Myrtle Beach Community and Lifestyle: The Election, the Service Economy, and the History Behind It

November 2025: A Crime-Focused Mayoral Upset, Not a Routine Reelection

In the November 2025 municipal election, Mark Kruea -- the City of Myrtle Beach's own former Public Information Officer for nearly 26 years, who had retired in 2024 -- won the mayor's office outright with 51% of the vote in a five-candidate field. He defeated two-term incumbent Brenda Bethune, who took just 28%, a wide enough margin to count as a genuine repudiation rather than a close-fought reelection. Kruea, 68, ran explicitly against what he characterized as excessive downtown and 'Arts and Innovation District' investment at the expense of established neighborhoods, and made public safety the center of his campaign. In an October 2025 debate, he put it directly: 'Myrtle Beach's reputation is at stake because of the crime problems facing the city' (per the Post and Courier). Kruea was sworn in for a four-year term beginning January 2026.

Myrtle Beach runs a council-manager form of government, in place since 1974, in which the mayor sits as a council member-at-large presiding over meetings rather than holding separate executive authority -- meaning Kruea's actual power runs through the six-member council alongside him, not a strong-mayor office. Per the city's own website, the current council roster is C. H. Mike Lowder Jr., Michael 'Mike' Chestnut, Deborah 'Debbie' K. Conner, Ph.D. (Mayor Pro Tem), Jackie Hatley, Bill McClure, and Philip N. Render, DMD. That roster was not independently cross-checked against meeting minutes for this page, and given how recently the mayor's office changed hands, confirm the current council lineup directly with the City of Myrtle Beach before relying on any name here.

Read plainly, this is a real and current data point about how year-round residents talk about livability in this city right now -- a sitting incumbent lost by 23 points after a campaign fought substantially over whether downtown development was coming at neighborhoods' expense, and over whether the city felt safe. That is not the language of a settled, tourism-brochure version of Myrtle Beach; it is an active civic argument that a four-year Kruea term will now have to answer.

A Massive Tourism Economy, a Median Income That Reflects Who Actually Works It

Myrtle Beach's visitor economy operates at a scale that has no real parallel among this site's other markets: the Post and Courier's 2025 reporting cites more than 18 million visitors in 2024, and Wikipedia separately states 'over 20 million visitors each year' -- both figures several times larger than the city's entire year-round population, which sources put anywhere from roughly 35,700 (2020 Census) to the low-40,000s by 2026 depending on methodology. That scale is not incidental to community life here; it is the reason the city's tax base, employment base, and land-use fights all run through tourism first.

The resident side of that equation is worth stating in plain numbers rather than glossing over with 'laid-back beach town' language: southcarolina-demographics.com's 2024 estimate puts Myrtle Beach's median household income at $60,394 -- below both the South Carolina state median and the national median. That figure is consistent with a resident workforce concentrated in the lower-wage, seasonal tourism, hospitality, and retail sectors that also generate the area's massive visitor numbers -- the same industry that funds the city budget also caps, for many residents, what they take home. Assistant City Manager Brian Tucker has spoken directly to this tension, describing the city's push to diversify its job base beyond seasonal tourism: 'a key component of making this a year-round livable place is to diversify our job base,' aiming for a transition 'from being a busy city four months out of the year versus being a busy city 12 months out of the year.'

That tension is not just an abstraction, either -- it is showing up in the city's own regulatory choices. On December 10, 2024, City Council approved an ordinance banning owners from converting short-term rentals back into long-term rentals across essentially the entire primary tourism corridor, after an economic-impact study found that converting just 1,000 rental rooms to long-term use would cost the city, county, and state a combined $7.6 million in lost accommodations, food-and-beverage, and business-license tax revenue. That is a city government using its zoning power to keep the tourism economy load-bearing, in a market where the same industry that draws 18-20 million-plus annual visitors also produces a below-median local wage base.

Atlantic Beach, "the Black Pearl": A Beach Town Built to Survive Segregation

A few miles up this coastline sits a chapter of Grand Strand history that deserves the same seriousness this site has given Gullah Geechee history at Hilton Head, not a footnote wedged between golf statistics. Atlantic Beach was founded in 1934, when entrepreneur George W. Tyson purchased 47 acres and built the Black Hawk Night Club, encouraging other African-Americans to buy plots alongside him -- the first major sale of ten plots closed on March 3, 1936. Tyson transferred the property to the Atlantic Beach Company in 1943, which continued selling plots through 1957, and the community incorporated independently in 1966.

During the era of legal segregation, Atlantic Beach flourished as one of the only beach vacation destinations on this entire coast open to Black visitors -- at a time when the oceanfront a few miles south was legally closed to them. The Black Hawk Night Club hosted national R&B acts, drawing Black vacationers from across the region to a stretch of oceanfront they could actually rent a room and swim at. Bikefest, launched in 1980 as a deliberate economic-revitalization strategy timed to Memorial Day weekend, grew directly out of that history and remains a major annual event today. Atlantic Beach is described by multiple sources as one of the few African-American-owned beach communities remaining in the United States, and its community continues active, present-day work preserving Gullah-Geechee heritage -- this is not a closed historical chapter but an ongoing one.

Atlantic Beach's independence is not incidental, either -- it is the direct result of a choice made in response to segregation-era exclusion. When four adjacent beach communities (Cherry Grove, Ocean Drive Beach, Crescent Beach, and Windy Hill) consolidated in 1968 to form North Myrtle Beach, Atlantic Beach did not join them. North Myrtle Beach's own postwar development carries documented Jim Crow-era deed restrictions barring Black ownership, and Atlantic Beach declined to fold into that consolidation for exactly that reason, choosing to remain a small, independent, Black-owned town rather than be absorbed into a neighbor built on exclusion. Two adjoining beach towns, two entirely different founding logics, sitting on the same few miles of Grand Strand coastline -- both real, both dated, and both worth naming directly rather than smoothing into a single undifferentiated 'Grand Strand' brand.

What This Means for Evaluating Community Fit

Taken together, Myrtle Beach's community fabric right now is not a single settled picture: it is a city that just replaced its mayor in a genuine electoral upset fought over crime and neighborhood priorities, sitting on top of a service economy so large it draws 18-20 million-plus annual visitors against a year-round population under 50,000 while paying many of its own residents a below-median wage, immediately adjacent to a small independent town whose very existence is a direct, documented response to segregation-era exclusion from the beach next door. None of that is generic beach-town marketing copy, and none of it should be smoothed away for a tidier narrative.

None of this should be read as a settled snapshot, either. The council roster, the exact current city and metro population, and the true all-in tax burden on tourism spending are all either actively in flux or genuinely disputed across the sources checked for this page -- confirm the current council lineup and any current-year civic detail directly with the City of Myrtle Beach before relying on it here.

A Professional-Consult Disclaimer

The median household income figure cited above ($60,394) is a single-source estimate from southcarolina-demographics.com's 2024 ACS-based reading, not a live government feed, and it will move over time; this site's broader Myrtle Beach research also found the city's population itself disputed across sources by several thousand residents depending on vintage and methodology. Economic and tax figures referenced elsewhere in this site's Myrtle Beach research -- the STR tax stack, property assessment ratios, and accommodations-tax revenue trends -- are similarly sourced estimates, not financial or tax advice. Confirm current income, employment, tax, and cost-of-living figures directly with the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce, the U.S. Census Bureau, and a qualified local professional before making any relocation, purchase, or investment decision. Nothing on this page is legal, tax, financial, or relocation advice.