Long Beach doesn't perform its creativity for anyone passing through. It builds it, block by block, mural by mural, storefront by storefront. Here's what we see when we look at the city we call home.
A city that never learned to blend in
Every city says it’s creative. Long Beach is one of the few that can prove it.
We didn’t pick Long Beach because it was convenient. We picked it because it already believes what we believe: that the work you make matters more than the pedigree behind it, and that a place doesn’t earn a creative reputation by branding itself one. It earns it the slow way, by filling its blocks with people who build things by hand and refuse to apologize for taking up space.
Walk any part of this city and you’ll find it. A muralist finishing a wall on Anaheim Street. A gallery owner rehanging a show before the paint dries on the last one. A restaurant serving food you can’t get anywhere else in the county, run by a family who’s been in the neighborhood for thirty years. None of it is staged. That’s the difference between a city with a creative reputation and a city that is actually creative.
An arts district built one gallery at a time
Downtown’s East Village Arts District is the clearest proof of it. The neighborhood runs roughly from Long Beach Boulevard to Alamitos Avenue, and Ocean Boulevard up to 10th Street, a compact grid holding art galleries, independent boutiques, used bookstores, mid-century furniture dealers, and restaurants slinging everything from Ethiopian food to natural wine (Wikipedia). The Broadlind Hotel and the Campbell Apartments, both raised in 1928, still anchor the streetscape, proof this neighborhood has always drawn people who wanted to build something with their hands (Wikipedia).
The district’s Second Saturday Art Walk has run for two decades, and in August 2023 it relaunched under new stewardship after its longtime organizer stepped back. Michael Mosselli and Marty Meier, owners of Brushstrokes and Beverages, picked it back up with backing from the Arts Council for Long Beach, the East Village Association, the Downtown Long Beach Alliance, and Make Collectives. The relaunched route runs past 22 galleries and businesses and 22 murals, threading through two green spaces along the way (Long Beach Post).
“Our main goal is to bring increased traffic to the area for the many businesses, galleries and artists.”
Marty Meier, co-organizer, East Village Second Saturday Art Walk, qtd. in Long Beach Post
That’s a community rebuilding its own infrastructure because the work deserved better than letting it quietly stop. Nobody waited for a developer or a grant to greenlight it. They just did it, together, the way this city tends to.
A melting pot that got stirred well
Long Beach’s creative energy doesn’t come from one scene. It comes from the fact that almost no two blocks look, sound, or taste the same. This is a city where roughly 44% of residents are Latino, 13% are Asian Pacific Islander, and 12% are Black, alongside a significant LGBTQ+ community, and it shows up in the work people make (ABC7 Los Angeles). Cambodia Town, the 1.2-mile stretch of Anaheim Street between Atlantic and Junipero, is home to the largest Cambodian population outside Cambodia itself, dozens of Khmer-owned businesses, and artistic groups actively preserving Cambodian music, dance, and visual art for the next generation (Visit Long Beach).
“It isn’t really a melting pot that got stirred. Long Beach actually got stirred well.”
Chanel Smith, Long Beach resident, qtd. in ABC7 Los Angeles
That line captures something we think about constantly. Diversity isn’t a talking point here. It’s the reason the city’s creative output doesn’t sound like anywhere else. When your neighbors are building from different histories, different languages, different tables, the work that comes out of that proximity is sharper and stranger and better than anything a single point of view could produce alone.
An economy that ships the world and builds its own backbone
None of this creativity floats free of the city’s economic engine. The Port of Long Beach supports roughly one in five jobs in the city, 51,090 of them locally as of the most recent economic impact study, a 70 percent jump from 2004 (Port of Long Beach). That’s real infrastructure, real payrolls, real reasons families put down roots here for generations instead of passing through.
The Long Beach Economic Partnership formalized what a lot of us already knew when it published its "Creative Economy of Long Beach: Unexpected Connections" report in October 2023, a study tracking the city’s arts, entertainment, fashion, and architecture sectors as legitimate economic drivers, not side hustles (Long Beach Economic Partnership). A port city and a creative city aren’t opposites. They’re the same city, built by people who know how to make something out of raw material and get it where it needs to go.
Not Los Angeles. Never trying to be.
Long Beach sits between two much louder neighbors, and it has never once tried to sound like either of them. Ask anyone who lives here and they’ll tell you the same thing: this city has its own gravity. Its own vibe. Its own way of building.
“Long Beach didn’t hand us a scene. It handed us a city full of people building things without waiting for permission. That’s the only kind of home base we ever wanted.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
We build here because the city already understands the thing our entire haus is built on. Safe doesn’t survive here. Bold does. Long Beach has been proving that with murals, galleries, family restaurants, and a port that never stops moving, long before anyone thought to write it down.
