Long Beach Was Just Ranked the No. 1 City in America for Outdoor Socializing

Long Beach was ranked the best city in America for outdoor socializing. First out of the 45 most populous cities in the country, ahead of Oakland and Atlanta. The study came from Maxwell Social and published on July 27, 2026.

Let me say the quiet part first. Los Angeles finished 44th out of 45.

I have been selling homes in this city long enough to have a reflex about rankings, and the reflex is skepticism. So I went and pulled the underlying data rather than repeating the headline. Some of it holds up better than I expected. Some of it does not hold up at all. Both parts are worth your time, because the honest version of this study says something real about what it is like to live here, and about what you should be looking at when you buy.

What the study measured

The researchers took the 45 most populous U.S. cities and counted five things, each expressed per 100,000 residents: patios and rooftop bars from Google Maps, beer gardens and breweries from Yelp, and Google search volume for terms like "outdoor bars" and "beer gardens" across 2025 and 2026. Each metric was normalized to a 0 to 100 scale, and the final score was the average of the five.

Here is where Long Beach landed in each category, out of 45 cities.

Read that table again, because it tells you something the headline does not. Long Beach did not sweep. It finished 30th on rooftop bars and 35th on how often people here actually search for a patio. It won on the ordinary stuff, the neighborhood brewery and the corner beer garden and the restaurant that put tables on the sidewalk.

That is a more interesting result than a clean sweep would have been.

Now the part I am obligated to tell you

Maxwell Social is a private membership club in Tribeca. This is a marketing study, not peer-reviewed research.

What makes me take it seriously at all is that the result matches what I see on the ground. The city is flat, the older grids are short-blocked and walkable, and the weather cooperates roughly ten months a year. Outdoor seating works here because the built environment allows it, not because a marketing department decided it should.

The survey underneath is the more useful half

The same researchers surveyed 1,000 American adults.

Nearly one in five Americans, 18 percent, said they have wanted to spend time outside with friends and had nowhere good, legal, or comfortable to do it. Fifteen percent said their city does not have enough places to gather outdoors. Nineteen percent have been asked to leave or quiet down while socializing outside in the past year.

Then the number that stopped me: 74 percent said they feel comfortable socializing in their own yard, against 21 percent who said the same about a public park. That is a gap of more than three to one, and it is the whole ballgame for anyone thinking about what a house is for.

Two more worth knowing. Sixty-five percent said they would visit a bar or restaurant more often if it had a patio or garden. Among Gen Z, 41 percent said they would go out more if their city had better outdoor spaces.

Put those together and the picture is a country where a lot of people want to be outside with other people and cannot find a comfortable place to do it. Long Beach is not most places. That is a genuine asset, and most people who live here have stopped noticing it.

What this actually means if you are buying here

Here is the short version, and I am going to be straight with you: the market has already priced this. Nobody hands you outdoor living for free in a coastal California city. What you can do is buy it deliberately instead of by accident.

Four things I would tell you to look at.

Private outdoor space is the single most underpriced feature buyers skip in a hurry. A usable balcony, a patio, a small yard. Given that 74 to 21 split, a place you can sit outside without negotiating with anybody is worth more to your actual life than the square footage you would trade for it. Buyers routinely rank it below a second bathroom, and then spend every weekend wishing they had it.

Read the HOA rules before you fall for the patio. In condominium buildings the balcony you toured is often governed by rules on grills, on furniture, on hours, and on how many people can be out there. I have seen buyers pick a unit for the outdoor space and then learn the association does not permit the thing they bought it for. The documents are boring and they are also the answer.

Walkability to a corridor is worth more than proximity to a single restaurant. Individual businesses close. I removed two well-known Long Beach names from an early draft of this post because they had shut down. Corridors persist. Being three blocks from 4th Street, or from Pine Avenue, or from 2nd Street, is durable in a way that being next door to any one place is not.

Now the trade-off, because I want to name it before you can. The blocks that deliver this are the blocks with noise, foot traffic, and street parking that gets worse on Friday nights. A patio you love at four in the afternoon is a bedroom window you resent at eleven. Walk the specific block on a Saturday night before you commit. Not the neighborhood. The block.

Places in Long Beach that make the case

This is not a best-of list and it is not ranked. It is a partial set of places I can confirm are open and genuinely built around outdoor space, spread across the city so you can see how wide the map is.

• Trademark Brewing, 233 E Anaheim Street, East Village. A taproom with a purpose-built beer garden.
• Belmont Brewing Company, 25 39th Place, Belmont Shore. A long-running brewpub with an oceanfront patio at Belmont Pier.
• ISM Brewing and Kitchen, 210 E 3rd Street, Downtown. Large patio with fire pits.
• SteelCraft Long Beach, 3768 Long Beach Boulevard, Bixby Knolls. An open-air food hall built out of shipping containers, and the most literal answer to what the study was measuring.
• Beachwood Brewing, 6430 E Pacific Coast Highway, near Alamitos Bay. An outdoor tasting garden.
• BO-beau kitchen and roof tap, 144 Pine Avenue, Downtown. A rooftop beer garden, which is worth noting given the study put Long Beach 30th on rooftops.
• Roe Seafood, 5374 E 2nd Street, Belmont Shore. Two patios under olive trees.
• The Attic on Broadway, 3441 E Broadway. A dog-friendly patio a short walk from Alamitos Beach.

Restaurants and taprooms open and close on their own schedule, so check hours and confirm a place is still operating before you drive across town. I verified each of these before publishing, and I am not going to pretend that guarantees anything twelve months from now.

Frequently asked questions

Which city ranked best for outdoor socializing?
Long Beach, California ranked first among the 45 most populous U.S. cities in the Maxwell Social study published July 27, 2026. Oakland ranked second and Atlanta third.

Where did Los Angeles rank?
Forty-fourth out of 45, ahead of only Phoenix. Houston finished 43rd and New York City finished 40th, despite New York being the city most survey respondents named as the best place for casual outdoor gatherings.

What did the study measure?
Patios, rooftop bars, beer gardens, and breweries per 100,000 residents, plus Google search volume for outdoor-venue terms in 2025 and 2026. Venue counts came from Google Maps and Yelp, and population figures came from U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates.

Why did Long Beach win?
Its strongest categories were beer gardens, where it ranked first, breweries, where it ranked third, and patios, where it ranked sixth. It ranked 30th for rooftop bars.

Is this a scientific study?
No. It was produced by Maxwell Social, a private membership club, using publicly available venue listings and search data. The methodology is disclosed and applied consistently across all 45 cities, which makes it a fair comparison, but it is not academic research and the venue counts depend on how businesses categorize themselves online.

Does outdoor space affect home values in Long Beach?
Usable private outdoor space and walkability to a commercial corridor both tend to support value here, though I want to be clear that this is my read of the local market from working in it rather than a figure I am pulling from a study. If you want the sourced numbers on what is happening with prices, I keep the current Long Beach market data updated monthly.

Dream Homes Do Come True.

Be well,
David

Source: Maxwell Social, "America's Best Cities for Outdoor Socializing," published July 27, 2026, by David Litwak. Full ranking and methodology at maxwellsocial.com.