Walk down Manhattan Beach Boulevard toward the pier and you will pass two sites that have looked exactly the same for two years: a fenced surface lot behind the shops on the north side of the street, and a shuttered bank building next to Vons with a parking lot nobody uses anymore. Ask most people why they're still empty and you'll get some version of the same answer: the city can't figure out parking. That answer was true in 2024. It stopped being true sometime in the last year, and almost nobody has updated their story to match.
The site behind the shops is Lot 3, at 1155 Morningside Drive. It used to hold a three-story, 145-space parking structure, built in 1971, that a 2024 seismic evaluation flagged as unsafe. The City Council declared a local emergency that September and had the structure torn down within months. The bank building next door, known in city paperwork as 400 MBB, is the former US Bank at 400 Manhattan Beach Boulevard, which the city bought outright in April 2025 for just over $13 million, financed through tax-exempt bonds that also covered public safety radio equipment.
Since then, the city has run something called Project Pulse: a year-plus public engagement process with a phone survey of nearly 600 residents, booths at the Hometown Fair and farmers markets, focus groups, and multiple City Council study sessions. In July, staff finally released conceptual designs for both sites. The City Council is set to review those final concepts and the public feedback behind them at a meeting this September, the moment this whole process has been building toward.
The shortage that quietly disappeared
Here's the part that hasn't made it into most conversations about these lots: while the city spent two years debating what to build, it also spent two years replacing the parking it lost, and it overshot.
City Traffic Engineer Erik Zandvliet laid out the math at a council session this year. Staff added 58 on-street spaces around downtown, built a 70-space interim surface lot at Lot 3, and picked up another 26 spaces at 400 MBB once the bank vacated. Add it up and downtown Manhattan Beach has more parking today than it did before Lot 3's structure came down. Zandvliet put it plainly: the city now has more parking than it's ever had.
That doesn't mean parking feels solved to everyone who drives downtown on a Saturday. Councilmember Amy Howorth pushed back on the framing in the same meeting, asking whether more total spaces actually means the spaces people need are in the right places. Zandvliet's answer was that the distribution is uneven. Some of the added capacity sits in lots that are farther from the restaurants and shops people are actually trying to reach, and merchant parking, the spaces employees need during their shifts, still hasn't been addressed.
So the honest version of the story isn't "downtown Manhattan Beach doesn't have enough parking." It's "downtown Manhattan Beach solved the raw numbers problem and is now arguing about something more interesting: whether these two acres in the heart of downtown should keep leaning toward cars, or pivot toward the restaurants, patios, and public space residents said they wanted when they were surveyed."
Two very different bets on the same acre
The clearest place to see that argument is in the two design options the city put forward for Lot 3 this July.
| Option A | Option B | |
|---|---|---|
| Parking spaces | 129, all underground on three levels | 200, three levels underground plus two above ground |
| Above-ground use | Three levels of retail, restaurants, and a community patio with event space | A third-floor community patio and event space only |
| Restaurant space | Two restaurant spaces, one facing Metlox Plaza with Tree Section views, one with a north and west patio and partial ocean views | None |
| What it requires | Council approval to build to a height that overrides current zoning for ocean views on the top floor | Council approval of nonconforming height for the community patio level |
Option A trades 71 parking spaces for a building that puts restaurants and public patio space back on a block that's had neither since 2024. Option B keeps parking as the primary use and adds only a rooftop community space, no commercial tenants at all. When residents were asked directly what they wanted for Lot 3 during the outreach process, a parking structure got the most votes, 160, but open space or park use wasn't far behind at 131, with mixed-use development at 104. Nobody voted decisively for either option as drawn. The council has to pick a direction the public input didn't fully settle.
What 400 MBB actually wants to be
The 400 MBB concept is less ambivalent. The current design calls it an "anchor hub": a two-story building with three food and beverage spaces on the ground floor opening onto a new plaza that folds in Morningside Drive itself, closed to through traffic with retractable bollards so the space can open up for events. The second floor is planned as 5,400 square feet of creative office space with a 3,000-square-foot patio that gets partial ocean views and, according to the renderings, sunset views down the block. Parking here is modest by comparison: a 16-space lot tucked behind the building off Morningside and 10th Place.
That's a much smaller parking allocation than Lot 3 gets under either option, and it reflects something specific about the site. When residents were surveyed on 400 MBB alone, open space or park use led the responses with 172 votes, ahead of mixed-use development at 140. Neighbors who live closest to the site, including longtime resident Jim Burton, told the council directly that whatever gets built there is going to change daily life for the block, and pushed for the lightest possible footprint rather than a major destination.
The rooftop park that split the council
One idea from this process didn't survive intact but is worth knowing about, because it explains how differently council members are reading the same two lots.
Mayor Pro Tem Joe Franklin proposed maximizing the surface parking at 400 MBB and building a rooftop park directly above it, reachable by stairs and elevator, with sweeping views down Manhattan Beach Boulevard to the ocean. His pitch: grab a sandwich from Health Nut, take it upstairs, eat above the noise. He tied it to a bigger vision for the two sites as a combined "gateway" to downtown, pointing out that Morningside Drive is the first cross street west of Valley and Ardmore, meaning a driver entering downtown could be routed left or right into a combined 711 spaces across Lot 3, 400 MBB, and the Metlox garage before ever circling for street parking.
Not everyone on the council was sold. Amy Howorth raised a concern that a rooftop amenity that close to residential property could become what she called an attractive nuisance for the people who live nearby. The rooftop park isn't part of the current design package, but the disagreement it surfaced, maximize parking capacity versus limit what draws people to the edge of a residential block, is the same disagreement running through both site plans.
There's a third voice in this conversation too. Mike Zislis, who owns the Shade Hotel directly across from Lot 3, pitched the council on a hotel expansion at the site instead, with underground parking connecting to the existing Metlox garage. He pointed to his hotel's 96 percent occupancy rate and more than $10 million in transient occupancy tax it has generated for the city as evidence the site could do more than park cars or feed a plaza. It wasn't the direction the survey results pointed, but it's on the record as one more idea the council has heard.
The blocks around these two lots are already changing
Whatever the council decides in September, the streets immediately around Lot 3 and 400 MBB have not been standing still. Kelly Stroman, who runs the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professionals Association, described the current pace of tenant turnover downtown as unprecedented, and the list backs her up. Bacio di Latte, a gelato shop, has opened. Sogna Toscana got the green light from the Planning Commission to build out the former Lemonade space with a patio facing the boulevard. Blank Street Coffee signed a lease for the old Peet's space, and Alfred Coffee is set to take over the closing Ocean View Cafe. Gum Tree, the longtime home goods shop, is relocating to a smaller storefront on Highland Avenue after losing its previous lease. Coucou, a French bistro already known in Venice and West Hollywood, is moving into the former Nando Trattoria space on Manhattan Avenue. Great White, an all-day Aussie cafe, is taking the old Pitfire Pizza spot at Metlox. Bread Head has opened in the former Tacolicious space on Manhattan Avenue.
None of that turnover depends on what happens to Lot 3 or 400 MBB. It's already happening on its own, which is part of why the stakes on these two lots feel higher than a typical municipal planning fight. The city isn't deciding whether downtown Manhattan Beach will keep changing. It's deciding whether the two biggest parcels it controls will lean into that change or hold the line as parking.
What September actually settles
The City Council's September review is the point where two years of surveys, design charrettes, and public workshops either converge on a direction or get sent back for more revision. Nothing about the meeting date guarantees a final vote on construction, and the city has been candid that entitlement and construction timelines could stretch into 2028. But this is the meeting where the public finally sees whether the council favors Option A's restaurants and patios over Option B's parking capacity at Lot 3, and how much commercial ambition survives at 400 MBB once cost estimates for either site, which run from roughly $10 million to $21 million depending on how much goes underground, are weighed against the city's own bond obligations.
If you live near either site, or just walk past them on the way to dinner, the next few weeks are worth paying attention to. The lots have been empty long enough that it's easy to assume they'll stay that way indefinitely. That's no longer the safe assumption.
If you're watching how downtown Manhattan Beach is evolving and want a read on what it might mean for a specific block or address, Colin Aita is always glad to talk through it. Reach out for a private, no-pressure conversation.
