Long Beach, MS — The Friendly City, a 500-Year-Old Oak, and an Entirely Man-Made Beach

What Long Beach Actually Is

Long Beach, Mississippi was incorporated in 1905 and today is its own city -- with its own mayor and board of aldermen, not a Gulfport neighborhood -- sitting on Harrison County's stretch of the Mississippi Sound between Gulfport to the east and Pass Christian to the west. It's a genuinely small, walkable place: about 10.4 square miles and roughly 17,000-17,400 residents by recent estimates, nicknamed "The Friendly City" locally, with a median household income around $70,300 (2024) and a median age of about 39.6, somewhat younger than many of its Gulf Coast neighbors. The city sits inside the Gulfport-Biloxi metro area, giving residents access to a larger regional job market, two casino-anchored economies in Biloxi and Gulfport, and the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, while still functioning as its own distinct municipality with its own school district, police and fire departments, and property tax rate.

The single most distinctive institutional anchor in Long Beach is the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus, built on the former site of Gulf Park College, a historic women's junior college. USM took the campus over in 1972, it became part of a formal dual-campus system in 1998, and in 2002 the Mississippi Supreme Court granted permission for the campus to offer freshman- and sophomore-level classes for the first time, expanding it into a full four-year option on the coast. The campus's best-known landmark is the Friendship Oak -- a live oak documented at more than 500 years old, dating to roughly 1487, making it the oldest living tree in the state of Mississippi. Local legend holds that anyone who enters its shade with a friend remains friends for life; more concretely, the tree has survived Katrina and every other hurricane to hit the coast in five centuries, and it sits a short walk from the beach on Highway 90.

Katrina is unavoidable in any honest accounting of Long Beach, and this page treats it as real, sourced history rather than a footnote. On August 29, 2005, the storm made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane, and storm surge estimated at roughly 25.7 to 28 feet (sources vary by exact measurement point) came ashore along the Long Beach shoreline -- comparable in severity to the surge that hit Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis a few miles west, not meaningfully less. The result: 715 single-family homes demolished, entire neighborhoods south of the CSX railroad tracks leveled, 60 businesses in the commercial district destroyed or closed, 12 municipal buildings destroyed or heavily damaged, 6 lives lost, and more than $364.9 million in documented property damage. The USM Gulf Park campus itself flooded all the way to the railroad tracks. Long Beach's population dropped from 17,320 at the 2000 census to 14,792 by 2010 as a direct result, before climbing back to 16,780 by 2020 and an estimated 17,000-17,400 today -- a genuine, multi-decade recovery story, not a market that quietly moved on without scars.

Two more recent, concrete facts round out the picture. First, Long Beach's own small-craft harbor -- a marina formed by a mole and jetty just west of the USM pier -- was separately destroyed by Hurricane Zeta's 8.2-foot storm surge in October 2020, and has been under reconstruction since, funded in part by a $2.18 million GOMESA federal grant announced in 2021 for a new protective bulkhead. Second, like every other beach along this stretch of Harrison County, Long Beach's own beach is not a natural feature: it's part of the 26-mile Harrison County Sand Beach, engineered and filled with imported sand by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1951-52 after a destructive 1947 hurricane, following an earlier 1926-28 seawall project, and it's actively maintained today by the Harrison County Sand Beach Authority rather than left to natural dune dynamics. Neither fact is a reason to avoid Long Beach -- but both are real, current, and relevant to how a buyer should think about coastal risk and public infrastructure dependency here.

Dining, Downtown, and the Harbor

Long Beach's downtown is small and walkable, running along Jeff Davis Avenue with locally owned shops like Sister Swank Boutique and Coast Roast Coffee & Tea. For food, Long Beach Market & Deli is a longtime local spot for stacked sandwiches and po'boys, and Harbor View Café serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a Coastal-Southern menu; the broader dining scene along Highway 90 adds Southern, barbecue, Mexican, and Vietnamese-influenced Gulf Coast options typical of this stretch of Harrison County. The rebuilt Long Beach Harbor is the other everyday anchor -- local charter operators including Impulsive Charters and Still Water Fishing Charters run fishing trips directly out of the harbor, putting genuine, working Gulf fishing access a short walk or drive from most of the city rather than something residents have to travel to Biloxi or Gulfport for.

Beyond downtown and the harbor, the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus functions as a genuine community landmark, not just a commuter school -- the Friendship Oak alone draws steady local and visitor foot traffic, and the campus sits directly on Highway 90 a short walk from the beach itself. For a broader restaurant scene, casino resorts, or bigger-city amenities, Long Beach residents drive a few minutes east into Gulfport or Biloxi; this page's real-cost and investment-outlook pages, along with the neighboring-market comparisons in the sidebar, cover those larger markets directly.