Building in the Beach Cities: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach

The Beach Cities are three independent municipalities on the south end of Santa Monica Bay: Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach. The strip of sand, hill, and bluff they occupy between El Segundo and the Palos Verdes Peninsula is one of the most compressed residential construction environments in Los Angeles County. The standard lot in Manhattan Beach’s sand section, Area District III in the zoning code, is 30 feet wide and 2,700 square feet, which is a 30 by 90. The neighbors on either side are a few feet from the property line and sitting on shallow footings. The water table can be within reach of a basement excavation. Many of the streets closest to the beach cannot be driven on. And two lots a block apart can sit in different cities, with different building departments, different height limits, and, in one case, a different government issuing the coastal permit.

The people who build here have usually concluded that the house they want does not exist in the location and configuration they want, and that the way to get it is to buy an older house on a lot that carries most of the value, take it down, and build. This page is written for that owner at a specific point: the lot is owned or about to close, an architect and a concept exist, and the decision about how the house will be built, and by whom, has not been made. Many owners in that position in the South Bay are aerospace and technology executives who have run large programs at work and have never built a house. The page is organized around the questions they ask. What has to happen in what order. Who is accountable for what. What takes the time. What the money actually pays for. What can go wrong on a thirty-foot lot with neighbors on both sides. It takes the sequence and the roles first, then the three-jurisdiction problem, the coastal permit question, the sand, the walk streets, the hill sections, the Esplanade, the utilities, the cost structure, and the due diligence, in that order.

Two BCG guides already carry the ground this page stands on. The Malibu guide covers the Coastal Act, the Coastal Commission, and, in its Section 7, the shoring, dewatering, and marine-materials engineering for saturated sand. The permitting overview covers how a Los Angeles entitlement runs. This page adds what is specific to the Beach Cities. The lot geometry. The city shoring rules and where they came from. The walk street logistics. The neighbor problem at close range. And the fact that Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach are not the same regulatory world even though they share a boundary.

The short version: in the Beach Cities the lot decides the project. The city, the coastal status, the sand, and the neighbors are fixed before anyone draws a line. The owner who checks those four things before buying keeps every option. The owner who checks afterward has already spent some of them.

Last updated: August 2026

Three problems run through nearly every Beach Cities build, and none of them belongs to a single trade. The first is whether the basement on the drawings can be dug next to the neighbor’s house, which is a geotechnical, shoring, dewatering, and neighbor-protection question with a city permit process wrapped around it. The second is who issues the coastal permit, which changes at a city line and changes the calendar by months. The third is what a house on a street with no driveway costs to build, which reaches into the crane permit, the delivery windows, the construction hours, and the encroachment on public land in front of the lot. What follows treats each of them as the sequenced problem it is.

1. How Do You Start, If You Have Decided to Build Instead of Buy?

The sequence in the Beach Cities runs in one direction, and it starts with the lot rather than the house. Most people begin the other way: describe the house, then look for a lot that fits it. The architect is in the room either way, and nothing about this order pushes the architect back. What changes is the order of the questions. On a less constrained site, a design can absorb the site afterward and still have room to adjust. Here it cannot, because the lot fixes five things before any design exists. Which city governs it. Whether the coastal permit comes from that city or from the state. How tall the house can be and how much floor area it can hold. Whether the ground beneath it is dry sand or saturated sand. How close the neighbors’ foundations sit to the excavation. Every one of those is set by the parcel number, and an architect who has them in hand designs into them instead of discovering them.

Lot First, Then House

Lot first does not mean closing first. It means a candidate lot under contract, an architect and a construction manager looking at it together during the inspection contingency, and a purchase that closes only after the feasibility study says what the lot can hold. Most Beach Cities purchases that lead to new construction are older cottages, duplexes, or postwar houses on land that carries the value. What a teardown actually buys is not the structure, which will be demolished, but the lot geometry and the entitlement position: the width, the depth, the corner elevations, the alley or walk street frontage, the zoning district and area district, the coastal status, and the neighbors. Two lots a block apart with the same square footage can hold very different houses. One is a standard 30 by 90 in a 30-foot height district with alley access. The other fronts a walk street, with no vehicle access except the alley behind it and a crane over it. The teardown math is worked in our teardown or renovate guide. The Beach Cities version is short: on a sand section lot the land carries most of the purchase price, so the decision is usually a lot decision, and the structure is a demolition line item rather than an asset to preserve.

Architect and Construction Manager Together, Not in Sequence

The second departure from the usual sequence is that the architect and the construction manager should be engaged together, before the lot closes if the purchase is still open, and at the start of schematic design if it is not. The architect owns the design. The construction manager owns constructability, cost, schedule, and the site-specific questions that the design has to be built around: the shoring system the sand and the neighbors will permit, the dewatering plan and its discharge permit, the crane picks on a walk street, the sequence of the coastal permit and the building permit, and the trade market for this scope. When those two roles start together, the design is drawn into the constraints. When the construction manager arrives after the drawings are priced, the same constraints are resolved through redesign instead. The division of labor is described in our guide to the architect’s role in a CMAR project. There is a second structure, design-build, in which the designer and the builder are one party and the number is theirs to define, and some owners prefer one party. With an independent architect and an open-book construction manager the owner keeps a check on both, and that is the structure this page assumes.

Feasibility Before Purchase

A pre-purchase feasibility study on a specific lot is the way to keep every option. It answers the five lot questions above for that parcel, in writing, before the money is committed: jurisdiction and area district, coastal status and which government issues the permit, the height and floor area envelope, the ground and the water table from published data and a scoped geotechnical program, and the neighbors’ foundations and how close they sit. It also prices the shoring and dewatering as engineered systems rather than allowances, which is where the Beach Cities budget most often departs from a Westside flat-lot budget. An owner who has that report can walk away from a lot, negotiate on it, or design into it, with the constraints measured rather than assumed. A redacted sample of the report is on our deliverables page.

The Clock

The project runs in four phases: design, entitlement, plan check, and construction. Design is controlled by the owner and the architect. Entitlement is controlled by the city and, in Hermosa Beach, by the California Coastal Commission, whose clocks are described in Section 3. Plan check is controlled by the city building division and by the completeness of the submittal, and in Manhattan Beach the shoring plans are a separate plan check and permit that cannot be filed until the building, grading, and drainage plans are approved. Construction on a sand section lot with a basement is controlled by the excavation, shoring, and dewatering sequence at the front of the schedule and by the finish scope at the back. The general framework is in our construction timeline guide; the documented clocks from each city’s code are tabulated in Section 9.

The Cost Structure

The budget has four parts: land, soft costs, hard costs, and contingency. Land is the dominant part here and is set by the market, not by the project. Soft costs are the architect, the structural, civil, and geotechnical engineers, the surveyor, the coastal permit and plan check fees, the fees the city collects at permit, and the carrying cost of the entitlement calendar. Hard costs are the construction itself, and on a sand section lot the front of that number, demolition, shoring, excavation, dewatering, and the foundation, is the part that varies most from lot to lot and the part a feasibility study prices first. Contingency is sized to what the investigation could not resolve.

How the hard cost is priced matters as much as what it is. A single number quoted against drawings that are not finished is a price on a scope that does not exist yet, with the missing parts listed as exclusions and allowances. The structure we work in prices it differently. Each trade is bid competitively, usually by three bidders, and every bid is visible to the owner. The builder’s fee is a fixed percentage of the direct cost of the work, and the agreement defines direct cost: subcontractor costs, vendor costs, and the builder’s own crews at the rates the agreement sets. The total, fee included, is capped by a Guaranteed Maximum Price, and cost above the cap belongs to the builder. Every month the owner sees every invoice against the budget, in a report built to be read line by line. An owner who wants to decompose the number can, because the lines are there. The delivery method is called Construction Manager at Risk. The accounting behind it is open-book cost-plus with a cap, and the cap is what separates it from the uncapped contracts the term usually brings to mind: the competition is in the trade bids, the fee is fixed, and the ceiling is contractual. Redacted samples of the monthly report and the GMP summary are on our CMAR deliverables page, and the estimating sequence behind them is in our budget and cost control guide.

2. Which City Is Your Lot In, and Why Does It Matter So Much Here?

Three cities, three building departments, three planning codes, three fire authorities, and two water providers share about eleven square miles of land. None of them is the City of Los Angeles, and none of them is governed by LADBS, the Los Angeles Municipal Code, ZIMAS, or the Baseline Hillside Ordinance. Readers who know our Palos Verdes and Beverly Hills guides will recognize the pattern of independent cities with self-contained codes. What is different here is the density of the boundaries. The Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach line runs through a continuous residential fabric, and the differences on either side of it are not cosmetic. They change who issues the coastal permit, how tall the house can be, and how the shoring is reviewed.

The entries in that table are verified against the three municipal codes and city handouts as of August 2026, and the sections that follow treat each row in depth. Two warnings belong here rather than later. First, the mailing address is not the jurisdiction. The Hollywood Riviera is the clearest case: a large part of the neighborhood carries Redondo Beach addresses and a 90277 zip code while sitting inside the City of Torrance, and a project submitted to the wrong city is a complete reset. The Los Angeles County Assessor portal shows the taxing city for any parcel and is the first check on any purchase. Second, in Hermosa Beach the zoning code is not part of the certified coastal program. The Commission’s 2026 staff reports for single-family houses there describe the city’s zoning code as uncertified and treat the 1982 Land Use Plan designation as the governing land use. A Hermosa lot therefore has two descriptions, the city’s zone and the LUP designation, and they do not always agree.

The Sand, the Hill, and the Bluff

The ground here is one of three things, and the page follows that split. The sand section and the Strand, in all three cities, are the flat lots between the beach and the first hill: 30-foot-wide parcels, zero or near-zero side yards, walk streets, and basements that reach toward the water table. The hill sections, Manhattan Beach’s hill section, Hermosa Beach’s hill, and Redondo’s Hollywood Riviera on the north flank of the Palos Verdes Hills, are view-driven lots where slope, retaining, and drainage toward neighbors below govern. The Esplanade in South Redondo is the bluff, where the residential lots face a public bluff park across a road and the constraints are appeal exposure and view corridors rather than private bluff-edge engineering. None of the three is easy ground. Our engagement map records coastal work from Western Malibu through Venice, where the same flat-lot, high-water-table conditions govern foundation design.

3. Are You in the Coastal Zone, and Who Issues Your Permit?

Current as of August 2026. The California Coastal Zone covers the western strip of all three cities. In Hermosa Beach it is about 43 percent of the city’s land area and runs inland from the beach to Ardmore Avenue, with exceptions. In Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach the boundary is mapped on each city’s zoning map and interactive parcel map, and Redondo’s coastal chapter defines the zone as the part of the state coastal zone lying within the city’s Area One. Inside the zone, nearly any new house, addition, or demolition is development under the Coastal Act and needs a Coastal Development Permit in addition to the building permit. The question that decides the calendar is not whether a permit is needed. It is who issues it.

In Manhattan Beach the City Issues the Permit, and the Strand Is Appealable

Manhattan Beach has operated under a certified Local Coastal Program since the 1990s, and its Chapter A.96 is the procedural spine for every coastal permit in the city. A new single-family house in the CZ overlay requires a Coastal Development Permit under Section A.96.040. The exemptions in Section A.96.050 cover improvements to existing houses, and they fall away where a builder cares. An improvement between the sea and the first public road, or within 300 feet of the inland extent of the beach, loses its exemption if it adds 10 percent or more of floor area, adds a story or more than 10 percent of height, or adds a significant detached structure. A house destroyed by disaster may be replaced without a permit only within 10 percent of its floor area, height, and bulk, in the same location. Demolition and new construction get the full permit.

The appealable area, defined in Section A.96.030, is the strip between the sea and the first public road paralleling the sea, or within 300 feet of the inland extent of the beach, whichever is greater, plus land within 300 feet of the top of a coastal bluff. The Strand lots are in it. Depending on the block, lots one or two rows inland are also within 300 feet of the beach and are in it too. For a house in the appealable area the city holds a public hearing and notices owners and residents within 100 feet. After the local decision, the Coastal Commission has 10 working days from its receipt of the notice of final action to take an appeal from an aggrieved person or from any two Commissioners. The permit is not effective until every appeal, including that one, is exhausted, and if the Commission takes jurisdiction it reviews the project de novo against the certified LCP and Chapter 3. Most single-family projects in the appealable area move through the administrative waiver process under Section A.96.260, which mails notice and waives the hearing if no one requests one within 15 working days. Any project that also needs a minor exception, variance, or use permit goes to a full hearing without the option of a waiver.

Two practical points follow. The Community Development Director makes the jurisdictional determination at intake under Section A.96.080, classifying a project as Commission original jurisdiction, appealable, non-appealable, or exempt, and an applicant or neighbor who disputes it can force a Commission Executive Director determination. Asking for that determination in writing before purchase is cheap. And the LCP amendments the city adopted in 2025 to implement its Housing Element, which touch the residential district chapter and the coastal permit chapter, are not effective until the Commission certifies them. A project filed today is processed under the certified text, not the adopted text, and the city’s own coastal zone page says so.

In Hermosa Beach the Coastal Commission Issues the Permit

Hermosa Beach is different in kind. The Commission certified the city’s Land Use Plan in 1982, but the city never obtained certification of a full Local Coastal Program, and its 2017 general plan, PLAN Hermosa, which was written as an integrated coastal land use plan, has not replaced it. The city’s own Local Coastal Plan page describes the remaining work to address Commission staff concerns as substantial, and the interim step the city and Commission staff agreed on in 2021 was a partial revision of the LUP focused on the mobility element, not on residential permitting. The result is that a new single-family house in Hermosa’s Coastal Zone gets its Coastal Development Permit from the California Coastal Commission’s South Coast District office in Long Beach, after the city has approved the project in concept and made its CEQA determination. The standard of review is Chapter 3 of the Coastal Act itself, with the 1982 LUP used as guidance. The city’s zoning code is not certified, and where it conflicts with the LUP designation the Commission reads the LUP.

The 2026 Commission record shows what that process looks like for an ordinary house. A demolition and rebuild on a 2,837-square-foot lot on the 8th Street walk street, about 275 feet inland of the beach, was filed with the Commission on November 21, 2025. It was heard on the consent calendar on February 6, 2026, with the 90-day Permit Streamlining clock and a 90-day extension noted on the report. The city had made its CEQA exemption determination on September 22, 2025. The approval carried special conditions that recur across Hermosa single-family permits. The walk street encroachment in front of the house was authorized for five years only, with a permit amendment required to keep it, and the city’s right to revoke the encroachment permit without cause was preserved. A nesting bird survey within 72 hours of starting work was required if construction ran between February 1 and August 31. Construction materials, equipment, debris, and washdown were regulated to protect coastal waters. And the owner had to record a deed restriction imposing all of it on the land before the permit issued. The standard conditions add a two-year expiration from the Commission vote if construction has not commenced, and the excavated soil was to be exported to a site outside the coastal zone, since disposal inside the zone would itself have required a permit.

Two things about that record matter to an owner. The first is the calendar: a Hermosa CDP adds a state process, with its own filing standards, staff report, and hearing date, after the city’s planning approval rather than in parallel with it. The second is the encroachment problem. Hermosa’s walk street front yards are largely public right-of-way improved by private owners under a city encroachment program, and the Commission’s staff has concluded that the program’s one-time fee, $1,643.52 in 2025, does not mitigate the private use of public land. Until the city and the Commission redevelop the program, the Commission is limiting encroachment authorizations to five years on new permits. An owner buying a Hermosa walk street lot is buying a front yard that the coastal permit may authorize only temporarily.

In Redondo Beach the City Issues the Permit, With a 50 Percent Trigger

Redondo Beach has had a certified Local Coastal Program since 2003, and Article 10 of its coastal implementing ordinance mirrors the Manhattan Beach structure with a few differences that matter. The Director decides most single-family permits; the Planning Commission decides any permit in the appealable area or any permit that needs a hearing before it for another reason. The application is deemed complete or incomplete within 30 calendar days of submittal, and a second 30-day review runs on the resubmittal. The minor development waiver works the same way as Manhattan Beach’s, with a 15-working-day window for anyone to request a hearing. Local appeals go to the City Council within 10 days, and in the appealable area the Commission appeal runs 10 working days from its receipt of the notice of decision. A permit expires two years after approval if the project has not commenced. What is specific to Redondo is the exemption structure. Replacement of 50 percent or more of a residential structure under one ownership is not exempt repair and maintenance and requires a coastal permit, so the remodel-versus-teardown question inside Redondo’s coastal zone has a coastal answer as well as a building code answer. Redondo also refuses to accept an application to improve development that was built without a coastal permit unless the owner simultaneously applies to authorize it, which makes the permit history of an older house part of the purchase diligence.

4. Do You Need a Basement, and What Does It Take to Build One on Sand?

The basement question in the sand section is a floor area question before it is an engineering question. Manhattan Beach’s Area District III, which covers the sand section, allows 30 feet of height and three stories. Under MBMC 10.60.050 the height is measured from a horizontal plane set at the average elevation of existing grade at the four corners of the lot, and a second limit keeps any part of the building from exceeding the district maximum by more than 20 percent above existing or finished grade, whichever is lower. Buildable floor area is capped by a Floor Area Factor of 1.6 times the lot area in the RS and RM zones and 1.7 in RH. On a standard 2,700-square-foot lot that is 4,320 to 4,590 square feet of buildable floor area above grade, before the parking exclusion. The code then excludes from that count any basement located entirely below local grade, and 70 percent of a basement that is not entirely below local grade, plus 200 square feet of basement storage and mechanical space. A condition of entirely below local grade exists where the finished floor of the level above sits no more than two feet above local grade. Square footage that cannot go up goes down. That is the origin of the sand section basement, and it is why the city’s shoring rules exist.

The floor area accounting has two more terms that shape the design. The open space requirement for single-family houses in Area Districts III and IV is 15 percent of buildable floor area with a 220-square-foot minimum, and for that calculation the basement counts at 100 percent, so a large basement enlarges the open space the lot must provide. Enclosed parking steps from two spaces to three once buildable floor area plus exempted basement area reaches 3,600 square feet under MBMC 10.64.030, and three enclosed spaces on a 30-foot lot is a design problem of its own. The city’s Basement and Story handout and Building Height handout, on the Planning Division’s forms page, carry the diagrams. The Director determines compliance from two vertical cross-sections, front to back and side to side, showing each level against existing and finished grade on the property and on the adjacent land within five feet of the property line. Any project involving grading or scraping needs a survey acceptable to the Director, with markers set, before a demolition or building permit issues.

What the Ground Is

The sand section is built on coastal dune and beach sand, and the water table under it is close. The City of Hermosa Beach says so on its own Building and Safety page. Its groundwater table ranges from six to 15 feet below the ground in some areas, and subterranean streams run from inland sources to the Pacific. Digging a basement in the coastal zone can breach the water table and flood it, and pumping carries a risk of saltwater intrusion into fresh groundwater. Hermosa requires a geotechnical report before construction for that reason. The Malibu guide’s Section 7 describes the same ground on beachfront lots, with a water table that rises and falls with the tides and saturated sand that behaves like a liquid when disturbed, and the engineering it lays out for secant pile walls, sheet pile cutoffs, wellpoint and deep-well dewatering, hydrostatic design, and permanent sump systems applies here without change. What changes in the Beach Cities is the lot: the excavation is 30 feet wide, and the neighbors are on both long sides.

The state seismic hazard zoning adds a second layer. The California Geological Survey maps liquefaction Zones of Required Investigation where shallow historic groundwater, less than 40 feet deep, sits in young, uncompacted sands under strong expected shaking, and the Venice and Redondo Beach quadrangles cover the three cities. Inside a zone the city must withhold the building permit until a site-specific geotechnical investigation evaluates the hazard and the foundation design or ground improvement addresses it. The CGS cites liquefaction damage in Redondo Beach in the 1994 Northridge earthquake in its own regulatory-zone guidance. Any specific lot is checked against the CGS seismic hazard zone maps, and a zone hit is disclosed by the seller. The general framework for reading a soils report and matching it to a foundation system is in our foundation systems and geotechnical guide.

Manhattan Beach’s Shoring Rules and Where They Came From

Manhattan Beach regulates basement excavations through a separate shoring permit, and the rules have a public origin. In the summer of 2013 the city had about 150 construction projects underway in four square miles, with 70 new houses built the year before, and the City Council heard from sand section residents about basement shoring on half lots. One resident described roughly two dozen steel beams and plates vibrated into the ground next door and the cracks in his walls and driveway that followed. City staff told the Council that the shoring guidelines, then about 20 years old, had already been revised eleven times, and that they would keep changing as the city learned more about the geology under the surface. The current edition, dated August 2023, is what a basement on a sand section lot is reviewed against today.

The rules are procedural, and they are listed here as procedure. A shoring permit is required for every excavation in the city except three cases. In the sand section, which the city maps as Areas 3 and 4 plus Blanche Road and everything west of it, the only excavation that avoids the permit is one four feet or less in depth, with sides sloped no steeper than one to one and at least five feet of horizontal daylight to any adjacent footing. Anything deeper is engineered shoring. The shoring plan check is separate from the building plan check and cannot be submitted until the building, grading, and drainage plans are approved; it may be deferred, but it cannot be skipped. The submittal has four parts. Shoring plans by a registered design professional showing dimensions, cross-sections, structural details, the method of installation, the method of removal, material specifications, and special inspection procedures. Structural calculations. A geotechnical report, unless the shoring is designed to the code’s presumptive values. And a survey by a licensed land surveyor showing the topography and profile at five-foot intervals along the adjacent property line, the location of the buildings on the adjacent properties, their finish floor elevations, and the location and elevation of their foundations. The code also requires a minimum 36-inch clear egress court between the exterior wall and any adjacent retaining wall, permanent shoring, or property line wall, and notes that this can supersede the zoning setback.

Before the permit issues, the owner must show the approved plans and calculations, a copy of the 30-day notification letter to the adjacent property owners required by California Civil Code Section 832 and Building Code Section 3307.1 with proof of mailing, and a Cal/OSHA permit for any excavation five feet or deeper. During the work, the shoring steel is inspected before it goes in the ground and the mill certificate is delivered to the building inspector a working day before shoring starts. Shoring construction and removal are continuously inspected by a certified deputy inspector, with structural observation by the design professional where the plans say so. A final special inspection report and a compaction report for fill behind the shoring go to the inspector for approval. Pile drivers, hammers, vibratory installation methods, and pile extraction are not permitted unless the Building Official pre-approves them. That last line is the 2013 council record written into the handout.

The Neighbor Problem at Close Range

On a 30-foot lot the neighbor’s foundation is a few feet from the excavation on both sides, and it is usually a shallow footing under a house that predates the current codes. What protects it is a sequence, not a single device. The shoring system is designed to carry full hydrostatic pressure so that dewatering can happen inside the shoring perimeter rather than by drawing the water table down under the neighbor’s footings, because lowering the water table outside the excavation is how older shallow foundations settle. Where the neighbor’s footing sits above the bottom of the excavation and within its zone of influence, it is underpinned before the excavation passes it. Monitoring points are set on both neighboring structures before any work starts and read on a schedule during excavation and dewatering, with thresholds that stop the work. A preconstruction survey, photographs and a written condition report of both neighboring houses inside and out, is made before demolition, and it is the document that settles any later claim. Manhattan Beach’s construction rules in MBMC 9.44.020 make part of this mandatory. Shoring and excavation must be performed to the city guidelines so as not to damage adjoining property, and the contractor must at its own expense preserve and protect adjoining property by providing proper foundations. If a neighbor claims physical damage and the owner declines to repair it, the owner has a mandatory duty to enter mediation administered or approved by the city. The city also funds a Residential Construction Officer whose job is the relationship between construction sites and the neighbors around them.

The neighbor agreement is the last piece. A written access and protection agreement with each adjacent owner, covering the preconstruction survey, the monitoring program, any underpinning or tiebacks that cross the property line, the crane swing, and the repair standard if damage occurs, is negotiated before demolition, while the owner still has leverage and goodwill. Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach do not publish a shoring handout of the Manhattan Beach kind, but both require engineered shoring plans and geotechnical reports for excavations of this depth. Hermosa states its groundwater warning on its own permit page, and Redondo’s noise chapter prohibits vibration perceptible at the property line, which reaches vibratory pile installation in practice. Our shoring and underpinning guide covers the systems and the adjacent-structure engineering in detail.

Dewatering, Discharge, and the Permanent System

Groundwater pumped out of a sand section excavation has to go somewhere lawful. Discharge to the storm drain, and from there to the bay, is regulated by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board under its general permit for construction and project dewatering in coastal watersheds, Order R4-2023-0429, NPDES No. CAG994004, which became effective March 21, 2024. Enrollment requires a notice of intent with a representative sample of the groundwater analyzed against the order’s screening levels. The order also requires the applicant to show that discharge to the sanitary sewer, reuse, or another lawful disposal is infeasible before it authorizes a surface discharge, so the sewering agency’s answer comes first and hauling is the fallback when volumes are small. Where the discharge enters the county storm drain system, the County Flood Control District is notified three days before it starts, and the city’s own right-of-way and stormwater rules apply to the connection. A new discharger files the notice of intent at least 45 days before the discharge begins, and the discharge cannot start until the Board issues its notice of applicability, so the filing is timed to have the authorization in hand before excavation reaches water. Below the water table, the finished basement is designed as a hydrostatic structure: waterproofing as a continuous system rather than a coating, a slab and walls designed for uplift and lateral water pressure, and a permanent sump with a backup power supply. The pump is the only thing between the water table and the finished floor for the life of the house. The building envelope side of that system is in our waterproofing and water intrusion guide.

The Risk Register for a Sand Section Lot

The risks on a sand section lot are knowable, and most of them are knowable before purchase. The register below lists each one, what changes in the project if it is realized, and what resolves it, which is also where it is priced. It is written to be copied into a spreadsheet and carried through the project.

5. How Do You Build a House on a Walk Street?

A walk street is a public right-of-way with no vehicle roadway: a paved pedestrian path, usually with a landscaped strip on either side, running from the first driven street west to the Strand. Manhattan Beach has them through the sand section on both sides of the pier, and Hermosa Beach has them from Hermosa Avenue west, where the Commission describes each one as a pedestrian coastal accessway that connects to the Strand. The houses front the walk street. Vehicle access is from the alley behind, where there is one, or from the cross street at the end of the block. The front yard is partly the owner’s and partly the city’s: in both cities, a strip of the public right-of-way in front of each lot, roughly 20 feet deep in Hermosa Beach, has been improved by owners as patios, planters, walls, and gates under a city encroachment permit. Manhattan Beach’s Encroachment Standards under MBMC 7.36.150 and its encroachment booklet govern what can be built there; Hermosa’s program is the one the Coastal Commission is now limiting to five-year authorizations on new permits, as Section 3 describes.

The construction problem is access. There is no driveway to back a truck into, and on many lots the alley is the only place a vehicle can stop. Deliveries are staged in the alley or the cross street and carried or craned in. The crane is the central tool of a walk street build: the lumber package, the steel, the roof trusses, and the mechanical equipment come over the neighbors’ roofs or down the walk street, and every pick is a permit. In Manhattan Beach, crane use in the public right-of-way is its own right-of-way permit through Traffic Engineering under MBMC 7.36.030, with the city’s traffic control requirements attached. Equipment and material storage, roll-off bins, concrete pours, and delivery and hauling in the right-of-way are a separate street use permit, and temporary fencing and pedestrian canopies are a temporary encroachment permit. A vehicle on the Strand or a walk street at all, or a well monitoring installation in the public way, is a Public Works special use permit. The same permits exist in Hermosa Beach through its Public Works right-of-way permit process, and Redondo Beach issues its right-of-way and encroachment permits through Public Works.

The rules that follow the permits are the ones neighbors enforce. Manhattan Beach’s construction rules in MBMC 9.44.020 are posted at every site. No construction activity may block private driveways or the normal movement of traffic without a right-of-way permit, and street and public parking spaces may not be reserved for construction vehicles or workers at any time. No audio device may be audible past the property line, and sidewalks may not be obstructed. A green mesh construction fence goes up before demolition, temporary power is installed before any work begins, and each subcontractor meets the Director’s designee on site before starting. Construction hours are Monday to Friday 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM and Saturday 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, with no work on Sundays or the eleven city holidays. Hermosa Beach allows Monday to Friday 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Saturday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and Redondo Beach, under RBMC 4-24.503, Monday to Friday 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Saturday 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with none on Sundays or six holidays. On a street where everyone is ten feet away and walks past the site every morning, those hours are not the outer bound of what is possible. They are the whole schedule.

What the walk street does to cost and schedule is a set of named variables rather than a percentage. Crane time and rigging replace the delivery truck for every heavy material. Alley staging limits how much material can be on site at once, which multiplies deliveries and the coordination behind them. The construction hours, the parking prohibition, and the noise limits cap the daily production rate. Neighbor relations consume management time from the first day. A feasibility study prices these as line items, and a schedule built around the crane calendar and the permitted hours is the schedule that holds.

6. What Do Slope and Views Change in the Hill Sections and the Riviera?

East of the sand section the ground rises, and the design problem changes from floor area to elevation. Manhattan Beach’s hill section sits in Area Districts I and II, where the RS district allows 26 feet and two stories. The minimum lot widths are 40 and 50 feet, the front setback is 20 feet, and the rear setback is a formula, 0.3 times the lot depth minus 20 feet with a 12-foot floor. The height is still measured from the average of the four lot corners, so on a sloped lot the datum sits somewhere between the uphill and downhill corners. That is why a hill section house can read taller from the street below than the number in the table. It is also why the second limit in MBMC 10.60.050 matters. No part of the building may exceed the district maximum by more than 20 percent above existing or finished grade, whichever is lower, so on a 26-foot lot the downhill face tops out at about 31 feet above the ground beneath it. Interior side yards and rear yards adjoining a wall taller than 24 feet grow by three feet, except on lots narrower than 35 feet. Lots in Area Districts I and II that adjoin an improved alley must take all vehicle access from the alley, and non-alley lots 55 feet wide or less are limited to 18 feet of aggregate garage door width in the front half of the lot. The Area District I and II RS lots also carry the supplemental front setback of MBMC 10.12.030(T): an additional area equal to six percent of the lot behind the front setback, with ground-level height limited to 14 or 17 feet depending on roof pitch. It is the city’s anti-mansionization tool, and it reshapes the front of every hill section house.

The engineering on these lots is the hillside package the rest of this site describes: deep cuts for a lower level that daylights downhill, retaining walls at the property line and under the house, drainage that must be collected and conveyed rather than allowed to run toward the neighbor below, and a geotechnical program sized to the cut. The view is what the owner is buying, and the massing follows the view, so the structure often steps down the slope with a garage at street level and living space below it. Our hillside construction guide, retaining walls guide, and grading limits guide carry the methods; the Beach Cities differences are that the cities’ grading ordinances are their own, that haul routes run through residential streets to the boulevards, and that the export leaves the coastal zone under the coastal permit’s conditions.

Hermosa Beach’s hill is the same problem under a different code. Height is 25 feet in R-1 and 30 feet in the multiple-family zones, and a 65 percent lot coverage cap stands in place of a floor area factor. R-1 requires 400 square feet of usable open space with a 10-foot minimum dimension, side yards of 10 percent of lot width with a three-foot minimum and a five-foot maximum requirement, and front yards of 10 percent of lot depth between five and ten feet. A garage that fronts a street sits 17 feet back from the sidewalk with roll-up doors. Parking is two enclosed spaces plus a guest space for a single-family house, and one on-site guest space is added for each on-street space lost to a new curb cut, a rule that pushes hill lots toward alley access wherever an alley exists.

The Hollywood Riviera

The Hollywood Riviera is the northern flank of the Palos Verdes Hills where they meet South Redondo, and it is the one hill section in the Beach Cities that is geologically part of the peninsula rather than the coastal plain. The jurisdiction is split. The lower Riviera nearest the beach and Riviera Village is in the City of Redondo Beach. Much of the neighborhood up the hill is in the City of Torrance. A substantial part of that Torrance land, including the streets of the original 1920s and 1930s subdivision, carries Redondo Beach mailing addresses and the 90277 zip code for historical postal reasons, while the newer 1950s blocks carry Torrance 90505 addresses. The Redondo side is governed by Redondo’s R-1 standards: 30 feet and two stories, a floor area ratio of 0.65 with design bonuses to 0.8, a front setback averaging 25 percent of lot depth or 25 feet with a 20-foot minimum, a second story set back a further 10 feet on average, and five-foot side yards. The Torrance side is governed by Torrance, which is outside the scope of this page. The ground on the Riviera is the beginning of the peninsula’s geology, and where a lot sits on the marine terrace deposits and bedrock that our Palos Verdes guide describes, the geotechnical questions are that guide’s questions, not the sand section’s. A Riviera lot within the Coastal Zone is in Redondo’s coastal permit process; a Torrance Riviera lot is in Torrance’s.

7. What Does the Esplanade Bluff Change?

The Esplanade runs along the top of a coastal bluff in South Redondo from Knob Hill Avenue south toward Torrance Beach, and it is the one place in the Beach Cities where a house sits on a bluff rather than on sand or a hill. The geometry is specific. The bluff and its face are public: the walkway, the landscaped slope, and the stairs and ramps down to the beach are city and county property, and the residential lots sit on the east side of the roadway, facing the bluff across the street. That makes the Esplanade different from a Malibu blufftop lot, where the bluff edge is on the owner’s land and the setback from it is calculated on the owner’s geotechnical report. Here the private engineering questions are the lot’s own soils and drainage, not bluff retreat, and the regulatory questions are appeal exposure and views.

Esplanade lots sit within 300 feet of the top of the seaward face of the bluff, which places them in the appealable area under Redondo’s Article 10, so the Planning Commission rather than the Director hears the permit and the Coastal Commission can take an appeal. The Commission has used that jurisdiction. In 2004 it found a substantial issue on an appeal of a second-story addition at the corner of the Esplanade and Knob Hill Avenue, because the addition would obstruct part of the public view of the sea from Knob Hill Avenue as it approaches the Esplanade. It then approved the project de novo with conditions. The principle is that the numbered avenues and Knob Hill are public view corridors to the ocean, and a house that fills the view down one of them draws the Commission’s attention regardless of what the zoning allows. The city’s own bluff infrastructure is aging on the same street: the Avenue A access ramp was closed in November 2021 after inspections found the retaining wall protecting the path failing, and the replacement ramp went through its own coastal permit and mitigated negative declaration in 2026. An Esplanade owner is not responsible for the bluff, but the bluff is the owner’s frontage, and the condition of the city’s walls and slopes across the street belongs in the diligence. The bluff engineering itself, retreat rates, slope stability setbacks, and drainage prohibitions, is covered in the Malibu guide’s coastal bluff section, and shoreline protection in its seawall section, for the reader who wants the mechanics.

8. Which Utilities Are Easier Here, and Which Still Have to Be Planned?

One thing is easier in the Beach Cities than in Malibu, and it is worth saying plainly: there is municipal sewer everywhere. No Beach Cities lot has a septic system, no coastal permit turns on an onsite wastewater design, and the seawall-septic-habitability relationship that governs a Malibu beachfront lot does not exist here. Each city owns its local collection system, and treatment runs through the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. The sewer lateral is a connection permit and a public works inspection, and on a walk street lot the lateral often runs to the alley main.

Water is two providers. The City of Manhattan Beach runs its own municipal water utility through its Public Works Utilities Division, and water and sewer bills are city bills. Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, with about five percent of Torrance, are served by California Water Service’s Hermosa-Redondo system, in place since 1927, which supplies a mix of local groundwater and Metropolitan Water District water delivered through the West Basin Municipal Water District. The service question a new house has to answer is fire flow. Every new one- and two-family dwelling in California is sprinklered under the residential code, and a sprinklered house needs a water service and meter sized for the sprinkler demand. The available fire flow at the hydrant nearest the lot has to be confirmed with the purveyor and the fire authority before the sprinkler design is fixed. That is a hydrant flow test and a will-serve or service planning request early in design rather than at plan check.

Electric service is Southern California Edison in all three cities, and gas is SoCalGas. A house with the mechanical, cooking, and vehicle charging loads that owners specify here is a 400-amp service or larger. A service of that size is an SCE service planning application with its own review, its own transformer and secondary questions, and, on a walk street or an alley-served lot, its own routing problem for the underground service. The application is filed when the electrical load calculation exists, at the end of design development rather than at permit, because the service planning review runs on SCE’s calendar, not the city’s.

Fire review is three authorities. The Manhattan Beach Fire Department and the Redondo Beach Fire Department are city departments and review plans through their own prevention bureaus. Hermosa Beach contracts with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, has adopted the county’s Title 32 fire code, and routes fire questions through County Fire Station 100. For a new single-family house the fire review is sprinklers, access, and hydrant flow. The wildland-urban interface hardening package that governs Malibu and the Palos Verdes Peninsula is a zone-based requirement that the flat sand section does not trigger, though a Riviera lot should be checked against the current State Fire Marshal hazard maps. Hermosa Beach adopted the 2025 California Building Standards Codes effective January 1, 2026.

9. What Does It Cost and How Long Does It Take?

Current as of August 2026. The split between land and construction is different here than on a Westside hillside, and it runs the other way. On a Pacific Palisades or Bel Air hillside the construction, with its caissons, retaining, and grading, can rival or exceed the land. In the Beach Cities the land dominates. A July 2026 survey of Manhattan Beach new-construction sales reported a citywide median sale price of $3.7 million for the three months ending May 2026 and a median of about $1,590 per square foot across all sales. Finished new-construction sales clustered between about $1,351 and $1,719 per square foot, with active new-construction listings asking $1,674 to $3,391. The same survey put a Hermosa Beach new-construction listing at about $2,264 per square foot and a Redondo Beach listing at about $824. Those are values of finished houses with the land underneath them, not construction costs, and their spread says what a per-square-foot rule of thumb cannot: the lot, the street, the coastal position, and the project complexity move the number more than the building does.

We deliberately do not publish a per-square-foot hard cost for the Beach Cities. The spread between a Riviera slope house, a Manhattan Avenue teardown with no basement, and a Strand house with a basement below the water table on a crane-only lot is too wide for a single range to inform anyone. The general framework, including the Los Angeles cost benchmarks by building component, is in our Los Angeles construction cost guide. What follows is the set of drivers specific to this geography, in roughly the order they change a budget, and each of them is a variable that a feasibility study on a specific lot converts into a number.

How the Number Develops

Under the open-book structure described in Section 1, the budget for a lot like this is not a single estimate. It is a number that develops in steps as the unknowns are resolved. At feasibility, the front of the budget, demolition, shoring, excavation, dewatering, and the foundation, is carried as engineered scope with a stated basis rather than as an allowance, because those are the items the lot controls. At each design milestone the estimate is updated against the drawings, and the shoring and dewatering lines move from ranges to system-specific numbers as the geotechnical report, the neighbor survey, and the discharge path come in. When the drawings are complete the trades bid competitively, and the Guaranteed Maximum Price is built from those bids and a detailed cost model, with a contingency the owner can see. The owner pays the actual cost of the work and sees every invoice. Contingency is drawn only with the owner’s approval. Savings below the cap are real, and how they are divided is negotiated in each contract, like the fee; the split tracks how completely the drawings define the scope when the cap is set, because that is what sets the builder’s risk inside the cap. It is the clause to read before signing any GMP. The mechanics are in our budget and cost control guide. The point here is narrower: on a Beach Cities lot the number is only as good as the investigation behind its first five lines.

What Is Not in the Number

The question that protects an owner more than any other is what is not in the number. A lump-sum bid on a design-development set is a fixed price on a scope the drawings do not yet define, and the undefined parts appear as exclusions and allowances: the shoring system as an allowance until the geotechnical report exists, the dewatering as an exclusion until the water table is known, the crane as a line that depends on an access plan no one has drawn. Three bids on the same incomplete drawings are three different scopes, and the lowest number is often the most excluded one. None of that is a fault of the bidder. It is a property of pricing a scope before it is defined. The way to compare numbers is to make the scope identical first, which is what the feasibility and preconstruction work on this page does, and then to ask every bidder the same question: what is not in the number, and what happens to the price when it arrives. The document that does the leveling, a line-by-line scope comparison across bidders, is one of the samples on our deliverables page. Under an open-book structure that question is answered on the page every month, because the number is built from the trade bids and the report shows what each line has consumed against them.

Long-Lead Items and When They Are Committed

A sand section build has a critical path, and most of it runs through items that have to be committed long before the work they govern. The table names them with the phase at which each is committed and the reason it is long-lead. None of the entries is a duration; each is a trigger.

The Documented Clocks

The phase durations that owners ask for are ranges that depend on the design, the city, the coastal status, and the lot, and we state them that way. What can be stated exactly are the clocks each city writes into its code, and a schedule is built from those first. The table lists them with their source, and the entries marked as ranges are our reading of how the documented clocks combine, not a promise about any project.

The one rule we will state is the ordering: entitlement and the shoring plan check run before construction can start, and on a Hermosa or appealable-area lot they run long enough that the schedule begins with them. The general phase framework is in our construction timeline guide, and the delivery-method question is in our CM at risk versus advisor page.

10. What Should You Check on a Beach Cities Lot Before You Buy?

Each item below is a question a pre-purchase feasibility study answers for a specific lot, and each takes days rather than months, so the whole set runs inside an inspection contingency. The general framework is in our lot due diligence guide; these are the Beach Cities layers, in the order they decide the project.

11. When Should the Construction Manager Come In?

Every constraint on this page is cheapest to satisfy early and most expensive to discover late. The jurisdiction, the coastal permit path, the height datum, the basement accounting, the shoring system, the dewatering plan, the crane calendar, and the neighbor agreements are all inputs the design should be built around. That is why the construction manager belongs in the room during feasibility and schematic design, alongside the architect, not after the drawings are priced. That is the premise of the Construction Manager at Risk model: one party is accountable for constructability, cost, and sequencing while the decisions that lock in cost are still being made, and the same party then delivers the project under an open-book Guaranteed Maximum Price.

For this scope there are three entry points. A pre-purchase feasibility study on a specific lot answers the Section 10 checklist in writing before the purchase closes. A constructability review on a house that has already been designed takes the shoring, dewatering, walk street logistics, and neighbor protection that the drawings assume and sequences them, prices them, and identifies what the drawings have not resolved. And CMAR delivery carries those items into the schedule and the Guaranteed Maximum Price, with trade procurement and the self-performed demolition, framing, and site scopes planned around each city’s logistics rules. Benson Construction Group runs preconstruction on coastal lots as the constraint-mapping exercise this page describes: jurisdiction and coastal status first, the feasibility pass as a single package, then design-phase management that puts the coastal permit, the shoring plan check, and the discharge authorization on the critical path deliberately. For how that approach applies to ground-up custom homes generally, see our ground-up residential construction page.

What the Owner Actually Does

A sand section build has a daily life the owner cannot attend: shoring inspection, dewatering readings, crane picks, neighbor coordination, city and deputy inspections, utility scheduling, and trade sequencing on a lot with no laydown area. The owner’s job under a construction manager is different and smaller, and it is desk work done on the owner’s schedule. It is the monthly report, delivered by the fifth business day of each month, which shows every invoice against the budget and the schedule against the plan, with the project record open in the Procore portal between reports. It is the decision set for the coming month, which the report lists with the date each decision is needed. It is the selections, in the order the schedule needs them, and the approval of any contingency draw or change before it is spent. Visibility replaces presence. The report and the GMP summary are described in our CMAR deliverables guide, and an owner who wants to know what the job will feel like can read them before hiring anyone.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

The information on this page is provided for educational purposes and reflects the professional experience and perspective of Benson Construction Group. Development standards, permit procedures, fees, and regulatory references reflect the municipal codes, city handouts, and California Coastal Commission records current as of August 2026 and may change; Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach are independent cities with their own codes and processes, and the Coastal Commission retains jurisdiction as described. Verify current requirements with the applicable planning and building department and, where applicable, the Coastal Commission before making project decisions. This content does not constitute professional advice for any specific project. Consult qualified professionals for project-specific guidance.