Ocean Park, Santa Monica

The best way to think of this area is as a borderland between Santa Monica and Venice. It is a bit more of a high end area than Venice with more pricy boutiques than its hyper-cool, hipster neighbor, but still with that same artistic feel that you only get once you go south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

You no longer have the cliffs here that separate the city from the beach, so the homes in Ocean Park have the feel of a beach town. Along the beach you also get lots of apartments and mini-high rises, but they simply don’t have the ritzy high cost feel of similar residences north of the freeway (even though many of the high rises don’t let this desuade them from charging the really high prices). The houses inland tend to be older and are a strange scramble of architectural styles from Victorians to Craftsmen to even an occasional Chateau. It is almost as if an architecture student designed the neighborhood as a catalogue of the mid century residential architecture styles. Near the ocean, the streets also tend to be narrow and create an environment conducive to walking.

Although lots of the high rises by the beach still charge the kind of rents you would expect north of the Santa Monica Freeway for Ocean Avenue locations, overall the prices in the area are much milder, with many of the smaller homes going for just over $1,000 per month.

There is a great deal of property theft in the area, but violent crime is less common.

Main Street is not really the central thorough faire in terms of traffic in Ocean Park (that right is reserved for Ocean Park Blvd.) but it is certainly the heart of the neighborhood in terms of foot traffic. The several boutiques, coffee houses and wine bars, make this artery course with hipsters and committed beach bums. The area has a certain Sixties feel as well, with a weekly organic farmers market and lots of health conscious eateries