Long Beach WA is a nice enough place…the first thing that comes to mind when I think of it is Jake The Alligator Man.
I live very near to Deerfield Beach FL. And have for over a decade. I have a meal in DFB at least weekly, if not more often.
DFB is well within the gigantic Greater Miami metroblob. So not a sleepy isolated beach town, but rather just one municipality among the hundred other mostly indistinguishable municipalities that make up the Blob.
Relatively speaking, DFB is a zipcode that time forgot. Like most of coastal Broward county, it was built up in the 1960s / 1970s. But unlike many of the other beach towns, they’ve resisted massive redevelopment since. With the result that the beach area is not dominated by glitzy 30-story buildings where the cheapest ground floor condo adjacent to the dumpster room costs $5M. Instead the beach is a public park and ordinary 1960s homes and 1970s condos are still commonplace. Plus some newer development even up through current construction. But overall the city council has set their sights on controlled density and affordability for the current residents, not selling themselves to the biggest developers.
My view is it’s one of the best bargains in the metroblob if you want middle-class affordable near-beach living. Like every 'burb here, there are some scruffy people and scruffy areas.
Another larger nearby town with a similar vibe is Pompano Beach. Although a few years ago they started admitting the developers to build the 30 story investor-only condo buildings on their last few plots of open land.
Lotta ways to live cheaply in either of these places and drive just a few miles to serious ritz if that’s your taste. Said another way, if you’ve got Champagne taste and beer budget, my vote is live in the beer and visit the nearby champagne most days. Either DFB or Pompano would fill the beer role nicely.
The OP’s cited article is about vacation homes. I really question the very idea of vacation homes in this era of high insurance, high taxes, high interest rates, and the collapse of the middle class.
These are great places to live year round. But spending a couple to few hundred thousand USD for a place you’ll use 3 weeks a year? You can stay at the Ritz Carlton for that annual outlay.
Of course the conventional wisdom for the last 50 years has been that real estate price appreciation will more than pay for your condo, so that despite your mortgage, etc., you’ll have free subsidized vacations every year and a nice profit whenever you sell out.
I question whether that “Can’t lose on Florida near-beach property” mentality / reality has too many more years to run. I sold all my waterfront property for that reason.
Long Beach, Wa is a nice little town, accent on “little”. If you come from and prefer an urban environment you will probably go nuts the first winter. There isn’t even a major grocery store on that side of the river, everyone goes across the Megler Bridge and back into Oregon to shop at places like Costco, Kroger, etc. A couple of good places to eat. No real industry in the area. If you are outdoorsy it has some of the best Pacifc Razor clams anywhere. Delicious and easy to dig.
but AC, unlike the towns to the north & south of it, there are very few properties within the first couple of blocks to the beach.
Myrtle Beach is very touristy with tons of hotels. There are about 60 golf courses in the ares. Surfside Beach has a few hotels and is mostly houses and about 10 miles South of Myrtle. We have a vacation home just South of Surfside and really enjoy the area.
The captioned Long Beach photo in the news article is not Long Beach. You don’t swim at Long Beach. The water is too cold. Same for Ocean Shores. It’s a long way to nowhere from basic groceries and stuff. Both are nice to visit for a long weekend.
And when The Big One eventually strikes , the entire peninsula will disappear in seconds.
Not to mention those towns in Florida- well there’s Florida man, De Santis, and rising Sea levels.
They seemed okay to me, buty again, I never lived there.
It is the NY Post for gawds sake, whose reliability rating is near the bottom and whose bias is higher than anything outside Pravda 
. I mean, even discerning birds wont accept it to crap on. 
The story was published in the New York Post, but it originated at realtor.com.
You are one of those people that after a comedian finishes a joke- asks "And then what happened?', arent you? 
Myrtle Beach is the only place on the list that I’ve actually been to, although it has been decades since I’ve been. Yes, it is very touristy and the main strip along the beach is full of hotels. But the north side of town is quieter, and there are fewer hotels and more single family houses (many of which are probably vacation rentals, but still…). That’s the area where we typically stayed when we went there when I was a kid, specifically because that was the quieter, less crowded, part of the beach.
On a different note, my memory from 30 years ago was that the strip was lined with modest, mid-century style motels. Looking at Google Street View today, there are still some places like that left (The Diplomat is still delightfully 1960s looking), many of those places have been torn down and replaced with giant high-rise hotels.
My wife and I were just in Long Beach yesterday. It’s one of our preferred places to take the RV when we want to get out of town for a weekend. It’s a great little town to visit. But I wouldn’t live there. As mentioned above, it’s a 30 minute drive to get to a real grocery store. And five feet of sea level rise means the entire peninsula will be underwater.
Of the list, I’ve spent time (though 3 decades ago) in Myrtle Beach, and vacationed on Padre Island (parts of which are considered Corpus Christi). Myrtle Beach was fairly normal (again a long while ago), but it was conservative and very uncomfortable to me. So, no, I wouldn’t want to live there, but could believe that it’s budget friendly, compared to a lot of options.
I’ll note, speaking to @LSLGuy’s point, that the median list price in the article is just shy of $300k. That’s… a hell of a lot, unless you’re making a bunch of assumptions about rental value when not in family use, and all the other associated costs. IMHO, if you’re wealthy enough to consider that sort of investment, I don’t think you should be looking at “budget friendly” options - go big, go home, or invest it and spend the proceeds on Ritzing it up per LSLGuy!
Corpus Christi is nice enough, but it was crawling with people far younger and better looking than I during most of the summer months. I’m sure I’m bitter, but it meant that everything was overcrowded unless you were there at the very beginning, or rather, Pre-season, or the very end of the season, in which cases things were less crowded and more pleasant, but you were taking chances on what was or was not open. Not to mention, near the end of the season, you could be looking at vacation ending bad weather.
Moderating:
Please don’t insult other posters. He offered a simple factual correction to a post that didn’t have any signs of being a joke. This was out of line.
I’ve only been to two of those towns, both a long time ago. I went to a business meeting at Myrtle Beach, and it was fine, in a touristy way. And I’ve been to Atlantic City, which wasn’t fine, as others have said.
I remember when casinos were opened there. The place had gone to seed and there were high hopes of casinos revitalizing it. Nope. It may have become even more of a dump. I wouldn’t want to vacation there.
I used to live in Princeton, NJ. If we wanted a day at the beach, we went to nicer places.
The reasons beach towns are “affordable” is because there is something negative about them. North of San Francisco, the water is not swimmable without a wetsuit, and summers are cold and foggy. So are the winters. There’s very little basking on sand.
Many East Coast beach towns on that list are seedy tourist traps.
If you have never lived at the ocean, be aware that the air is salty and humid and everything rusts or degrades quickly. Actually living in, as opposed to visiting, most vacation areas, is not like a permanent magazine dream spread. It’s just living, with the climate year round, town vibe, crowds or lack thereof, where the hospital and grocery stores are, being filled with positives and negatives like any other place.
If you are looking for a place to retire and fantasize living on the beach, I suggest Baha.
All the beach block homes at most of the Jersey shore beaches are multi-million dollar pads. If you’re second home costs a few mil I can only imagine that your primary residence costs at least that much. You’re talking one-percenters to afford those. There are plenty of wealthy people in the 2-10% range, too.
Location, location, location.
There is something peaceful about the water & the waves…or something angry about them on other days. Sunrises over the water are amazing! Especially in the offseason when you’re most likely the only person on the beach.
Of course more popular places are less affordable. Canada has so many lakes that many don’t even have names. There is a lot of pleasant waterfront property, relatively cheap in some provinces and further from cities, whose only drawback is being somewhat remote or hours from a bigger centre.
In “affordable” Deerfield Beach near me, condos actually “on the sand” as we say, meaning actual no-kidding beachfront start at about $750K for an unrenovated 1975-vintage place. You can buy a 1960s single family 3BR ranch house 1/2 mile inland for about the same. Something newly rennovated or larger can run multiple millions if you’re walking distance to the beach.
Condos a half-mile inland are $300K-ish.
And this is one of the cheapest zipcodes up and down the coast within the Greater Miami / Ft. Lauderdale / Palm Beach metrobolob.
The idea one can own a vacation home and rent it out much of the year is sorta fanciful. It can be done, but lots of ways for that to go badly expensively wrong.
A quick look at Zillow for zipcode 33441 will tell you what you need to know.
Until I moved to inland New England I lived within 20 minutes of a beach all of my adult life. For a while I lived virtually on a beach. I dislike being hot, and I hate crowds, so I only visited the beach in winter. It was lovely, empty, cold. I hiked many miles on the sand.
You can’t assume that people with a vacation home will use it only three weeks a year. Sure, that might be true if someone who lives in Massachusetts buys a vacation home in Florida - although even in that case, I suspect the people are planning to retire to it. But most of the people I know who have vacation homes spend a lot more time there than 3 weeks - if you live in the NYC area and your vacation home is on the Jersey shore/the Catskills/ Poconos/Long Island or you live in Michigan and have a house on the lake an hour or two from home , you might be there nearly every weekend or all summer ( like a couple of teachers I know)