Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times
He’s rich.
He’s famous.
He wanted to build a colony of castles on a Malibu hillside, despite the years-long screams of conservationists.
But David Evans, who strums a guitar for U2, has become an exception to the rule that with money and power, you can buy anything your heart desires.
It’s been two weeks since the California Supreme Court delivered a near-fatal blow to Evans’ planned rock and roll colony on Sweetwater Mesa, which overlooks the Malibu pier and offers heavenly coastal views on a plot just outside the city of Malibu.
The court decided not to review a lower court ruling that the California Coastal Commission, which gave Evans the go-ahead in 2015, did not have the authority to do so.
So what happens next?
Unclear. I asked Evans’ attorney and he said he had passed along my query to his client. But in all the years I’ve been on this story, I’ve never been able to get hold of Evans. Maybe I should have gone to a U2 concert in Ireland, like Mark Vargas did. He’s the California Coastal Commissioner who met with Evans in Dublin and then came home to cast a vote in favor of the project. He said he paid for the Dublin trip and concert himself.
It just so happens that I have a few suggestions on what Evans might do next, but let me back up before I move forward, because there’s a David and Goliath story to be told.
Evans and his wife bought the 150 acres of land for just under $9 million in 2005 and were part of a plan to erect five ridiculously gigantic homes on an otherwise pristine ridge. If that’s not offensive enough, he wanted to call the compound Leaves in the Wind.
The Coastal Commission took a look at Evans’ plans—which included running a long water-service line through the hills, and sinking dozens of caissons into a cliff to support an access road — and said, in effect, you’ve got to be kidding. The commission rejected Evan’s claim that there were five separate owners, contending instead that limited liability corporations were used to mask his role as the only owner.
But legal maneuvering aside, Peter Douglas, the agency’s executive director at the time, zeroed in on what was really at stake.
“In my 38 years with the commission,” Douglas said at the time, “I have never seen a project as environmentally devastating as this one.”
