We could have built HAUS XXIV anywhere and called it a headquarters. Instead we built it in a port city that has never asked permission to be itself, and that choice shapes every brand we touch. Here's what Long Beach taught us before we ever taught it anything back.
A city that never tried to be Los Angeles
Long Beach sits twenty miles south of Los Angeles and gets treated, more often than not, like a footnote to it. Anyone who has spent real time here knows better. This is the seventh-largest city in California, home to close to half a million people, and it has never once tried to be the entertainment capital next door (United States Census Bureau). It doesn’t need to. Long Beach built its own identity on cargo ships and shipyards, on immigrant neighborhoods that grew into whole districts, on a working port and the people who kept it running. Writers Joel Kotkin and Alicia Kurimska put it plainly in City Journal, calling Long Beach "unpretentious and vital" in sharp contrast to Los Angeles and San Francisco. That is the city we chose to build a haus in, and it is not a coincidence.
“Long Beach is hardly a 1950s middle”
class paradise, but, in sharp contrast with Los Angeles or San Francisco, the state’s seventh-largest city remains unpretentious and vital." — Joel Kotkin and Alicia Kurimska, City Journal
We didn’t move here for the skyline. We moved here because a city that refuses to perform for anyone is exactly the kind of place that raises people who refuse to blend in.
The port taught us how to build
You cannot live near the Port of Long Beach and stay soft about work ethic. It is the second-busiest container port in the country, moving nearly ten million container units a year and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs across the region (Port of Long Beach). That is not background noise. That is a daily reminder that this city runs on labor, logistics, and getting the hard thing done on schedule, every single day, without a press release for it.
We build the same way. No shortcuts dressed up as strategy. No "good enough" passed off as craft. The port doesn’t stop moving because the tide is inconvenient, and we don’t stop pushing a brand toward its sharpest version because the easy draft would ship faster. Long Beach runs on people who show up and do the work. So do we.
Diverse by nature, not by strategy
Long Beach has been called the most ethnically diverse large city in the country, and it earned that reputation the honest way, through decades of immigration and community-building rather than a marketing plan (USA Today; U.S. Census Bureau). Nearly a quarter of residents were born outside the United States. Close to forty-five percent speak a language other than English at home. Cambodia Town sits blocks from Little Saigon-adjacent neighborhoods, which sit blocks from Black-owned businesses that trace back generations, which sit blocks from the East Village Arts District and its monthly Artwalk of independent galleries and studios (City of Long Beach; Wikipedia).
We are not from every one of those communities. We don’t claim to be. But we operate inside a city that made diversity of thought, culture, and business ordinary rather than exceptional, and that changes how a haus thinks. It makes "the overlooked" a neighbor, not an abstraction.
Small business is the backbone, not the sideshow
Ask the Long Beach Post what they cover on any given week and you’ll find a century-old auto shop nearly lost and then saved by new ownership, a market rebuilding after a fire, a food truck operator still standing fifteen years in (Long Beach Post). That is not filler content. That is the actual texture of this city’s economy: independent owners who built something from nothing and refuse to let it go quietly.
The Long Beach Economic Partnership exists because that texture is worth protecting on purpose, not by accident. Its work centers on growing and retaining the businesses already here rather than chasing whichever industry looks flashiest this quarter (Long Beach Economic Partnership). We recognize that instinct because it’s ours too. We didn’t build HAUS XXIV to court the biggest logo in the room. We built it to make the small business down the street look as sharp and as serious as anyone twenty times its size, because in this city, that business earned the right to look that way a long time ago.
“Long Beach gave us the blueprint before we ever wrote one down. A port city doesn’t get to fake its work. Neither do we.”
David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV
Heritage, not a cage
None of this means Long Beach is the only place we build. We work with founders and brands well past this city’s borders, and we always will. But heritage means something, and pretending we came from nowhere in particular would be its own kind of dishonesty, the exact kind we built this haus to refuse. Long Beach is where the conviction got sharpened. It is not a limit on where that conviction can travel.
Every city has a story it tells about itself. Long Beach’s story is that it works hard, welcomes everyone who shows up ready to build, and never asked Los Angeles for a permission slip. We think that’s a pretty good story to build a haus inside of. We think it’s an even better one to build brands from.
