of Malibu's rural character can fairly be said to have begun with formation of the Rhoda May Rindge's Marblehead Land Company. Malibu's rural character in the minds of many today, seems to be derived from the Malibu of the 1950s and earlier, when there were many undeveloped lots giving the physical appearance of a rural area. But with the advent of service from County Waterworks District 29 in 1961 and consequent infilling residential property development, Malibu's rural appearance began to disappear.

The area of this rural-cum suburban metamorphosis is most apparent in Malibu Park, Zuma Canyon, and Point Dume, with areas north of PCH including that between Ballard Road and the western City boundary, the Cavalleri Road and Winding Way areas, parts of the Serra Retreat area now referred to as Serra Canyon, Carbon Mesa, and along parts of Rambla Pacifico, all maintaining, to some degree, an appearance or actual aspects of ruralness. Beach-front properties are a special case. Because of their satellite character they seem to fit, somewhat uncomfortably, into the suburban category. Proponents arguing for maintaining Malibu's rural character probably have in mind, whether they know it or not, its isolation, its low population density, and among the older, images of the mythic 1940s and 50s.

It is now difficult to fit areas of Malibu, either developed or suitable for development, into the suburban-rural land-use scheme. As a working hypothesis, about 10 square miles of Malibu can be regarded as too steep for residential development. About 5 square miles can be regarded as either existing rural-suburban development or suitable for such development, with the remaining 4 square miles or so either existing beach and floodplain development or suitable for such development. Despite all however, retaining the "rural character" of Malibu, tacit or otherwise, has remained a major plank in the platforms of most of Malibu's City Council candidates and in the minds of many not-yet doddering locals. The former is politics and the latter is human nature. But in fact, "rural Malibu" is more of an idea, a dream, or an intellectual conceit, if you like, rather than something real, and just as nobody made Topsy, nobody planned Malibu - it just "growed."

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