Long Beach by the Numbers: Businesses, 311 Requests, Housing, Development

Most “Long Beach statistics” pages online are a population figure, a median rent and a crime index copied from a vendor. The Data desk does something narrower and more useful: it takes the records the City of Long Beach itself publishes as open data and counts them, with the dataset, the period, the fetch date and the method printed on every page. The numbers are the city’s; the sums and the groupings are this site’s, and the methodology page explains every definition and every exclusion. This pillar is the index: what each page answers, the headline figure, and what the figure does and does not mean.

The short answer

Businesses: the license register

The city’s Business Licenses Public View is a register of license accounts, refreshed nightly from the licensing system¹. On October 1, 2026 it held 179,455 records across every status the city uses, from Active and Pending to Inactive, Expired and Closed¹. Of those, 29,748 were Active, and 24,024 of the active records were located inside the city; the rest are contractors, vendors and services based elsewhere that hold a Long Beach license to work here¹.

Three things follow from how the register is built, and each data page repeats the one that matters for its table:

• A license is an account, not a storefront. Every apartment house holds one, so “property rental” is the largest category group among active licenses; a company can hold several; a home-based consultant and a sidewalk cart each hold one¹.
• Start date is when the license took effect, not when the owner applied, and the city can set it ahead; the monthly tables leave out the current month and treat the two before it as provisional¹.
• A closed record is an account the city closed, which also happens when a holder moves, stops paying or changes entity; closures are not failures¹.

The four license pages answer four questions. How Many Businesses Long Beach Has gives the active count by category group and by the home-based flag, and lists the 25 largest city license descriptions. New Business Licenses in Long Beach, Month by Month shows the last 24 full months with Active and Pending in separate columns, because roughly four in ten recent records are still Pending, and the yearly series back to 2018, which puts 2025 at 3,623 in-city starts, 985 of them home-based¹. What Kinds of Businesses Open in Long Beach splits the same records into the site’s thirteen category groups by year, and Where Businesses Open in Long Beach splits them by the council district and ZIP the city records on each license¹.

Closures

Business License Closures in Long Beach by Month and Category counts records whose current milestone is Closed, by the month of that milestone’s date¹. The yearly totals since 2022 run 2,094, 2,306, 4,242 and 3,465, with 2026 partial, and the page is careful about the 2024 figure: the milestone date is the date the city closed the account, and a large year can reflect an administrative clean-up as much as businesses stopping¹. Read the closures page with the openings page open beside it, and read both with the methodology page’s definition in mind.

311: what residents report and how fast it closes

Go Long Beach is the city’s 311 system, and every request since September 2020 is on the open data portal with its type, status, dates, district and ZIP². Requests rose from 42,269 in 2021 to 70,039 in 2025, and 2026 stood at 55,289 on the fetch date with a quarter of the year to go². Dumped items are the largest type by a wide margin, 137,360 of all requests since September 2020, followed by graffiti at 84,055 and e-scooter reports at 47,188².

Long Beach 311 Requests by Type and Year Since 2020 gives the twenty largest types by year. Long Beach 311 Requests by Council District and ZIP gives the geography, as raw counts, because the site has no sourced population by district and will not invent a per-resident rate. How Long Long Beach Takes to Close a 311 Request shows the median days from creation to closure by type and year over closed requests only: graffiti closes in a day in every year, dumped items in five to eight days, and some series move in ways that look like a change in the city’s recording rather than its speed, which the page points out instead of smoothing over².

Housing: what the city reports to the state

The housing page is built from the Housing Dashboard Data behind the city’s Housing Element annual progress reports, one row per project per stage per report year³. Housing Units Permitted and Completed in Long Beach by Year and Income Level sums units by stage, from Planning Application through Entitled, Building Application and Permitted to Built, and splits permitted and built units into the report’s four income levels³. In the 2025 report year the city recorded 1,218 units permitted and 905 built; in 2024, 1,704 permitted³. Because a project appears in every stage it reached, the stages are never added together, and “Permitted” is the figure most people mean by housing production.

Development: coming next

The city maintains a curated layer of major development projects with each project’s address, type, units, stage and key dates⁴. A page per project, generated from that layer with a map pin and a dated provenance box, is the next addition to the Data desk; until it exists, the permits pillar covers what a project needs from the city and the zoning map page covers where it is allowed.

How to read any Data page

Every Data page opens with a provenance box naming the dataset and its page on the city’s portal, the fetch date, the period and the method in one sentence. The tables are injected from the fetched data, so the numbers in the text and the numbers in the table always come from the same build. Charts are drawn from the same tables. The derived tables are kept as files in the site’s public repository, and the methodology page quotes the terms under which the city’s data may be reused: MapsLB grants a license “to copy, publish, distribute and/or transmit the Data” for “commercial and/or personal use” with no suggestion of the city’s endorsement, and the 311 dataset is published under CC BY⁵².

Refresh schedule

A figure quoted from this site should carry the fetch date printed on the page it came from.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many businesses are there in Long Beach?

The city’s license layer held 24,024 active licenses located inside the city on October 1, 2026, out of 29,748 active records in all; a license is an account, so the count of storefronts is lower and the count of people working is not in the data¹.

How many new businesses open in Long Beach each year?

Counted by in-city license start dates, 3,623 licenses started in 2025¹.

How many businesses close in Long Beach?

The city closed 3,465 in-city license records in 2025, by the date of the Closed milestone; the figure includes accounts closed for moves, non-payment or entity changes, not only businesses that stopped¹.

How many 311 requests does Long Beach get?

70,039 in 2025, up from 42,269 in 2021, by the year the request was created².

What is the most common 311 request in Long Beach?

Dumped items: 137,360 requests since September 2020, then graffiti at 84,055².

How much housing does Long Beach permit?

The city’s Housing Element data records 1,704 units permitted in the 2024 report year and 1,218 in 2025³.

Is the Long Beach open data free to use?

Yes, under the terms quoted on the methodology page: MapsLB licenses the data for commercial and personal use without endorsement, and the 311 dataset is CC BY⁵².

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