Laguna Beach has been losing people for a quarter century while the price of living there more than doubled. Scroll, and watch the civic record say so itself.
For most of the twentieth century, Laguna Beach only grew. An artists' colony of a few hundred in the 1910s became a town of 14,550 by 1970 and kept climbing. The terracotta bars behind the line are this atlas's own pulse: places founded, scenes started, buildings raised, decade by decade. When the population leapt, the cultural record leapt with it.
Then, in 2002, it stopped. The state's own annual estimate put Laguna Beach at 23,779 residents that January, the most people who have ever lived here. No headline said so. No plaque marks it. The series has never regained it: a slide to 2010, a partial recovery to 2015, then a steady thinning to 22,440 by 2026, which is 5.6% below the peak.
Run your finger along the line. Each dot is a January 1 estimate arriving slightly below the last.
The housing record runs the opposite direction across the same years. The median realized sale price in Laguna Beach was $1.21M in 2012 and $2.83M by 2025. Two lines crossing like scissors: value climbing, people leaving, in a town that cannot expand, hemmed by the Pacific on one side and by the greenbelt it fought to establish on the other.
A city that grows more valuable while holding fewer people is undergoing a demographic inversion. When this reading was first published, the mechanism was the open research question the atlas held. Then the atlas went and got the data.
The Census Bureau counts homes held "for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use": the second-home column. In the 2010 survey, Laguna Beach had 1,149 of them, 8.7% of all housing. By 2024 it had 1,842, or 13.5%, while the total housing stock barely moved. That is roughly 700 homes that once held households and now hold occasional weekends.
Seven hundred homes, at even two people each, is fourteen hundred residents. The town has lost about 1,339 since its peak. The two curves are the same story told twice. The houses did not empty; the town did, one converted address at a time. The usual caveats hold: these are pooled five-year estimates with margins of error, and the share dips and recovers year to year. The decade's direction does not.
This atlas documents ninety years of scenes sustained by a year-round community that never numbered 25,000: the plein-air painters, the Brotherhood, the Boom Boom Room, the greeters, the volunteers who rebuilt after the 1993 firestorm. Every one of those scenes was carried by people who were here, daily, in person.
"The story of Laguna Beach told by this atlas, ninety years of scenes sustained by a year-round community of fewer than 25,000, now includes the community itself becoming rarer."
Population peaked in 2002 at 23,779; the 2026 estimate of 22,440 is 5.6% below peak. That sentence is computed from the state's data every time this page loads. If the decline ends, the sentence will change. So far it has not.