Seaside / Sand City — Fort Ord's Second Life, Not a Postcard Aquarium Town
Seaside and Sand City sit side by side on the south shore of Monterey Bay, at the northern edge of the Monterey Peninsula -- next door to Monterey, Pacific Grove, and Carmel-by-the-Sea, but priced and built very differently from all three. Both cities exist in their current form largely because of the U.S. Army: Seaside's founder lobbied Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 to put Fort Ord here, the base trained soldiers for eight decades before closing in 1994, and California State University, Monterey Bay now occupies a 1,350-acre slice of that former post straddling Seaside and neighboring Marina. Sand City, fully surrounded by Seaside and one of California's smallest incorporated cities by population, has its own separate origin story -- a 20th-century sand-mining town turned small arts community sitting next to a protected dune preserve. What that history means for a buyer today: newer, less postcard-pretty housing stock than Carmel or Pacific Grove, meaningfully lower prices than either of those neighbors or Monterey itself, a still-unfolding base-redevelopment story (new mixed-use housing under construction on former Fort Ord land right now), and a handful of genuinely disclosed, sourced facts about the base's environmental legacy that this page lays out plainly rather than glossing over.
What Seaside and Sand City Actually Are
Seaside's story starts with Dr. John Roberts, who left New York for California in 1887 and, with an uncle, bought and subdivided 160 acres near Pacific Grove into 1,000 vacation-property lots. As Monterey County Supervisor in 1910, Roberts lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to site a new U.S. Army base on land near his development -- Fort Ord, established in 1917 as Camp Gigling, went on to train infantry for the better part of eight decades and became a notable early test case for military desegregation given its large population of soldiers of color. Seaside itself didn't incorporate until 1954, after a fight for cityhood that community and business leaders had pushed since 1940; a 1968 annexation of additional Fort Ord land pushed the city's population past 32,000. The Army closed Fort Ord in 1994 under a national base-realignment round, and California State University, Monterey Bay opened that same year on former base land -- CSUMB's campus now covers about 1,350 acres, roughly 5% of the old post's footprint, straddling Seaside and neighboring Marina, with a strong focus on marine science and environmental programs given the coastal setting.
Sand City is a genuinely separate municipality with its own, very different history -- not a Seaside neighborhood, despite being completely surrounded by it. Incorporated in 1960, the city grew out of an industrial sand-mining operation: by the 1930s, companies including the Monterey Sand Company and Lone Star Industries were dredging coarse beach and dune sand along a mile and a half of coastline with dragline equipment, supplying regional construction and infrastructure projects, and drawing an estimated 681 mining-industry workers to the area by the late 1950s. That industrial identity has since given way to something much smaller and quieter: Sand City's own population sits at roughly 323 people as of the 2026 estimate, one of the lowest of any incorporated California city, alongside a separately cited figure of nearly 400 working artists and residents occupying live-work lofts inside the old sand-company warehouses. The dune landscape that once fed the mining operation is now largely protected -- much of the land west of Highway 1 has been designated the Eolian Dunes Preserve.
The most consequential thing happening in Seaside right now is the continued build-out of former Fort Ord land into new housing. Campus Town, a 122-acre mixed-use project just south of the CSUMB campus straddling Gigling Road, was approved by the Seaside City Council in 2020 and is being built out by developer KB Bakewell as of 2026 -- the full entitlement covers 1,485 housing units plus hotel, roughly 150,000 square feet of retail/restaurant/entertainment space, and light-industrial uses. A related roughly 60-acre parcel next door, known as Main Gate, is also being developed by a KB Bakewell affiliate. One real, sourced constraint sits underneath all of that new construction: a 2018 legal settlement capped the number of new residential groundwater hookups the Marina Coast Water District can issue on former Fort Ord land at 6,160 total, and Campus Town's own 1,485 units alone account for all but 10 of that entire cap -- meaning very little water-connection capacity remains for any Fort Ord-area development beyond what's already been entitled. See the investment-outlook page for what that constraint means for anyone weighing this market's future supply.
On recreation, the most visible former-base asset is Bayonet Black Horse Golf Course -- two full championship courses built on old Fort Ord training grounds, opened to the public in 1997 and consistently ranked among the top public golf on the Monterey Peninsula, with an on-site clubhouse restaurant. A state park along the shoreline (covered in the section below) adds another former-base recreational asset. None of that changes the basic pricing story, though: Seaside and Sand City are the Monterey Peninsula's value play precisely because they carry newer, plainer housing stock and a working-base-turned-university identity rather than Pacific Grove's Victorians, Monterey's Cannery Row tourist draw, or Carmel-by-the-Sea's storybook downtown -- and the sourced price gap between them, covered in full on the real-cost page, is real and substantial.
Golf, Dunes, and Life Around the Old Base
Bayonet Black Horse Golf Course is Seaside's best-known destination: two separate 18-hole championship courses -- the Bayonet and the Black Horse -- built during Fort Ord's Army years and opened to public play in 1997, with coastal-facing fairways and views out over Monterey Bay that regularly put them near the top of "best public golf on the Peninsula" lists. The on-site Bayonet Blackhorse Grill serves golfers and families a casual menu built around Salinas Valley and Monterey Bay ingredients, both indoors and on a patio.
Fort Ord Dunes State Park preserves the former base's own frontage on Monterey Bay -- trails wind through coastal dune habitat past visible remnants of old rifle ranges and base infrastructure, a genuinely unusual mix of military history and protected coastal landscape in one place. Del Monte Beach offers a quieter, less-developed stretch of sand near the Seaside/Monterey line. In Sand City, the dune-warehouse arts community -- close to 400 working artists and residents by one count -- gives the smaller city its own distinct, industrial-turned-creative character, sitting immediately next to the protected Eolian Dunes Preserve. This page did not attempt a full restaurant-by-restaurant survey of either city this session; see the sourceNote below for what was and wasn't verified.
Independent research. No ads. No sponsored listings. This is a pilot "thin market" build (hub + 2 topic pages) for a smaller, lower-priority destination, not the site's full 22-page research format. Facts drawn from: BlackPast.org and the City of Seaside's own History of Seaside page for Dr. John Roberts' founding role, the 1910 Fort Ord lobbying effort, and the 1954 incorporation date; the U.S. Army's Fort Ord history via the California State Military Museum (militarymuseum.org) for the 1917 Camp Gigling establishment and the base's desegregation-era significance; the City of Seaside's own City Demographics page and worldpopulationreview.com for the ~31,380 2026 population estimate, the 2020 Census count of 32,328, and the reported ~0.81%/year decline; Wikipedia, biggestuscities.com, worldpopulationreview.com, and Montereycountynow.com's reporting on Sand City's and Del Rey Oaks' origins for Sand City's 1960 incorporation, its sand-mining industrial history (Monterey Sand Company, Lone Star Industries), its ~323 2026 population estimate, and the Eolian Dunes Preserve; california.com for the "nearly 400 artists and residents" figure describing Sand City's dune-warehouse arts community; Zillow's and Redfin's own Seaside market pages, accessed via search-result synthesis rather than direct refetch (both domains, along with Wikipedia, the City of Seaside's own site, and Montereycountynow.com, were blocked by this session's network egress policy, so every figure sourced to them here reflects search-engine-summarized page content, not independently re-verified primary text); Zillow's Pacific Grove, Monterey, and Carmel-by-the-Sea home-value pages and Redfin's Carmel-by-the-Sea market page (same egress-blocked, search-synthesized caveat) for the neighboring-market comparison figures; California State University, Monterey Bay's own site and Wikipedia for the 1994 founding date and 1,350-acre campus footprint; Monterey County Weekly's and Montereycountynow.com's reporting (via search synthesis) on the Campus Town and Main Gate projects, KB Bakewell as developer, and the 2018 Marina Coast Water District groundwater-hookup settlement capping new Fort Ord-area connections at 6,160; the EPA's Fort Ord Superfund site profile (cumulis.epa.gov) and fortordcleanup.com for the original 27,827-acre site size, the 2021 partial delisting of 11,934 acres, and the status of the remaining 15,893 acres and ongoing unexploded-ordnance cleanup; Ownwell.com and propertytaxbystate.com for Monterey County's and Seaside's property-tax figures; and Stateline.org, the California Department of Insurance's own press releases, and the Stanford Woods Institute for the FAIR Plan enrollment and statewide premium figures. Genuine, disclosed gaps: this research did not compile Seaside- or Sand City-specific household income or crime-rate data this session; it did not confirm a specific Mello-Roos or Community Facilities District dollar rate for any individual Fort Ord-area parcel (the general FORA financing mechanism is confirmed, a parcel-specific number is not); it did not confirm whether any specific Seaside or Sand City parcel sits inside an officially mapped tsunami-hazard zone (the state's tsunami-mapping framework for Monterey County is confirmed, but the source material found named Capitola and Monterey as example hazard-zone communities, not Seaside or Sand City by name); and this session's web-search tool budget was exhausted before several planned follow-up searches (household income, crime data, and Mello-Roos specifics among them) could be run -- disclosed here rather than silently left out. See the real-cost and investment-outlook pages for further sourced detail and their own disclosed gaps. Confirm all current facts directly with the City of Seaside, the City of Sand City, Monterey County, and a licensed California real estate, insurance, and tax professional before making a purchase or relocation decision. Nothing on this page is legal, tax, financial, or insurance advice.