Walk from Highland to Ocean on a Wednesday in August and count the paper-covered windows. If you have lived here more than a year, the exercise is unsettling in a specific way. The storefronts you used as landmarks (the Peet's on the corner, the Gum Tree on MBB, Ocean View Cafe, Pitfire at Metlox) are all either closed, closing, or already flipped to a new tenant. The block does not look broken. It looks like it is being re-drafted, one lease at a time.
Kelly Stroman, who runs the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professionals Association, put it plainly to MB News in July: "The turnover in downtown Manhattan Beach is unprecedented right now and we are all talking about it." That is a strong word from the person who tracks every storefront on this stretch for a living. It is also the right one. The pattern below is not a roundup. It is a map of who signed what, where, and what it tells us about which downtown is coming next.
Who took which space
The clearest way to read the shift is to line up the outgoing tenants against the incoming ones and note the street. Almost every swap tells you something about which category of tenant is winning the lease competition right now.
| Address / Block | Space vacated | New tenant |
|---|---|---|
| Manhattan Avenue | Nando Trattoria | Coucou, a French bistro, has opened |
| Metlox Plaza | Pitfire Pizza | Great White, an all‑day cafe that first opened in Venice Beach in 2017, at 401 Manhattan Beach Blvd, the company's sixth location |
| Metlox Plaza | Lemonade | Sogna Toscana, cleared by the Planning Commission with a small patio facing Manhattan Beach Blvd. |
| Metlox Plaza | (new build-out) | Bacio di Latte, a gelato shop, now open |
| Manhattan Beach Blvd | Peet's Coffee | Blank Street Coffee has signed a lease |
| Manhattan Beach Blvd | Gum Tree (retail) | Beyond Yoga, in the former Gum Tree space soon |
| Manhattan Beach Blvd | Gelato & Angels | Velvet by Graham & Spencer, a clothing store |
| Manhattan Avenue | Rolling Hills Flower Mart | Ounce of Salt, a jewelry store by local Jen Baick |
| Manhattan Avenue | Kate Lester Home | Framebridge, a framing shop, will open in the fall |
| Manhattan Avenue | Café Altamura | Parakeet Cafe, delayed with no opening date available yet |
| Manhattan Ave / MBB | Ocean View Cafe (closing) | Alfred Coffee has signed a lease |
Two things jump out of the column on the right. First, the food and beverage side is loading up on daytime and aperitif hours. Coucou runs the classic bistro program of steak frites, oysters, and an aperitif and cocktail culture that keeps a room busy from five to close. Great White brings the grain-bowl and fish-taco lunch crowd Metlox was missing. Blank Street, Alfred, Parakeet, and Bacio di Latte are all counter-service concepts pointed at coffee, breakfast, and afternoon walk-ins. Downtown had no shortage of dinner. It had a soft middle of the day, and this cohort of leases is filling exactly that.
Second, the retail column is skewing design-forward and lifestyle-adjacent. Beyond Yoga, Velvet, Framebridge, and Ounce of Salt are not general-interest tenants. They read as the kind of curated boutique mix you find on Abbot Kinney or Montana, not on a Southern California beach main street built around swimwear and quick-serve pizza.
Metlox is quietly changing character
Metlox is doing the most work in the shortest window. The plaza has picked up Bacio di Latte, is about to open Great White in the Pitfire courtyard space, and has a green light for Sogna Toscana to build out the old Lemonade footprint with a patio addressing Manhattan Beach Boulevard directly. That is three F&B swaps inside one plaza in a single leasing cycle.
For anyone who has watched Metlox operate as an in-and-out lunch stop, the practical difference is the arrival of a courtyard that can now hold a mid-morning coffee, a full lunch, an afternoon gelato, and a sit-down dinner without leaving the block. Metlox has been waiting on a daytime tenant that was not another coffee shop for years. It got two.
"The turnover in downtown Manhattan Beach is unprecedented right now and we are all talking about it." — Kelly Stroman, executive director of the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business and Professionals Association, speaking to MB News
The two blocks that are not leases
The leases tell one story. Two civic sites, one at the west edge of downtown and one just behind Metlox, tell the other. The city unveiled conceptual designs for both in July, and the next public checkpoint is a September council review.
The first site is 400 MBB, the former US Bank parcel next to the Vons market. The site is nearly a "gateway" to downtown Manhattan Beach. The current concept puts a two-story "anchor hub" on the parcel with three food and beverage spaces on the first floor, opening onto a plaza that incorporates little-used Morningside Drive, blocked at each end by retractable bollards so the space can be opened up as needed. Read against the tenant map above, that plaza matters. Downtown right now has plenty of dining and no meaningful public gathering space that is not a sidewalk or the pier deck. A three-tenant patio anchoring a closable street would give the west end of MBB something it has never had.
The second site is Lot 3, the parking parcel tucked behind the north-side shops just west of Metlox. A three-story, 145-space parking structure sat there until it was demolished in late 2024 due to seismic instability, leaving a 69-space ground-level lot in its place. The concepts on the table trade off parking count against public space. Option B recognizes public sentiment for surface-level parking, delivering 200 spaces with three underground levels and two above ground, and preserves a third-floor community patio and event space if the council approves the nonconforming height.
The city council will review final concepts and public feedback at a September meeting. If you have an opinion on whether downtown needs 200 more parking spaces or a proper plaza, that is the meeting to show up to. The city calendar posts agenda details as they are set.
What is still on the summer calendar
While the leases and the civic sites work themselves out, the resident calendar is unusually stacked between now and Labor Day. The dates worth blocking:
- AVP / MB Open, the volleyball weekend on the sand at the pier. The event lands in August.
- Concerts in the Park at Polliwog, the free Sunday series. Sundays July 5 through September 6, 5 to 7 PM, ten bands across the summer, admission always free, presented by Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation.
- Charlie Saikley 6-Man, the two-day August ritual at the pier. Teams of six, costumes, and the crowd that has followed it for decades.
None of these are new. They are worth naming because they are the counterweight to the churn. The block turnover is fast right now. The summer calendar is exactly what it was, and a Sunday at Polliwog reads the same as it did in 2019.
Reading the pattern
Three things are true at once. The tenant mix is shifting from pizza-and-swimwear generalists to boutique-and-café specialists. Metlox is turning into a genuine three-meal courtyard rather than a lunch stop. And the two civic sites in the pipeline are aiming at plaza space downtown has never had.
A cynic will call this gentrification of a district that was already expensive. A more careful reading is that downtown Manhattan Beach spent a decade with a leasing profile designed for beach-day foot traffic, and the current cycle is re-fitting the street for a resident base that increasingly wants a Tuesday-evening bistro and a Saturday-morning framing shop within a five-block walk. Coucou at dinner, Blank Street at 7 a.m., Bacio di Latte at 3, and Framebridge on the way back to the car is a plausible resident day now in a way it was not two years ago.
The turnover is the story. The category of tenant winning the lease is the sub-story. The plaza question is the one to watch through September.
If you own on 1st, 2nd, or the streets around Metlox, and you have been curious about what a shifting downtown lease map means for your address, ARIA Properties tracks these blocks the way an operator tracks a menu. Get your instant home valuation when you are ready to see what the current cycle looks like from your front door.
