Walk Manhattan Beach Boulevard this month and count the paper on the windows. A French bistro where an Italian trattoria used to be. A gelato counter where nothing used to be, in a courtyard that used to feel half-finished. A jewelry store that opened in a flower shop's old footprint two months ago, and a coffee chain with a signed lease still waiting to replace a name everyone in town already misses. Kelly Stroman, who came back this year to run the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professional Association after leading it once before, put it plainly to the local paper this summer:
"The turnover in downtown Manhattan Beach is unprecedented right now and we are all talking about it."
That quote gets repeated a lot, usually as color for a restaurant roundup. It deserves better than that, because the turnover isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening on the same six or seven blocks where the city itself is sitting on two of downtown's biggest parcels, unable to decide what either one becomes, with a City Council review of final concepts landing sometime this September. Every new tenant signing a lease right now is making a bet on what the center of downtown looks like in three years, without knowing the answer. That's the story underneath the storefront churn, and it's worth understanding before the next round of paper goes up in a window.
What's Actually Changed This Year
Here's the ground-level version, block by block, based on reporting from this summer:
| Left or Leaving | Moved In or Moving In | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Nando Trattoria | Coucou (French bistro, now open) | Manhattan Avenue |
| Peet's Coffee | Blank Street Coffee (lease signed) | Manhattan Beach Blvd. |
| Gum Tree (original space) | Beyond Yoga | Manhattan Beach Blvd. |
| Gelato & Angels | Velvet by Graham & Spencer | Manhattan Beach Blvd. |
| Pitfire Pizza | Great White (still finalizing opening) | Metlox Plaza / Highland Ave. |
| Rolling Hills Flower Mart | Ounce of Salt (jewelry, opened mid-July) | Manhattan Avenue |
| Kate Lester Home | Framebridge (expected this fall) | Manhattan Avenue |
| Lemonade | Sogna Toscana (in buildout, patio approved) | Metlox Plaza |
| Walstory (closed) | No tenant yet | Manhattan Avenue |
| Pressed Juicery (closed) | No tenant identified as of this summer | Manhattan Beach Blvd. |
| Drift Beach Club (closed June) | No tenant identified | Downtown |
Bacio di Latte, a gelato shop, opened this year directly into Metlox Plaza without replacing an existing tenant, adding to a courtyard that has spent years figuring out what it wants to be. None of this reads like decline. Stroman's own framing was about pace, not distress: businesses are moving, closing, and opening faster than the association can track in real time. That's a healthy commercial corridor by most measures. But it's also a corridor where an unusual number of leases are turning at once, in the same stretch of blocks where the city owns two of the most visible lots and hasn't said what they'll be.
The Two Corners Nobody's Filled
The two sites are Lot 3, a parking structure at Morningside Drive and 12th Street, and 400 Manhattan Beach Boulevard, the former US Bank building next to Vons. Lot 3's old three-story structure came down in late 2024 after the city found it seismically unstable, leaving a 69-space surface lot where 145 spaces used to sit. The 400 MBB site came into city hands in April 2025, when Manhattan Beach paid more than $13 million for it, financed through tax-exempt Certificates of Participation rather than a straight cash purchase. That financing structure matters here: it means the city is paying down bond debt on a building it hasn't decided how to use, which is part of why the process has moved with real urgency behind the scenes even as the public timeline has slipped.
The city calls the combined effort Project Pulse, and it has run for well over a year now: community meetings starting in spring 2025, design workshops at Joslyn Community Center over the last weekend of May 2026, a January 2026 study session, and a formal unveiling of conceptual designs for both sites in mid-July 2026. The city's own project page still lists an expected council decision for August 2026. Reporting after the July designs went public pushed that back to a City Council meeting this September, where the council is set to review final concepts and the public feedback gathered so far. Nothing about that slippage is unusual for a project this size, but it means the two most consequential downtown decisions of the year are still open on the same calendar as the storefront turnover everyone's already talking about.
What Residents Actually Voted For, and What's on the Table
The city ran an unusually granular outreach process for this: a phone survey of 588 residents, booths at the Hometown Fair and multiple farmers markets, and focus groups with both residents and downtown business owners. When people could vote for specific uses at specific sites, the results split in a telling way. At Lot 3, a parking structure was the top vote-getter with 160 votes, ahead of open space or park space at 131 and mixed-use development at 104. At 400 MBB, the preference flipped: open space or park space led with 172 votes, ahead of mixed-use at 140 and cultural or community space at 76. At both sites, a hotel, social club, or visitor center ranked last.
The two design concepts unveiled this summer split the difference in different ways. For 400 MBB, the current concept is a two-story "anchor hub" with three food and beverage spaces on the ground floor opening onto a plaza that would fold in a stretch of the underused Morningside Drive, plus creative office space upstairs with a rooftop patio facing the boulevard. For Lot 3, the city presented two competing options. Option A puts 129 parking spaces underground across three levels, freeing up space above for retail, restaurants, and a community patio with an event space, with council approval needed to override height limits for ocean-view potential on the top floor. Option B leans further into capacity, combining underground and above-ground levels to deliver 200 total spaces, 71 more than Option A, but drops the retail and restaurant component entirely in favor of preserving just the community patio and event space.
Not everyone at the table wants either option as drawn. Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin has pushed a version that treats both sites as one gateway system, pointing out that combining Lot 3, 400 MBB, and the existing Metlox garage could offer roughly 711 total parking spaces if the city leans all the way into capacity. He's also floated a rooftop park option for 400 MBB, an idea Council Member Amy Howorth pushed back on as a potential draw for the wrong kind of foot traffic late at night. Separately, Shade Hotel owner Mike Zislis has pitched a hotel expansion at Lot 3, pointing to his property's 96 percent occupancy rate and more than $10 million in transient occupancy tax generated for the city as his case for a use that wasn't on the resident survey at all.
The September Test
None of that gets settled by the businesses opening downtown right now. Coucou didn't wait for a rooftop park decision to sign its lease on Manhattan Avenue, and Blank Street Coffee didn't ask whether Lot 3 ends up with 129 spaces or 200 before taking over the old Peet's space. That's normal. Retail leasing runs on its own clock, and six or seven months is a long time to sit on a good location waiting for a city council to make up its mind.
But the timing here isn't incidental either. A downtown business association executive director calling this year's turnover "unprecedented" in the same season that the city is finalizing designs for its two largest owned parcels is not a coincidence worth ignoring. Every new operator moving into Metlox Plaza or Manhattan Avenue this year is effectively betting that downtown's center of gravity holds roughly where it is now, or shifts toward wherever Lot 3 and 400 MBB end up pointing foot traffic. If the council leans toward Option A's retail and restaurant space at Lot 3, the corner of Morningside and 12th becomes a second anchor competing with the existing Manhattan Avenue and Boulevard strips. If it leans toward Option B's added parking, that corner stays functional but quiet, and the businesses that already bet on Manhattan Avenue this year look better positioned for it.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
You don't need a real estate reason to care how this lands. If you park downtown on a Saturday, the difference between 129 underground spaces and 200 surface spaces is the difference between circling the block twice and circling it five times. If you take out-of-town guests to dinner, whether Lot 3 gets two new restaurant patios or none changes where you're likely to end up eating six months from now. And if you've noticed the storefront churn without connecting it to anything, the connection is worth holding onto: downtown is filling back in around two blank spots the city still hasn't decided how to use, and the decision arrives this month, not next year.
The City Council reviews final concepts and public feedback for both sites at a meeting this September at City Hall, 1400 Highland Avenue, with remote participation available for residents who want to weigh in before it's finalized. Whichever way it lands, it will shape the next decade of foot traffic on those blocks more than any single restaurant opening will.
If you're keeping an eye on how downtown's evolving because you're thinking about your own next move here, whether that's buying, selling, or just understanding what your property's position in this shifting corridor is worth, the Stearns Lieb Team has spent years watching these blocks change and can walk you through what it means for you. Request Your Home Valuation and let's talk about where things stand.
