Crystal Cove: When Coastal Housing in Orange County Was Affordable
Humble housing began here in the 1920s, when some employees of Irvine Ranch and Bell Telephone who were working nearby chose to settle in rustic cottages they built by hand. Beach vacationers arrived, especially after the Coast Highway was constructed in 1928, settling alongside artists, spearfishers, and, during Prohibition, rumrunners.
In 1932, on July 4th weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that a "tent city" stretched five miles from Huntington Beach to Newport Beach, especially dense at Crystal Cove, where "campers filled the grounds to the water’s edge." Cottage 34, now called The Cultural Center, was a schoolhouse and community center set up by Japanese American farmworkers.
In 1962, the Irvine Company outlawed camping. The secluded cabins stayed within families for generations, on land rented from the Irvine Company, who forbade extensive cottage updates, so it remained a quaint and affordable beach village, in a region where housing costs along the coast eventually skyrocketed.
In 1957, there were not many stores near these cottages, only a mobile home park and a particularly dangerous stretch of Coast Highway with up to a dozen fatalities each year. The Irvine Company considered turning this spot into a luxury resort or a sewage disposal site. Eventually, in 1979, the Irvine Company sold the land to the state to create a park that would buffer other developments further from this steep canyon, inland where construction access and infrastructure was more accessible. The state paid $32.6 million, the most expensive park purchase in California up to that time.
Explore some of the spaces in Orange County shaped by land rights. Click on the starred map points to read more in-depth stories.
As the state began the eviction process for residents of the 294 mobile homes at Morro Beach and 46 cottages at Crystal Cove, resident Mary Jane Wood told the Los Angeles Times: "We've been here a long time. And this is what you’d call the low-cost housing everyone is hollering for." Rent in 1978 for a mobile home was $250 a month.
Cottage residents managed to get their village of "vernacular beach architecture" listed on the National Register of Historic Places and postponed their eviction for a remarkable 22 years, until 2001, while the media began to call them "squatters." Residents of El Morro Village mobile home park fought eviction even longer, until 2005, when their homes were replaced by state park campsites. By then, rents had increased to between $470 and $1,100 a month. Kelly Heflin asked the New York Times, "What's so bad about there being one affordable place to live in Laguna Beach?"
In 1999, Laura Davick — whose family had camped here since 1937 and lived in a cottage since 1961 — spearheaded the nonprofit Crystal Cove Conservancy, which now works in partnership with the state park to rent out these beach cottages. The conservancy charges more per night than many residents had paid per month and uses those funds for outdoor education and conservation. Meanwhile, the Irvine Co. developed the land above Crystal Cove into the community of Newport Coast, a collection of multimillion-dollar houses protected from the public by multiple gates. Along the coast, struggles continue between capitalist development and activists working to keep the coast publicly accessible, even if not affordable for the masses.
