A California appellate court has found that a Southern California homeowners association's ban on short-term rentals runs afoul of the state's coastal access law.

In June 2016, the Mandalay Shores Community Association passed a resolution that barred owners of about 1,400 single-family units along the Oxnard coast from renting their dwellings for less than 30 days.

The Second District Court of Appeal on Tuesday found the ban on short-term rentals violated the California Coastal Act of 1976, which was passed to “maximize public access” to the beach.

“Respondent Mandalay Shores Community Association has not erected a physical barrier to the beach but has erected a monetary barrier to the beach. It has no right to do so,” wrote Justice Kenneth Yegan in the introduction to the unanimous Second District opinion.

Local attempts to curtail the spread of short-term rentals have spawned numerous lawsuits over the past couple of years—including suits challenging bans from other homeowners groups and the rental platforms' own legal challenges to restrictive municipal ordinances.

Tuesday's decision reverses a ruling by Ventura County Superior Court Judge Kent Kellegrew, who denied a preliminary injunction seeking to block the short-term rental ban filed by lawyers for homeowners Robert Greenfield and Demetra Greenfield. Kellegrew found that the short-term rental ban wasn't a “development” under the meaning of the Coastal Act. That designation would trigger the need to get a permit from the Coastal Commission, the state body charged with overseeing development along California's Pacific coastline.

Kellegrew also found that the matter of whether the short-term rental ban violated the Coastal Act should be decided by the commission rather than a court.

But Tuesday's Second District decision disagreed with Kellegrew on both fronts.

The term “development,” the decision pointed out, is broadly defined under the act to include anything that changes the “density or intensity” of the use of coastal land.

“Here the [short-term rental] ban changes the intensity of use and access to single family residences in the Oxnard Coastal Zone,” Yegan wrote. The Second District also found the issue is ripe for the court to decide since the plaintiffs showed that passing the short-term rental ban without getting a permit from the commission first violated the Coastal Act.

“The question of whether a seven-day house rental is more of a neighborhood problem than a 31-day rental must be decided by city and the Coastal Commission, not a homeowner's association,” Yegan wrote.

One of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs, Michael Velthoen of Ferguson Case Orr Paterson in Ventura, said Tuesday that his clients' case was one of a number of disputes over short-term rental restrictions in coastal zones pending in California courts, and is the first to yield an opinion from the court of appeal.

“What is and isn't a 'development' under the Coastal Act is a big issue, and there's only a few opinions that address it,” Velthoen said. “This was the right result, I think. The message is if you want to regulate short-term rentals in the coastal zone, there's a process to do it.”

The homeowners association's lawyers at Hathaway Perrett Webster Powers Chrisman &
Gutierrez didn't immediately respond to messages.