Lincoln City — A Merged Town, a Tsunami Zone, and a Genuine Kite Wind

What Actually Makes Lincoln City Different

Lincoln City is a merger, not an old town that grew -- and that origin still shapes how the place is laid out and how locals talk about it. On December 4, 1964, voters across five separate unincorporated communities strung along roughly seven miles of Highway 101 -- Oceanlake and Delake in the north-central area between the ocean and Devils Lake, Nelscott just south, and Cutler City and Taft further south toward Siletz Bay -- approved consolidation by a margin of only three votes. After electing a mayor and council and setting a budget, the new city was officially incorporated on March 3, 1965. Choosing a name was nearly as contentious as the merger vote itself: residents rejected any name duplicating an existing Oregon city, and the winning choice, Lincoln City, was picked from a newspaper ballot listing five finalists that also included Miracle Beach, Miracle City, Surfland, and Holiday Beach. Those original five towns had genuinely different origins -- Taft grew from a Siletz tribal allotment belonging to Sissie and Jakie Johnson on Siletz Bay; Cutler City from an allotment inherited by Charlie Depoe, also Siletz; Nelscott began as a campground whose name combined founders Herbert Rexroad and Edgar Hoyt's surnames; and Oceanlake and Delake developed independently in the strip of land between the Pacific and Devils Lake -- and all six named areas (the fifth-plus-Roads End) remain the names residents and city planning documents actually use for different parts of town today, not marketing labels invented later.

The town's most famous quirk sits squarely inside that merged geography: the D River, which drains Devils Lake into the Pacific at the D River State Recreation Site in the middle of town, was named "D" in a 1940 contest run out of the old Delake community specifically to have the shortest possible name for what organizers wanted to be recognized as the world's shortest river. Guinness did list it as the world's shortest river at 440 feet for years. That title has been genuinely, publicly contested since 1987, when fifth-graders at a Great Falls, Montana elementary school launched a campaign for their local Roe River (measured at 201 feet, flowing from Giant Springs to the Missouri River), and Guinness recognized the Roe as shortest in 1989. Lincoln City pushed back with its own remeasurement -- roughly 120 feet at extreme high tide -- and locals reportedly called the Roe "a drainage ditch surveyed for a school project." Neither side fully won: in 2006, Guinness dropped the "world's shortest river" category from its book altogether, calling it too difficult to conclusively adjudicate. That's the honest, current status of the claim as of this research pass -- a real, well-documented dispute with no settled winner, not a clean fact either town can still claim outright. As of April 27, 2026, Oregon State Parks transferred management of the D River State Recreation Site itself to the City of Lincoln City under a no-cost lease, and the city has begun a $6.7 million Welcome Center project at the site (the old restroom building was removed in May 2026), with completion targeted for early 2027 -- a real, current construction disruption at what was, per the state's own count, the sixth-busiest state park site on the Oregon coast in 2025, with more than 1.1 million visitors.

The kite-flying reputation and the outlet-shopping draw are both real, sourced tourism identities, not marketing flourishes layered on afterward. Lincoln City's Summer Kite Festival reached its 40th year in 2025, meaning it dates to roughly the mid-1980s, and the town runs a second Fall Kite Festival most years as well -- both traditionally staged on the open beach at D River State Recreation Site, with the 2026 Summer festival relocated to Chinook Winds Casino Resort specifically because of the D River construction project. This research did not find a source ranking Lincoln City as objectively the windiest town on the Oregon coast by measured average wind speed -- general climate data shows a fairly modest average (January, the windiest month, averages roughly 9.8 mph, with December gusts reported up to 15.8 mph) -- so the kite-festival draw is better understood as a long-running cultural and event tradition built around a reliably breezy, wide-open beach, not a claim to the single highest wind speeds on the coast. The outlet-shopping side is more straightforward: Oregon's first outlet mall opened here in 1989 at 1500 SE East Devils Lake Road, operated by Tanger until it was sold and rebranded Lincoln City Outlets in 2015, and remains, per the mall's own description, a roughly 60-store draw pulling millions of visitors a year -- a real, decades-old retail anchor that, combined with Oregon's lack of any state sales tax, makes outlet shopping a genuine, sourced part of the town's tourism economy.

Property taxation here runs through Oregon's Measure 50 system, a genuinely different mechanism than most other states' market-value-based property tax. Since 1997, each property's Assessed Value has been capped at growing no more than 3% a year regardless of how much its Real Market Value moves, with a few statutory exceptions (like new construction). Lincoln County's own materials show that gap playing out concretely in the most recent cycle: countywide Real Market Value rose only about 0.8% from January 1, 2024 to January 1, 2025, while Assessed Value -- the actual number taxes are calculated against -- rose the full 3.6% Measure 50 allows in a typical year, a reminder that Assessed Value and Real Market Value can diverge in either direction. Lincoln County administers 85 separate taxing districts across schools, fire, water, port, and other special districts, each with its own boundaries and rate, meaning no single flat percentage cleanly describes every Lincoln City property's bill; one third-party aggregator (Ownwell) puts the median effective property tax rate around 0.80% of value, offered here as a directional estimate rather than a confirmed permanent rate. This page's Property Tax Guide goes into the mechanics in more depth. What this research could not confirm and does not invent: the exact current city-of-Lincoln-City permanent tax rate expressed per $1,000 of assessed value, a single authoritative median home price (Zillow, Redfin, and other trackers disagreed by more than $100,000 across snapshots taken within months of each other in this small market), specific current insurance premiums for a Lincoln City address, and the town's FEMA Community Rating System status, if any. Confirm all of these directly with the Lincoln County Assessor's Office, the City of Lincoln City, and a licensed Oregon insurance agent before budgeting a purchase.