On a summer weekend in 2018, dozens of people gathered on the sand in Long Beach to watch the Great Lakes Grand Prix boat races pass offshore. A private security guard, hired by the Long Beach Homeowners Association, tried to clear them off a stretch of beach in front of a lakefront home. Someone called the police. Tom King, a director of the Long Beach Community Alliance, later summed up what was at stake for the town in five words: "This affects our quality of life."
The guard had no legal authority to do what he was doing. The homeowner, Jim Smith, later said he hadn't hired the security firm himself and declined to say whether he considered the beach his own property. The Long Beach police told the guard and the homeowners association to knock it off. That confrontation happened because a lot of people in Long Beach, and plenty of buyers looking at the town today, assume "lakefront" means the beach in front of the house belongs to whoever owns the house. In Long Beach, it does not, and the case that settled the question started on this town's own sand.
The case that drew the line
In December 2012, a company called LBLHA LLC and two Long Beach lakefront owners sued the town after its council passed a resolution declaring the state's ownership boundary along the beach. Two years later, in a related suit, Long Beach owners Don and Bobbie Gunderson took the fight directly to the source and sued the State of Indiana and its Department of Natural Resources, arguing their deed carried them all the way to the water's edge, wherever that happened to be on a given day. The state, along with the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Save the Dunes, argued that Indiana had held title to the lakebed and the exposed shore up to the ordinary high water mark since statehood in 1816, and that no private deed could override that.
That second case, known as Gunderson v. State, worked through LaPorte Superior Court and the Indiana Court of Appeals before the Indiana Supreme Court settled it in February 2018, ruling that the boundary between public trust land and private property along Lake Michigan is the ordinary high water mark, not the water's edge. The U.S. Supreme Court later declined to review the decision, leaving it in place. Tom King, the Long Beach Community Alliance director quoted above, pointed out at the time that roughly 90 percent of Long Beach homeowners don't live directly on the lake, which meant most of the town had a stake in how that fight came out.
What the line actually looks like from your yard
The Indiana Supreme Court's own opinion admitted that pinpointing the ordinary high water mark on the ground is not simple. When LaPorte Superior Court Judge Richard Stalbrink Jr. had to draw an actual line for the Gunderson case, he adopted the DNR's administrative elevation of 581.5 feet above sea level. That number turned out to sit underwater in some spots and well inland of the shoreline in others. For a practical rule of thumb, Long Beach Chief Marshal Robert Sulkowski has put it more simply than any court did: private property ends where the vegetation does. The sand below that line, along with the water, belongs to the state and is held in trust for public use.
That distinction matters for anyone comparing a "lakefront" listing in Long Beach to a similar one elsewhere on the shore. Here is the plain version of what a deed actually covers:
| What you typically own | What you do not own |
|---|---|
| The house, yard, and dune vegetation up to the tree line or grass line | The beach and water below the ordinary high water mark |
| The right to build and maintain structures within town and DNR setback rules | Exclusive control over who walks, fishes, or stops on the adjacent sand |
| Deeded access to the water for your own recreational use | The ability to bar the public from that same stretch of beach |
None of this changes what shows up at closing. It changes what a buyer should expect to control once they own the place.
The real reason the beach still feels private
If the beach itself is public, why does Long Beach still read as one of the more exclusive stretches of Indiana shoreline? The answer has less to do with deeds and more to do with parking. The town maintains public beach access only through a handful of easements located at bus stops, and there is no general public parking anywhere in Long Beach. Parking in the town's own lot is limited to residents and their guests with stickers.
That is the actual mechanism behind the privacy buyers are paying for. It is not a legal wall around the sand. It is a practical one built from where a car can sit for the afternoon. A buyer who understands that difference will read a "private beach" claim in a listing more carefully, and will know that what they're really buying into is a town-managed access system, not a fence line that runs to the waterline.
Where the doctrine meets a contractor's punch list
The public trust question has already collided with a very concrete construction problem in Long Beach. In the mid-2010s, a group of homeowners on the lakefront applied for permits to build seawalls, arguing their septic systems were at risk of being breached by lake water. The Long Beach Community Alliance and a neighboring property owner, James Neulieb, appealed those permits to the town's Board of Zoning Appeals, arguing the seawalls sat in fragile dune and floodplain areas and could accelerate erosion of beaches and dunes held in trust for the public. Stop-work orders followed. The dispute eventually reached the Indiana Court of Appeals, which sided with the objectors on procedural grounds in 2017, finding the homeowners hadn't exhausted their administrative remedies before going to court.
That case is a useful preview for anyone planning to build, rebuild, or harden a shoreline lot in Long Beach. A legitimate infrastructure concern, in that case protecting a septic system from erosion, does not guarantee a fast or friction-free path through permitting when the proposed fix touches the beach or dune. Neighbors and advocacy groups have standing to appeal, and the public trust doctrine gives them a real legal hook to do it with. Anyone budgeting for shoreline construction here should build permitting time and possible appeals into the schedule, not just the concrete estimate.
Why this still isn't fully settled
The public trust doctrine along Indiana's Lake Michigan shore keeps generating new disputes even though the core question was answered in 2018. Elsewhere on this shoreline, in Ogden Dunes, a fight over a proposed stone revetment is currently working its way through Porter County Superior Court, with the administrative record transferred there in March 2026 and briefing that ran from April through June of this year. The specifics differ from Long Beach's seawall case, but the underlying tension is the same one that produced the Gunderson ruling: where exactly does a private owner's right to protect their property end, and where does the public's right to an unaltered shoreline begin.
For a buyer, the takeaway isn't that Long Beach is uniquely contentious. It's that shoreline hardening projects anywhere on this coast, including Long Beach, are decided against a legal backdrop that still gets tested in court on a regular basis.
A few questions worth asking before you make an offer
Does any of this affect resale value or a clean title? No. The public trust boundary has applied to this shoreline since 1816, whether or not a given deed mentions it. Closing on a Long Beach lakefront home works the same way it always has.
Can I still landscape or build near the water? Yes, within town and DNR setback rules, and through the standard BZA permitting process. What the Long Beach case shows is that a permit application near the dune line can draw an appeal from neighbors or the Long Beach Community Alliance, so it pays to ask a builder who has worked shoreline permits in this specific town before assuming a straightforward timeline.
Is this only a Long Beach issue? The doctrine applies to all 45 miles of Indiana's Lake Michigan shoreline, including Beverly Shores and Dune Acres. Long Beach is simply where the legal boundary was defined, which is also why it's the town where buyers hear about it most.
If you're comparing what a "lakefront" price tag actually buys along this stretch of coast, that's exactly the kind of question worth working through before you write an offer, not after. Mark Hull has spent two decades on the construction side of these shoreline properties before moving into brokerage, and can walk you through what a specific Long Beach lot includes, what it doesn't, and what a realistic permitting timeline looks like if you're planning to build. Book a complimentary consultation to start with the facts, not the listing copy.
