Sunset Beach

Sunset Beach is the thin strip of Huntington Beach along Pacific Coast Highway between Surfside, the gated colony at the edge of Seal Beach, and Warner Avenue, where Bolsa Chica State Beach begins. It's a little over a mile long. The ocean and a very wide beach are on one side, Huntington Harbour is on the other, and PCH runs down the middle.

Start at the sand and walk inland. A row of houses faces the beach along Pacific Avenue, short numbered streets run back from it, and a greenbelt park runs the length of town. PCH carries the restaurants, bars, and motels. On the harbor side of the highway, the old census boundary also takes in a strip of houses on the water facing Huntington Harbour's islands.

It's small. The 2010 census, the last count before annexation, found 971 residents and 641 housing units on about 0.19 square miles of land, and of the occupied homes 41 percent were owner-occupied. Mail doesn't come to the door. Residents use post office boxes, a quirk the Los Angeles Times noted when the town was annexed.

Houses here are close together on small lots. The front row faces the beach along Pacific Avenue, the inside blocks mix older cottages with newer two- and three-story rebuilds, and a few houses sit on the harbor side of PCH with the water behind them.

Not much sells in a given month. When I pulled listings for our mapped area in late September 2026, there were three: a 1938 cottage listed as income property at about $2.1 million, a house built in 2026 at about $3.6 million, and a larger 2007 house at about $7.2 million. Lots ran from about 2,250 to 3,400 square feet. With so few listings, one home coming or going swings the numbers, so price off recent sales instead.

Renters are a big part of town. In the 2010 census, 59 percent of occupied homes were rented, so expect rentals and small multi-unit buildings on most blocks.

Every trip starts on Pacific Coast Highway. North, the road passes Surfside and the Seal Beach naval weapons station into Seal Beach. South, it runs past Bolsa Chica State Beach and the Bolsa Chica wetlands toward downtown Huntington Beach and the pier.

Across the highway is Huntington Harbour, where the marinas and the shopping centers are. Boaters use the Sunset Aquatic Marina ramp, just north of town, to get onto the water, and from there the harbor reaches the ocean through Anaheim Bay.

Schools are split between two districts. The Ocean View School District covers the lower grades, and its boundary maps put the district's northwest corner, along the harbor and the coast, in the Harbour View Elementary and Marine View Middle School areas. High school is the Huntington Beach Union High School District. The maps are drawn loosely, so confirm the address with each district's school locator.

Development here runs through the Sunset Beach Specific Plan, which the county wrote with heavy input from residents and which Huntington Beach now carries out with the local review board. If you're buying to remodel or rebuild, read the plan and talk to the city before you write an offer, and remember that the whole town is in the coastal zone.

On a Sunset Beach house I pull the flood zone and an elevation certificate, a private and a federal flood quote, and the permit history on any rebuild. I check where the lot line sits on the beach side and what the plan allows for height. And because so many homes here are rentals or second homes, I look closely at leases and at who's actually living in a house before a sale. I do all of this in English or Russian.