Architectural Digest names Long Beach 3rd best place in country to buy a beach house

In a study analyzing the best places to invest in a beach house across the U.S.—y’know, with the few extra million we all have sittin’ around—Architectural Digest suggests that Long Beach is the best on the West Coast and the third best in the entirety of the country.

While the Carolinas dominated the Top 10, Long Beach’s own ranking was defined using seven ranking factors: average number of rainy days per year; average number of extreme temperature days per year; entertainment establishments per 10,000 people; restaurants per 10,000 people; air quality; median home value; and one-year change in median home value.

Here is what Architectural digest wrote about Long Beach’s appeal to those who can invest in a summer beach house: 

Long Beach, California, is the only West Coast city to make the cut for our top 10. This thriving SoCal town is bustling with activities such as shopping, golfing, and whale watching, as well as its best-known tourist attraction: The Queen Mary.

Not surprisingly, Long Beach ranked high in our study for its entertainment establishments and desert climate. The beach town sees the least number of rainy days per year out of any other town we analyzed. Long Beach also ranked well for having low levels of air pollution. While homes in Long Beach are above the national average, it was the only town in our top 10 to see a depreciation in home value in the last year (-2.4%).

Of course, the publication’s emphasis on “summer beach house” is alarming for many of the working class living here: Long Beach has luckily remained, for the most part, one of the state’s more affordable coastal cities—but that is vastly changing, driven many people toward it after being priced out of massively gentrified spaces like Venice Beach, Culver City, and Downtown Los Angeles. This then contributes to Long Beach’s more steep rise in rents and home prices across the past five years (and this just after CSULB presented startling data at the end of 2021 showing rent increases of over 5% for some neighborhoods).

Then there is the complicated nature of “summer beach houses,” which are often used as short-term rentals while owners are away and whittle down the access to year-over-year living for those who work here and need it.

The investment, however, is a good thing for many: Increased home ownership and reinvestment in those properties only increase their value, according to Architectural Digest—and their main thrust was just that: Where one should invest.