San Francisco Boardsailing Association
The State of Recreational Access to
The San Francisco Bay:
2026
Annual Site Access Audit
October 2026 · sfba.org
Introduction
October 1, 2026 · Andrew Sullivan, President
During a recent community outreach meeting held by the city of Richmond in collaboration with The Watershed Project, the project lead, Naama Raz-Yaseef, presented a map showing the impact of sea level rise flooding that will affect Richmond's shoreline by 2050. This land is largely Bay fill and is home to much of the city's industry. The main steward of this land is Chevron, and the company is not yet cooperating with the city's efforts to understand soil toxicity, among other things. Richmond and The Watershed Project are managing arguably the most professional example of a shoreline planning effort in the region, and attendees at this community outreach meeting were celebrating the belief that they were ahead of the curve, building visionary plans to address the environmental challenge of our generation. But as Naama Raz-Yaseef clearly and precisely reviewed the detailed findings in her measured voice, the 2050 flood map, with its underlying story of community meetings, design revisions, environmental reviews, construction designs, funding acquisition and scope changes, was telling a haunting story: we may already be too late and the consequences are going to be enormous.
This report presents the San Francisco Boardsailing Association's annual audit of site access across the Bay. Each launch is rated in one of three categories:
- Closed: the public cannot legally or physically reach the water to launch.
- Compromised: the site is open, but access is already reduced by lost parking, restricted hours, erosion, riprap or failing facilities.
- Threatened: access is adequate today, but a pending decision, project or ongoing erosion is likely to reduce or end it. "Mid-term" marks threats expected beyond the next few years.
A site can be both compromised and threatened.
2026 has been a dynamic year, and the nature of the risk has shifted sharply since our 2025 audit. Last year's findings centered on erosion and operational neglect, conditions that degrade access gradually and can often be reversed. This year the threat is different: decisions now before regulators and local agencies will set access terms for decades. Two forces are driving most of that change, and they put some sites at risk of being lost outright.
Public land, put to private use. The largest threat in this report is the strong trend to use public land for private use and revenue. Berkeley is the most serious case. The city is seeking a BCDC permit to charge for parking on land filled for public recreation, and it has proposed converting a significant part of its recreational waterfront into a parking lot for a ferry terminal. BCDC will rule on the first step in this process, a permit to charge for parking, in the coming months. Treasure Island is next. San Francisco was allowed to build housing there in exchange for committing the shoreline to public use, yet it still plans a visitor toll and has approved parking meters on both islands. If either city succeeds, it wil provide every agency that holds shoreline land a template to monetize our parks.
Erosion, and how we respond to it. At 3rd Avenue, Crown Beach, Toll Plaza, Ocean Beach, Crissy Field and Candlestick, the beach itself is at stake, for different reasons:
- 3rd Avenue: the upper launch has been washing away for more than a decade, and Foster City's new levee protects the city, not the sand in front of it.
- Crown Beach: there is "almost no beach left" near the concession, and emergency rock is being stockpiled for this winter's storms.
- Toll Plaza: already closed by the Port, and now inside a sea level rise plan built around protecting the Bay Bridge toll plaza, with no commitment yet to preserving the beach or improving access to it.
- Ocean Beach: losing sand while sand is mined from the Bay and sold.
- Crissy Field: the launch lot floods at 3 feet of sea level rise, and the plan to adapt it could change the layout that makes the launch work.
- Candlestick: recurring flooding and lost parking.
The usual response to erosion is rock and walls. They protect what sits behind the beach, but the beach is lost. Without designs and funding in place before the first floods, rock and walls will be the default. But these designs don't take a critical factor into account: as the Bay rises, it pushes shoreline groundwater up with it. The rising water reaches contaminated soils that have stayed dry for decades. Salt in the water loosens metals bound in those soils, and the groundwater carries the pollutants back into the Bay. Seawalls and levees don't necessarily address this. More than 1,500 contaminated sites around the Bay could be exposed with one meter of sea level rise, and many of these are located around our most popular launches.
The work itself can be a barrier. Resilient shoreline planning can cost access in three ways:
- Construction closes launches. Shoreline projects take years to build, and sites often close while they are built: South Ocean Beach is expected to close for about six months of every year during construction. Even projects that stay out of the water take parking for staging. With projects under way around the entire Bay, sailors could lose launches in several places at once, for years at a time.
- The clock is shorter than it looks. 2050 sounds far off. It isn't. Shoreline projects can take decades to plan, permit, fund and build, so the designs that will meet the first floods are being decided now. As we have seen with Foster City and Alameda, emergency response means riprap.
- Everyone will need the same people at once. Every city on the Bay, and coastal communities across the state, the country and the world, will be competing for funding, engineers, contractors and equipment. We have already what this might mean at 3rd Avenue, when access was compromised for an extended period because the crews and equipment needed to fix a large pole at the neighboring golf course were tied up rebuilding golf courses damaged in the Los Angeles fires. Think about how this competing demand for resources on a Bay-wide, regional, state and national level might affect our ability to implement complex and costly solutions.
Both forces play out against a larger need to rethink our shoreline. The same long-term planning that threatens access is also the opportunity: a new park at Golden Gate Fields, the SFBA's study at 3rd Avenue (part of a larger effort to create a resilient shoreline there) and Crissy Field Next can each be designed with water access built in, if recreation is in the record before the designs are drawn.
The roughly 5,000 boardsailors we represent depend primarily on four keystone launches: Alameda, 3rd Avenue, Berkeley, and Crissy. Three of those four face binding decisions within the next twelve months. Nearly every inch of our shoreline is currently under initial phases of long-term but critical shoreline planning. The volume and permanence of change arriving at once is without precedent in the Association's history, and it is the reason this year's audit warrants closer attention than most.
How you can help. Join or renew your SFBA membership at sfba.org. Your dues help support our work. Then get involved where you sail. Every site in this report has a plan, a hearing or a decision coming up, listed in the priorities and links at the end of each section. Comment, show up, and tell us what you see on the water. The agencies writing these plans need to hear from the people who use the shoreline, and they need to hear it before the designs are finalized. We urge you to get involved in the SFBA now.