The plaintiffs' homes are in this section of Porter, Ind., backing up to a slender ribbon of Lake Michigan Beach. 

Three Chicagoans with second homes on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Northwest Indiana are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the public from hanging around on the beach behind their houses.

The homeowners, Randall and Kimberley Pavlock and Raymond Cahnman, believe a 2018 ruling by the Indiana Supreme Court took away private beach rights attached to their homes on Duneland Drive in Porter, about 49 miles from downtown Chicago.

They’re asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the state court’s decision. There is no guarantee the high court will agree to look at the case.

“My clients are fine with people walking along the beach, but not with having bonfires, playing volleyball and sitting on the beach all day,” says Chris Kieser, a California-based attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation law firm who is representing the homeowners.

Because of the homes’ unusual location, there’s a strong temptation for people who are passing through on foot to stay a while. The houses are in a secluded enclave that stretches about a mile and a half along the lakefront, with the Indiana Dunes state and national parks on three sides.

In 1980, the property owners, including the Pavlocks and the then-owners of the house Cahnman now owns, granted a "walking easement" that allows users of the parks to pass along the beach on foot from one piece of public land to the other.

The number of people who went beyond walking to spending time on the beach was a minor annoyance for years, said Ray Cahnman, one of the plaintiffs, "but then when you had COVID, and the beach was totally packed with people putting down beach blankets and playing loud music. I couldn’t go out and use my own property." Cahnman, a retired trader who lives in Lincoln Park, has owned a Duneland Drive property that has about 125 feet of Lake Michigan shoreline since 2006. He said the "walking easement" attached to the deed "doesn’t bother me. I’ve never had a problem with that."

Built into such an agreement, Kieser said, is the notion that the government was acknowledging that the homeowners own the beach. Otherwise, they would not have to provide an easement for its use by the public.

In 2018, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that property owners on the lakefront do not own the beach. In Gunderson vs. State of Indiana, regarding a property about 15 miles east of Duneland Drive in Long Beach, the court ruled that the state of Indiana has control of the lakebed up to the ordinary high water mark, or OHWM. The state legislator followed the ruling with a statute along the same lines.

“Up until that moment, my clients understood that the beach was their property,” Kieser said. The decision, he wrote in the brief filed with the Supreme Court earlier this month, “effectively extinguished (their) rights to the beach.”

Cahnman said the state court’s decision "took away my front yard so people could have bonfires and barbecues."

The Pavlocks have owned their Duneland Road house since the 1970s, Kieser said. They live primarily in Rogers Park, property records show. The Pavlocks did not respond to a request for comment

Kieser said Indiana property owners have controlled the land down to the low water mark of any navigable water since an 1837 ruling related to the Ohio River. Later decisions re-affirmed the right, Kieser said, and in the 20th century, property owners including steel mills and homeowners were all granted the same right on the Lake Michigan shoreline. When the National Lakeshore Land Acquisition Office began buying properties in 1969 to develop what’s now a national park, “the government made it clear that the beach was private land that had to be bought up,” Kieser said.

Throughout Indiana’s history, he said, “it’s clear that pretty much everybody thought private owners could own the beach of Lake Michigan” in Indiana.

In 2021, a U.S. district court judge ruled the three homeowners do not have standing to challenge the Indiana ruling statute, and earlier this year the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago did the same. The appeals court justice wrote that the homeowners could not claim their property rights were taken away because they had never actually had those rights.

Kieser said the state's moves amount to "declaring property that belongs to someone is now property of the state."

Access to the Lake Michigan shoreline is a treasured right, as evidenced by Chicagoans’ embrace of the “Forever Open, Clear and Free” dictum that keeps 24 of its 30 miles of shoreline public. But competing interests often clash, such as the 2018 dispute between the Chicago Cubs’ Yu Darvish, who wanted to build a privacy fence at his lakefront Evanston mansion, and neighbors who claimed they had decades-old easements that guaranteed their view of the water.

The Indiana case has an echo of a simmering dispute in Winnetka, where the buyer of a string of lakefront mansions initially wanted visual separation built between his property and adjacent parkland, in exchange for a swap of some of his land for some existing park land. Earlier this month, the buyer, Justin Ishbia, announced that he is no longer asking for any separation at the beach level.

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