A stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Main Street and First Street in Huntington Beach now glows under a new set of city-branded light poles, part of a project designed to make it easier for residents and visitors to walk between downtown, Pacific City, and the city's resort hotels. The City of Huntington Beach installed the poles, while Visit Huntington Beach funded the work, according to a Facebook announcement from the city.
The post, shared by the City of Huntington Beach, frames the lighting upgrade as part of an ongoing collaboration between the city and Visit Huntington Beach aimed at enhancing key visitor areas and improving the overall experience across Surf City. The new poles illuminate the walking path along PCH, creating what the city describes as a more inviting and walkable connection among downtown, Pacific City, and the surrounding resort hotels.
Tourism Dollars, Not City Taxes, Fund the Glow
Rather than draw on the municipal general fund, the project relied on revenue from Visit Huntington Beach's Tourism Business Improvement District, a 6% self-assessment on overnight stays at 21 local hotels and more than 200 vacation rentals that generates roughly $10 million a year, with 10% specifically set aside for tourism-enhanced product development. That funding structure, detailed by Visit Huntington Beach, means hotel guests and short-term renters — not local taxpayers — are effectively covering the cost of the new streetscape.
The lighting project fits into a larger downtown beautification push the city launched in 2024 and 2025, which has also included bollard repainting, planter landscaping, side-street fixture upgrades, and seasonal public restrooms near the pier. City officials have increasingly paired those physical streetscape improvements with tourism-season demand, betting that a more walkable corridor keeps visitors moving between hotels and local businesses on foot rather than in cars.
Connecting the Pier to Pacific City's Retail Core
The newly lit path connects downtown Huntington Beach to Pacific City, the 31-acre beachfront development along PCH that includes a 191,000-square-foot retail and dining center, 516 apartments, and the 250-room Paséa Hotel & Spa, which opened in 2016. Built on a former oil field adjacent to the highway, Pacific City was designed as an open-air bridge between the pier and the city's hotel cluster, according to reporting from Urbanize LA.
That corridor directly serves what's known as the “HB Collection” — a group of four oceanfront resorts that includes the Hyatt Regency, Hilton Waterfront Beach Resort, Paséa Hotel & Spa, and Kimpton Shorebreak, together offering roughly 1,400 guest rooms and 185,000 square feet of meeting space. Hoodline previously reported on the Hyatt Regency's $200 million refinancing earlier this year, underscoring the financial weight resting on this stretch of PCH. From those hotels, the lit path leads pedestrians directly into Main Street, home to Surf City Nights, the weekly street fair that has closed three blocks of Main Street every Tuesday evening since 2008 to host more than 60 vendors, live music, and a farmers market.
Working Within State Highway Rules
Because Pacific Coast Highway is State Route 1, any work along this stretch falls under Caltrans District 12 jurisdiction, and the California Coastal Commission enforces a construction moratorium from Memorial Day to Labor Day to protect summer beach access. Caltrans has separately pursued its own safety initiative on this same corridor, replacing traffic signal poles, adding bike-detection sensors, and installing Class II bike lanes to reduce bicyclist and pedestrian collisions along SR-1 through Huntington Beach.
Pedestrian safety along PCH has been a recurring concern for the city for more than two decades. Dedicated infrastructure on this stretch dates back to 2002, when the city approved the Hyatt Regency's pedestrian sky bridge over the highway to give hotel guests a safer route to the beach, as the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. Hoodline also covered the deadly stakes of that traffic corridor in April, when a Long Beach woman died following a late-night crash near the wetlands along PCH in Huntington Beach.
A Tourism Economy Worth Protecting
The investment comes as Huntington Beach's visitor economy continues to set records. In 2024, the city recorded $580 million in direct local spending from 2.34 million visitors from outside Orange County, supporting more than 5,600 jobs and generating $21 million in city tax revenue, figures Visit Huntington Beach presented at its 2025 annual tourism summit. Statewide, California's tourism management districts have increasingly shifted lodging assessment dollars toward physical infrastructure like this, a trend reflected in December 2025 when 98.3% of assessed tourism businesses voted to reauthorize Visit California's marketing and destination programs.
For Huntington Beach, the new light poles represent a small but visible piece of that strategy: encouraging hotel guests to walk rather than drive between the pier, Pacific City's shops and restaurants, and downtown's Main Street storefronts. The project follows closely on the heels of the Lexus US Open of Surfing, which Hoodline covered as it took over the Huntington Beach Pier last month, bringing crowds through the very stretch of PCH the new lighting now illuminates.
