Neighborhoods and Communities in Little River, SC
Little River is small and unincorporated enough that it doesn't have the dozens of named, HOA-governed subdivisions a larger Grand Strand city has. This page covers the specific, real, named communities this research could confirm -- Coquina Harbour, Harbourgate, and the historic waterfront core -- and is direct about where a more comprehensive neighborhood list would need further confirmation.
The Historic Waterfront Core
The heart of Little River, and the area most people mean when they picture the community, is the historic waterfront district directly on the Intracoastal Waterway -- a strip of docks, restaurants, and marina businesses that has functioned as a working fishing harbor for generations. Named restaurants here include Hurricane Juel's Restaurant, sitting directly on the Little River Waterfront; Crab Catchers, offering fresh seafood and waterfront views; The Parson's Table, occupying a converted church building; and Clark's Seafood & Chop House, with a marina view. This is also where the annual World Famous Blue Crab Festival is held, an event that started in 1981 and now draws more than 300 vendors and over 30,000 attendees to these same streets. Property here tends to be older and more mixed-use in character -- commercial waterfront businesses alongside residential -- rather than a single uniform residential subdivision.
Coquina Harbour
Coquina Harbour is a genuinely distinctive, documented waterfront community with an unusual origin: it was dug in the 1960s as a coquina mine -- coquina being a limestone-like building material made of compacted shell fragments -- and the resulting excavated basin was later opened to the Intracoastal Waterway. The basin was reportedly found to be deeper than the EPA wanted and was partially filled with sand; today it runs roughly 11 feet deep and serves four separate marinas. Real estate in and around Coquina Harbour is generally marketed as a marina community, meaning proximity to or direct access to that shared harbor and its marina infrastructure is a core part of the appeal, similar in spirit to a golf-course community but organized around boat access instead. This page did not independently confirm current HOA structure, specific home types, or price ranges within Coquina Harbour beyond the broader market-wide figures covered on this site's Real Cost of Ownership page.
Harbourgate
Harbourgate is built around Harbourgate Marina, a full-service marina on the Intracoastal Waterway with 100 deep-water wet boat slips, a fuel dock, a ship store, a boatyard with a 50-ton travel lift, and a waterfront restaurant and tiki bar. The broader Harbourgate complex includes waterfront residential units and waterfront office space alongside the marina itself, making it a mixed residential-and-marina community rather than a purely residential subdivision. As with Coquina Harbour, this page did not independently confirm current HOA fee structures, specific unit types, or price ranges within Harbourgate beyond the market-wide figures cited elsewhere on this site.
Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens and the Nearby Corridor
Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens, a short drive from Harbourgate Marina, offers trails and boardwalks winding through marsh and along the Intracoastal Waterway -- a real, publicly accessible amenity that shapes the character of the surrounding area even though it isn't itself a residential community. Its presence near Harbourgate is a genuine amenity data point for anyone evaluating that part of Little River: direct walking/nature access to protected marshland alongside marina and boating infrastructure, a combination that doesn't exist at every Grand Strand address.
What a Comprehensive Neighborhood List Would Need
Beyond the historic waterfront core, Coquina Harbour, and Harbourgate, Little River almost certainly contains additional named residential subdivisions and communities -- inland from the immediate waterfront, along the Little River corridor, and near the state line toward Calabash, NC -- that this research did not independently confirm by name this pass. This site's content rules prohibit inventing subdivision names or characteristics that weren't actually verified, so rather than pad this page with plausible-sounding but unconfirmed community names, it states the gap directly: a local buyer's agent working active Little River listings, or the Horry County GIS/property records system, is the right source for a comprehensive current list of named subdivisions and their HOA structures.
Choosing Between the Confirmed Options
Among the three areas this page can speak to with confidence: the historic waterfront core suits a buyer who wants to be inside the actual working fishing-village district, walking distance to restaurants and the Blue Crab Festival grounds, with a more mixed commercial-residential character. Coquina Harbour and Harbourgate both suit a buyer prioritizing direct or near-direct marina access and boat storage, with Harbourgate's marina offering a large, confirmed wet-slip count (100 slips) and full-service amenities (fuel, ship store, boatyard) that make it a meaningfully different day-to-day experience than a purely residential waterfront lot. Which of the two marina communities fits better depends on specific inventory, price, and HOA terms at the time of a search -- variables this page cannot responsibly generalize about without current, address-specific data.
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Get a Free Agent Referral →Independent research. No ads. No sponsored listings. Data sourced from: VisitMyrtleBeach.com and North Myrtle Beach-area tourism sources for the historic waterfront district's named restaurants (Hurricane Juel's, Crab Catchers, The Parson's Table, Clark's Seafood & Chop House); WBTW News coverage of the Blue Crab Festival's history and scale, corroborated by the festival's own site and the Little River Chamber of Commerce; marina-industry and real-estate sources (SeaMagazine's marina directory, the SC Picture Project, and C21 McAlpine's local-market guide) for Harbourgate Marina's slip count and amenities, Coquina Harbour's coquina-mine origin and current depth and marina count, and Vereen Memorial Historical Gardens' trail and boardwalk description. Facts not independently confirmed and not invented here include: a comprehensive list of named residential subdivisions in Little River beyond the historic waterfront core, Coquina Harbour, and Harbourgate; current HOA fee structures for either marina community; and specific home-type or price-range breakdowns within each community. Confirm a comprehensive, current neighborhood list and HOA specifics with a local buyer's agent or Horry County's property records/GIS system before narrowing a search to a specific community. Nothing on this page is real estate advice.