Balboa Island

Balboa Island is a man-made island in the middle of Newport Harbor. A short two-lane bridge from Jamboree Road reaches it, and so does the car ferry from the Balboa Peninsula. It covers about 0.2 square miles, and most of its lots measure 30 by 85 feet. A paved concrete boardwalk runs the whole way around the seawall. Marine Avenue, the main commercial street, cuts across the middle.

The island is really three. Balboa Island proper is the big one. Little Balboa Island sits across the Grand Canal to the east, joined by a two-lane bridge. Collins Island, the smallest, sits off the northwest corner behind a one-lane bridge. Together they form one neighborhood with one ZIP code, 92662.

The census shows how the island gets used. In 2020, ZIP 92662 had 2,490 residents and 2,035 homes, and 460 of those homes were held for seasonal or occasional use. Winter weekdays are quiet. Summer means renters and a line for the ferry. There are almost no yards and not much parking, the seawalls are old and low, and the city watches short-term rentals and coastal construction closely.

In 1902 William Stepp Collins and a partner bought land around Newport Bay. By 1906 Collins had a dredge cutting a channel on the north side of the bay. The sand and silt went onto the tidal flats, and the flats became Balboa Island. Progress was uneven: a 1909 newspaper report noted the collapse of one hundred feet of seawall. By 1910 the island was open to the public with about twenty houses built.

Waterfront lots first sold for around $650 and inland lots for $350. Flooding, snagged utility lines, and sewers that emptied onto the beaches drove owners away, and lot prices later fell as low as $25. Collins sold his island holdings in 1915, and in 1916 the residents agreed to join the City of Newport Beach to save the place. Newport Beach itself had incorporated only in 1906, with 206 residents. In 1919 Joseph Allan Beek won the contract for a ferry to the Peninsula, and in 1920 the Fat Fairy went into service, carrying up to 20 passengers for a nickel each.

The 1920s built the island people recognize today. The Beek family founded the Balboa Island Yacht Club in 1922 as a club run by kids, with a child serving as commodore. The Grand Canal's wooden bulkhead and walk were rebuilt in concrete in 1929, and island residents paid for the first Park Avenue bridge to Little Balboa Island around the same time. By 1929 about 100 people lived on the island year-round. Jamboree Road, the mainland approach, takes its name from the 1953 Boy Scout Jamboree held nearby. The island marked its centennial in 2016 with a parade.

Most of the island was platted on 30-by-85-foot lots, 2,550 square feet, and the island has its own zoning district, R-BI, which allows up to two units on a lot. The original houses were small beach cottages, and many survive with front patios facing the street or the boardwalk. Over the decades a large share have been replaced by two-story homes that use the whole lot. Active listings in September 2026 ran from a 1932 duplex to houses finished in 2026.

Location sets the tiers. Bay-front houses on North Bay Front and South Bay Front sit on the boardwalk with the harbor and docks in front of them. Homes along the Grand Canal and on Little Balboa Island face narrower water and quieter foot traffic. Interior lots on the cross streets named for precious stones, Sapphire, Emerald, Onyx and the rest, are the most common product and the entry point.

If you're coming from a bigger lot, reset your expectations. Outdoor space means a patio, a roof deck, or the boardwalk itself. Garages are small and parking is scarce, so an off-street space is a real asset. By 2008 original cottages on interior lots were already selling as teardowns for the land alone, and I still price island homes that way: the lot and its position first, the house second.

The seawalls come first. In August 2017 the City Council voted 6-0 to add a 9-inch concrete cap to walls the city described as 80 to 90 years old, at a cost of $1.5 to $2 million. The cap raised them to 8.5 feet on the north side and 9 feet on the south side, and the city engineer called it a fix for the next 10 to 20 years. Full replacement, estimated at $68 million in 2017, is now priced at about $136.6 million in the city's 2024 Harbor and Beaches Master Plan. The 2025-26 capital budget funds design and permitting, with a first construction phase tentatively set for the 2027-28 fiscal year. Until then, crews install removable boards in gaps along the bay-front walls before king tides, as they did in December 2025 and again in June and July 2026.

The city's 2014 hazard plan explains how the streets stay dry. The city runs 86 tide valves that keep high tides off the streets of Balboa Island and the Peninsula, and pumps clear the runoff that ponds behind them. The plan also warns that a 100-year flood could overwhelm the pumps and leave the island under water until the storm abates. FEMA's preliminary 2016 maps would have put more of Newport Beach in flood zones; after two years of work with the city, the revised maps greatly reduced the number of properties that must carry flood insurance, though some on Balboa Island stayed in or were added. Those maps took effect March 21, 2019, so check the exact parcel on the city's viewer and FEMA's Map Service Center.

Then the rules. Short-term lodging is any rental of 30 days or less. It needs a city permit and business license, carries a 10 percent transient occupancy tax, requires stays of at least two nights and renters 25 or older, and has been banned in single-family (R-1) districts since 1992. Permits are capped at 1,550 citywide; since a Coastal Commission approval in May 2025, 1,475 of them are for residential districts and 75 for two mixed-use zones. The city isn't issuing new permits while it's at the cap, so newcomers join a wait list, and an existing permit can be transferred only under the city's rules. The city's island-specific rental limits apply to Newport Island, not Balboa Island. Finally, the whole island lies in the coastal zone. The city has issued most coastal development permits since its Local Coastal Program took effect January 30, 2017. House and duplex projects on lots that don't abut the harbor are generally excluded from those permits, but bay-front lots need one and stay in the Coastal Commission's appeal area.