Drive almost any developed American shoreline and the pattern repeats: a road running parallel to the water, hotels on the ocean side, everything else behind. The arrangement comes from engineering and regulation rather than taste.
The road came first and fixed the geometry
Shore highways were generally laid along the first stable ground behind the beach, following the coast because that was where the buildable land ran.
Once the road existed, it split the frontage into a narrow ocean-side strip and a deeper inland side, and every later decision worked within that division.
The strip is thin, so buildings on it are long and narrow, oriented broadside to the water. That shape is what produces the wall of hotels seen from the sand.
Setback rules limit how far seaward anything goes
Coastal states commonly regulate construction relative to a dune line or a measured erosion rate, which puts a hard boundary on the seaward edge of a lot.
The result is a consistent building line up and down the coast, because every property is pushed back to roughly the same limit. Specific rules vary by state and are revised over time.
That uniform line is why oceanfront hotels look aligned even where they were built decades apart by unrelated owners.
Ground logistics all happen on the back side
The ocean face is given to rooms and balconies, so the entrance, the porte cochere, the loading dock and the parking all land on the road side.
Guests therefore arrive at the back of the building and cross through it to reach the water, which is why lobbies in beach hotels so often run straight through from door to deck.
Parking is the hardest piece. A narrow lot cannot hold a surface lot beside the building, so it goes underneath, behind, or across the road with a crossing to manage.
The inland side develops differently on purpose
Land across the road cannot sell a view from the lower floors, so it attracts uses with lower land costs: motels, rentals, restaurants and services.
Those properties compete on price and on being a short walk from the sand rather than on frontage, which produces a visible tier break at the road.
Buildings there also tend to be taller relative to their footprint, since height is the only way to reach over the front row for a partial view.
What the pattern means for choosing a room
An oceanfront building's premium is concentrated in a narrow band of rooms, since the same property contains side-facing and road-facing units at the same address.
Across the road, a short crossing separates a much cheaper room from the same beach, at the cost of carrying chairs and towels over a public street.
The tradeoff worth weighing is not view against price alone but how many times a day the group will make that crossing, especially with young children or gear.