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Indiana homeowners fight for their right to stop parties on the beach

Lake Michigan property owners want SCOTUS to overturn 2018 ruling

Pacific Legal Foundation's Chris Kieser with Duneland Drive (Pacific Legal Foundation, Google Maps)
Pacific Legal Foundation's Chris Kieser with Duneland Drive (Pacific Legal Foundation, Google Maps)

Life’s a beach, but stay off mine.

That’s the message three Indiana homeowners on Lake Michigan are trying to send all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The homeowners, with primary residences in Chicago, hired attorney Chris Kieser with the Pacific Legal Foundation law firm to request that the nation’s highest court repeal a 2018 ruling by Indiana’s Supreme Court that they claim took away their rights to a private beach, Crain’s reported.

“My clients are fine with people walking along the beach, but not with [people] having bonfires, playing volleyball and sitting on the beach all day,” Kieser told the outlet.

The homes, on Duneland Drive in Porter, Ind., are located in a secluded enclave that stretches about a mile and a half along the lakefront. They are surrounded by the Indiana Dunes state and national parks, which is where the loitering problem comes into play, according to the homeowners.

In 1980, property owners granted a “walking easement” that allows visitors of the parks to use the beach as a path that connects the public lands, but homeowners say the public has been abusing that privilege.

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One homeowner, Ray Cahnman, said that over the years people went beyond simply walking through the beach to sitting down and spending time there. He said what started as a minor nuisance has become a steady disturbance that’s prevented him from enjoying his property.

Kieser said that the 1980 agreement implies that the government acknowledged that the homeowners also owned the beach behind their properties, because otherwise, they wouldn’t have needed their approval to allow public access.

The 2018 Indiana Supreme Court ruling states that the property owners along the lakefront don’t own the beach and that the state of Indiana has control of the lakebed up to the ordinary high water mark.

“Up until that moment, my clients understood that the beach was their property,” Kieser wrote in his filings to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said the 2018 ruling “effectively extinguished [the homeowners’] rights to the beach.”

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— Victoria Pruitt

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