Belmont Shore: A Neighborhood Built Around Second Street

Long Beach isn't one market — it's a patchwork of neighborhoods, each with its own rhythm, and Belmont Shore is one of the most distinct. I spend a lot of time in Long Beach with buyers and sellers, and Belmont Shore comes up constantly, usually from people who've walked Second Street once and started looking at listings the next day. It's a small, walkable stretch of the coast with a real sense of place, and it's worth understanding on its own terms rather than as a footnote to the rest of the city.

The neighborhood's roots go back to the early 1900s, when the area below Livingston Drive was known first as West Naples, then as Belmont Heights. Long Beach promised to build a pier here as an incentive to keep the area from incorporating as its own city, and when that pier went up in 1915, the surrounding community eventually took its name — Belmont Shore. Development stayed modest until Pacific Coast Highway was paved through the area in late 1922; within months, "Belmont Shore Place" was showing up in local records, streetcars started running down Second Street in 1923, and the neighborhood was annexed into Long Beach that same year. The pier itself has gone by several names over the decades — Grand Avenue Pier, Devil's Gate Pier, Belmont Heights Pier — before being rededicated in 2005 as the Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier, a tribute to servicemembers that still anchors the shoreline today.

What makes Belmont Shore work as a neighborhood is that it never outgrew its original footprint. Second Street and Livingston Drive form the commercial spine, crossed by roughly fifteen residential side streets, so the shops, restaurants, and salons are never more than a short walk from home. Livingston Park sits right in that mix, a neighborhood gathering spot for families in a part of town that's otherwise all beach and business. Head west and you hit Bluff Park; head east and the neighborhood runs into Naples and Alamitos Bay, with the calmer, breakwater-protected water making the shoreline here better suited to paddling and kitesurfing than traditional surf. The housing stock reflects the neighborhood's long build-out — 1920s and '30s bungalows and Spanish-style homes sit alongside newer construction and multifamily buildings, which gives Second Street its layered, lived-in feel instead of a planned-community sameness.

Buyers are drawn to Belmont Shore for reasons that hold up over time: you can walk to dinner, the beach, and your dentist without getting in a car, the neighborhood hosts real community events like the Belmont Shore Car Show and the Long Beach Sea Festival, and the pier and shoreline give it a genuine identity rather than just proximity to the water. It's a neighborhood people move to because they've spent time in it first, as a visitor, a renter, or a regular at one of the Second Street restaurants, and decided they didn't want to leave.

If you're curious what's currently available in Belmont Shore, or you're thinking about selling a home here and want a straight read on your options, I'd rather talk it through than send you a form. Reach out, or take a look at my current Long Beach listings to see what's out there.