The city of Malibu boasts the seventh-most expensive zip code in America, with an average home price of more than $6.8 million in 2024. But while Malibu – with its slightly more than 10,000 well-heeled residents – may not be the most expensive place to live in the U.S., the city’s leaders may be the best in the country at wielding their power to keep the less privileged out of their exclusive enclave.
For a state struggling with a severe housing shortage, stark income inequality, and the rising influence of NIMBY politics, the zealous gatekeeping employed by Malibu’s civic leaders offer a stark illustration of how local power can be wielded to block progress. From resisting affordable housing mandates to relocating homeless residents and opposing measures like traffic signals and sidewalks near schools, Malibu officials have repeatedly used their influence to protect wealth and privilege at the expense of broader community needs. It’s a pattern that demands scrutiny—and action—from policymakers in Sacramento.
Malibu is no outlier. It reflects a broader problem in California, a famously liberal state where – ironically enough – wealthy, self-proclaimed progressives routinely use the levers of local government to block housing and infrastructure projects intended to serve broader populations. Across California and elsewhere in the nation, communities that preach fairness and diversity often erect barriers to preserve their exclusivity, disguising their agenda with the language of environmentalism or preservation. This hypocrisy has made California’s housing goals elusive—and exposed how local power, left unchecked, can entrench inequality under a progressive banner.
Malibu’s reputation for its jealously guarded exclusivity is old – and memorably lampooned in the 1994 cult film The Big Lebowski, when the fictional sheriff of Malibu assaults Jeff Bridges’s slacker-hippie character and warns him to “stay out of Malibu,” a “nice quiet beach community” that the sheriff “aims to keep nice and quiet.” In an ironic case of life imitating art, “Stay out of Malibu” might as well be the unofficial slogan of both the Malibu City Council and the Malibu Township Council (MTC), the city’s sister civic organization that claims to promote community spirit and cultural development. In practice, however, the MTC has often served as a vehicle for a privileged few to block civic initiatives they don’t like.
Take Bruce Silverstein – Malibu’s current mayor pro tem and a member of the City Council since 2020 – who has promised to do “whatever we are minimally required” to comply with California’s affordable housing laws and once voted to relocate Malibu’s homeless population to neighboring cities.
“I don’t believe that the people of Malibu have a moral obligation to help people who come to Malibu in an unhoused state and chose to impose themselves on our residents,” said Silverstein – who doesn’t want anyone who he doesn’t think belongs milling around his $4.2 million home overlooking the Pacific. “I’m opposed to Malibu spending one dime to address efforts to solve homelessness issues or to assist anyone living unhoused in Malibu.”
Then there’s 78-year-old Stephen Uhring, former Malibu mayor and past president of the Township council who currently serves on City Council. Contrary to MTC’s mission of “stimulating and furthering community spirit,” Uhring has spearheaded several MTC lawsuits to shut down community events and civic projects that don’t benefit him personally.
For example, Uhring led a Township Council lawsuit to block the development of a Malibu community park that would benefit all residents – which he withdrew after the city agreed to forever ban sports like Little League from using the park – and another to prevent Malibu’s public high school from erecting lights to allow games to be played at night.
Uhring was also the driving force behind a failed effort to shut down the Malibu Kiwanis Club’s annual Labor Day Chili Cook-Off, a decades-long tradition that raises money for youth organizations. The beloved community event found itself in Uhring’s crosshairs only after organizers relocated the festivities to Uhring’s tony neighborhood.
Finally, there is long-time resident John Mazza, who, despite three failed attempts at running for elected office in Malibu, still wields tremendous power as Vice President of the MTC board and as a 16-year member on the cities’ influential Planning Commission.
Mazza has frequently voted with Uhring to keep out new residents by blocking new home construction, with The Malibu Times writing in 2019 that “it isn’t often you see a city council consciously try to hurt its own citizens,” while accusing the likes of Mazza and Uhring of “living in a bubble” and trying to “destroy” Malibu by creating “an empty town with all of the middle class gone.”
Mazza has also tried to maintain his exclusive bubble by posting an illegal “private property” sign to discourage people from using a public beach near his home and leading efforts to actively defy a California law that requires Malibu to build low-income housing in the city. Mazza has also fought efforts to improve public safety, including opposing the construction of sidewalks outside his home to make it safer for children walking to school.
Mazza’s most egregious act involved fighting a 2024 Caltrans-approved project to add a traffic signal to a dangerous Pacific Coast Highway crosswalk at a bus stop near his home. Why would Mazza fight a safety measure that would reduce traffic accidents and pedestrian fatalities? Because Malibu residents would never use, or benefit from, the crosswalk. “The only people that I can contemplate using the bus stop [and crosswalk] are the local maids,” Mazza told a local radio station.
Clearly, Mazza thinks the less privileged should be more concerned with mopping his floors and cleaning his toilets than crossing a dangerous, multilane highway after they take the bus to work. He behaves as if he lives in a bubble, but the bubble could not survive absent the labor of people who use public transportation to penetrate this privileged and myopic enclave.
For too long, a handful of extremely wealthy, older, white men have corrupted Malibu city government and its powerful civic groups in order to keep undesirables out and undermine infrastructure projects that don’t benefit them or their rich friends. It is time for lawmakers in Sacramento to intervene and ensure that Malibu is a welcoming community that benefits everyone, not just a few long-term, uber-wealthy individuals hellbent on maintaining their private, multimillion dollar playgrounds.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux, a native San Franciscan is an economist, author, and educator based in Washington, DC.
Liberal Posturing in California
