Beach Town, USA
San Clemente to Folly Beach, Haleiwa to Huntington, for surfers and tourists alike, beaches are a simple attraction with an astounding value. In our series The Business of Beaches we take a look at this often underfunded natural resource—and why it’s worth protecting.
The Business of Beaches
Riddle me this… Is a beach still a beach without sand? Is a beach town still a beach town without a beach? These actually aren’t brain-busters—just a couple ideas to consider.
Let’s zoom out a little and look at the kind of moolah beaches create. Basically, beaches friggin’ dominate U.S. recreation spending. Each year, beach-going tourists generate a staggering $520 billion in economic output, $240 billion in direct spending, and $36 billion in tax revenues.
Ocean-based tourism and recreation contribute approximately $143 billion to the national GDP, and employ nearly 2.5 million people. That’s more than the entire real estate industry or building construction sector.
In coastal counties, leisure and hospitality employ almost 6.9 million people and contribute $427 billion to the GDP.
Out of the 3.4 billion visits to U.S. beaches annually, those visits are 225% times greater than the combined annual attendance at all National Park properties, state parks, all amusement-park attractions such as Disney World, all professional and collegiate football, basketball, and baseball games, cruises, and NASCAR events.
Wild right?
Zooming in a little, the economic significance that the coast and beaches have on the Southern California economy, for example (found in the money and jobs that beaches produce) is nothing short of extraordinary.
Southern California alone has 427 beaches with 631 miles of beachfront. Tourists and residents generate over 150 million day-visits annually, and beaches accounted for $30.1 billion of visitor spending in 2023.
In Orange County, for example, tourism spending, largely driven by coastal areas amounts to over $5 billion. An estimated 132,000 jobs are linked to tourism, with 50,000 of those jobs coming from the coastal economy. $584 million in revenue gets generated from sales tax, much of it from traveling visitors.
Thing is, just because a coastline kisses the ocean doesn’t necessarily make it a beach to most tourists. For most folks—beaches without sand aren’t really considered beaches. Around 50% of beachgoers don’t even touch the water. They just like to catch those rays in the grains on a folding chair.
