What Nobody Tells You About Longport

A Wealthy Enclave Fought a Decade at the NJ Supreme Court -- Just to Switch Towns

Seaview Harbor is not part of Longport -- it is a waterfront subdivision built in the 1960s inside neighboring Egg Harbor Township, comprising 92 homes with private docks plus a restaurant and marina with 300 boat slips, and a combined assessed value of roughly $100 million. That distinction matters, because Seaview Harbor's decade-long fight to leave Egg Harbor Township and join Longport instead is one of the more revealing stories on this whole stretch of coast about what a municipal boundary is actually worth.

Beginning around 2014, Seaview Harbor property owners petitioned to secede from Egg Harbor Township and annex into Longport, and the numbers behind that push were dramatic: court evidence showed a $1 million home would face roughly $31,400 a year in property taxes under Egg Harbor Township, versus roughly $9,800 a year under Longport -- a documented difference of about $21,600 annually on a single home. Egg Harbor Township's Township Committee denied the petition in 2016. A trial judge ruled against Seaview Harbor in February 2020. The New Jersey Appellate Division affirmed that ruling in a 48-page opinion in December 2021, agreeing that deannexation would cause "the loss of social and economic diversity" and cost Egg Harbor Township roughly $2.3 million in annual tax revenue -- a projected 5.9-cent tax-rate increase for the residents left behind. The New Jersey Supreme Court denied further appeal shortly after, ending the litigation with Seaview Harbor remaining part of Egg Harbor Township.

The honest takeaway is not that Longport did anything wrong -- Longport was simply the more tax-favorable destination residents of a neighboring enclave wanted to join. It is that a difference of roughly $21,600 a year on a $1 million home was worth pursuing all the way to the state's highest court, over nearly a decade. Anyone comparing Longport to a neighboring municipality on paper should understand just how real -- and how litigated -- these boundary economics can get.

Seven Signs, One Zoning Officer, and a Small Honest Tension Over the Dunes

In July 2025, Longport installed seven educational signs along its beach crossovers after officials observed beachgoers standing on protective dunes -- including a July 4th Facebook post showing people standing on the dunes to watch the fireworks. It is a small story, but a genuinely current one, and it says something honest about how a beach town balances casual public use against the conservation work that protects it.

Zoning Officer Bruce Funk was quoted explaining why the borough acted: "People don't understand how important the dunes are. The diversity of wildlife there is amazing," adding that the dunes are "more than just a pile of sand." Each of the seven signs, one of four designs, carries a QR code linking to a dedicated website called Our Dunes. The $5,000 initiative was funded through a CAFRA Trust Fund donation -- a coastal-development-approval requirement -- with the signs themselves costing roughly $700 each to install.

This is not a lawsuit or a crisis, and it should not be read as one. It is a small, current, well-documented reminder that the dunes protecting Longport's homes are not scenery -- they are functioning coastal infrastructure that ordinary beach behavior can undermine without anyone intending harm.

A Town That Is Mostly Water -- Because 180 Acres of It Already Washed Away

Longport sits on the southwest corner of Absecon Island, an 8.1-mile barrier island it shares with Margate City, Ventnor City, and Atlantic City. Today the borough's total area is just 1.56 square miles, and only 0.40 square miles of that is land -- the remaining 1.16 square miles is water, meaning Longport is roughly 74.5% water by area, among the highest water-to-land ratios of any Jersey Shore town.

That is not an accident of mapmaking. Between 1900 and 1916, storms eroded 180 acres comprising ten numbered, platted streets on the southern end of the barrier island, permanently reshaping Longport's geography. This was not gradual beach narrowing -- it was the loss of streets that had actually been laid out and numbered, streets that today simply do not exist. The precise former boundaries and original names of those ten streets were not confirmed in this research and are not invented here, but the scale of the loss -- 180 acres, ten numbered streets -- is well documented.

The practical point for a buyer is that Longport's current, water-dominant footprint is not just a scenic feature of a barrier-island town -- it is partly the direct, lasting result of a real erosion event more than a century ago. A landscape that has already lost that much land once is worth taking seriously today, even where no active lawsuit or current crisis is underway.

Why These Three Facts Belong on the Table Together

An enclave fighting for a decade over tax dollars, a zoning officer asking beachgoers to stay off the dunes, and a century-old loss of platted streets are not connected by drama -- they are connected by the same underlying lesson: on this stretch of the Jersey Shore, municipal lines, dune lines, and coastlines are all treated as things worth defending, litigating, and rebuilding, because the money and the land at stake are real.

None of this makes Longport a risky or declining place to buy. Its population has stayed remarkably stable for decades and its tax base was strong enough to make it a destination other towns' residents fought in court to join. It does mean a buyer should walk in understanding that the quiet, low-key feel of Longport sits on top of a place where boundaries -- both legal and physical -- have been actively contested and actively reshaped, not simply inherited unchanged.

What This Research Could Not Resolve

This page confirmed its facts through Wikipedia's own Longport, New Jersey entry, DownBeach's July 2025 coverage of the dune-signage initiative, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Press of Atlantic City, and DownBeach's extensive coverage of the Seaview Harbor secession litigation. It did not find, and does not invent, any current (2026) permanent population figure beyond the 2020 census count of 893, a current median home price, active listing counts, or specific current rental rates. Longport's 2018 ranking as New Jersey's 22nd most expensive ZIP code, its $767,500 median home sale price in 2017, and its $10,872 average property tax bill in 2018 are real but dated figures, not current pricing.

Also not confirmed this research pass: current Longport or Egg Harbor Township property tax rates or the current New Jersey state sales tax rate (New Jersey has its own state sales tax and its own property-tax structure, distinct from states with no sales tax at all, and none of that should be assumed to match another state's rules); whether Seaview Harbor residents pursued any further legal or legislative avenue after the New Jersey Supreme Court's denial of appeal; specific current flood-zone designations for individual Longport parcels; specific current restaurant, shop, or business names; and the precise former boundaries or original names of the ten streets lost between 1900 and 1916. Confirm current details directly with the Borough of Longport's own finance office, Atlantic County government, a New Jersey real estate attorney, and FEMA's Flood Map Service Center. Nothing on this page is legal, tax, or financial advice.