Mai Kai

Mai Kai sits on Bayside Drive on the harbor side of Coast Highway and covers 2.3 acres holding 33 addresses on 33 parcels. Bayside Drive is the only street name on the record inside the boundary. The city zones the whole of it RM, multi-unit residential, in a Local Coastal Program density band of 10 to 19.9 dwellings per acre, with a height limit written as 28 feet flat and 33 feet sloped.

All 2.3 acres sit inside the Coastal Zone and all of it is designated for short term lodging. The FEMA layer places 0.3 acres of the boundary in zone AE, the inland flood band, with the remaining 2 acres in zone X. The California Coastal Trail clips the footprint for 0.01 miles and the city bikeway layer runs 0.15 miles through it. This is one of only two boundaries in the district the city assigns to council district 5. Abraham Lincoln Elementary serves the community and enrolled 336 students on the 2024-25 federal count. For the city's own administration the city places it in evacuation zone 43, park service area 10, census tract 627.01.

Mai Kai took thirty three homes and set them on 2.3 acres, in the front row on Newport Harbor with the boat channel at the foot of the terraces. The buildings date from 1960. The name is Hawaiian, from maikaʻi, meaning good, fine, handsome, and 1960 sits in the middle of the local tiki decade: Christian's Hut, which began as a bar for the crew filming Mutiny on the Bounty and burned down in 1963, along with Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic's, Disneyland's 1955 opening, and a few years later the Gilligan's Island credits shot in Newport Bay. A Polynesian name on a Newport Harbor address in 1960 was of its moment, not an accident.

The land record here runs later than the buildings. A subdivision map was recorded over almost the whole of this boundary on 3 May 1976, sixteen years after the homes went up, and the county carries no construction year for any of them, which is how it treats homes held as condominium airspace.