Project Pulse and Manhattan Beach Downtown Parking Plans

Ask anyone who circles Manhattan Beach Boulevard twice looking for a spot on a Saturday morning, and they'll tell you parking downtown has never been worse. Ask the city's own traffic engineer, and he'll tell you the opposite. At an April council meeting, Traffic Engineer Erik Zandvliet told council members that the city actually has more downtown parking spaces right now than it did before Lot 3 came down. Both things are true. That gap between what the numbers say and what the experience feels like is the real story, and it's the reason a set of decisions coming this fall matters more than another restaurant opening or road repaving.

The Math Behind the Surplus

Lot 3, the three-level structure at Morningside Drive and 12th Street, was built in 1971 and came down in 2024 after inspectors found corrosion in its steel support columns. That single demolition erased 145 spaces from downtown's core in one stroke. Rather than just replace them one for one, the city scrambled and, by Zandvliet's count, added 58 new on-street spaces, built a 70-space interim surface lot on the Lot 3 footprint, and striped 26 more spaces at the newly acquired 400 Manhattan Beach Boulevard site next to Vons. Add it up and the total exceeds what the old structure held.

"Totaling all that up, we actually have more parking spaces now than we've ever had in downtown," Zandvliet said.

Empty Spots Aren't the Same as Solved Problems

Council Member Amy Howorth wasn't ready to declare victory. "So now there's empty parking spots? Or are those spaces utilized?" she asked.

Her question gets at the real issue. A raw space count treats every stall as interchangeable, but a spot at the Civic Center lot off 13th Street is not interchangeable with a spot on Manhattan Avenue if you're trying to grab coffee before an 8 a.m. meeting. Zandvliet's own answer to Howorth admitted as much: usage is uneven, some lots farther from downtown sit underutilized, and merchant parking, the spaces employees at downtown businesses need for their own shifts, still hasn't been addressed. The surplus is real. It's just parked in the wrong place.

The Shortage Is Geography, Not Inventory

Zoom out and the imbalance gets clearer. The city maintains 12 parking lots citywide with more than 1,400 spaces, plus over 400 street meters across the Downtown and North Manhattan Beach business districts. That's a lot of asphalt. But most of it isn't within a comfortable walk of the blocks people actually mean when they say "downtown," the stretch of Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Manhattan Avenue anchored by Metlox Plaza. When a visitor circles that four or five block core hunting for a spot, the fact that Civic Center has open meters three blocks away doesn't help them, and it doesn't help the shop owner watching a customer give up and drive to Hermosa Beach instead.

This is why the city's own engagement process, called Project Pulse, has spent the past year treating Lot 3 and the 400 MBB site as one connected problem instead of two separate parcels.

What's Actually on the Table

The two sites sit almost exactly where a downtown visitor would want new capacity. Lot 3 sits just west of Metlox Plaza. The 400 MBB parcel, the former US Bank building the city bought for just over $13 million in 2025 using tax-exempt Certificates of Participation, sits right at the Vons corner on Manhattan Beach Boulevard, which city planners have described as a gateway into downtown.

Conceptual designs unveiled this July lay out real tradeoffs rather than a single obvious answer.

The real trade-off sits inside the two Lot 3 options. Option A keeps the underground garage but wraps it in retail and dining, including ground-floor shops facing 12th Street and two restaurants with their own patios, plus a rooftop community space with ocean views, provided the council agrees to override the standard height limit for a three-story building. Option B trades all of that commercial space for 71 more parking spaces, landing at 200 total, but keeps only a shared community patio on top. Retail and dining versus raw capacity: that's the choice sitting in front of council this fall.

The Price Tag Behind the Puzzle

None of this is free, and the numbers explain why the city has already started charging more to use the parking it has today. Replacing Lot 3's original 145 spaces is estimated to cost $70,000 per space for above-ground construction or $145,000 per space if it goes underground, putting total construction costs somewhere between $10.2 million and $21 million depending on which option the council picks. Annual debt service on that borrowing could run from $600,000 to $1.4 million a year.

To start covering those future costs, the city raised parking meter rates and citation fees effective August 1, 2026. Average citation fees rose by $6 to a new average of $65, and the combined rate and fine changes are projected to bring in an additional $916,447 during fiscal 2027. Council members declined a staff proposal to build in automatic annual rate increases going forward, so any future hikes will require another vote.

The Bigger Vision Trying to Tie It Together

The push to treat these two sites as one problem goes back further than this summer's design reveal. At an August 2025 study session, Associate Planner Tari Kuvhenguhwa framed the philosophy behind the whole effort to council: "There needs to be good synergy between both of these sites." Staff floated merging the underground levels of a rebuilt Lot 3 with the existing underground garage at Metlox Plaza, an idea planners at that session called "very possible."

Five months later, at a January 20, 2026 study session, Mayor Joe Franklin took that synergy further. He sketched out linking the parking at Lot 3, 400 MBB, and the Metlox Plaza garage into one connected system, so that a driver entering downtown on Manhattan Beach Boulevard sees options immediately at Morningside Drive, the first cross street west of Valley and Ardmore. Combining the capacity of all three, Franklin put the number at 711 total spaces, a scale that reframes the conversation from replacing one lot to redesigning how cars enter downtown in the first place.

What Happens Next, and Why It Touches More Than Parking

This isn't an abstract planning exercise. When Lot 3 first shut down in 2024, Councilman Steve Napolitano suggested the Tuesday Farmers Market at 13th and Morningside might need to relocate temporarily to free up space for cars, a reminder of how directly a parking decision reaches into the routines residents don't think of as parking-related at all. Whatever gets built on these two sites will shape foot traffic patterns, weekend market logistics, and merchant access for years.

The next real checkpoint is close. The city has scheduled a Project Pulse Study Session for Tuesday, August 26 at 5:00 p.m. at City Hall, where staff will present refined concepts and take resident input before the City Council reviews final proposals in September. If you've ever circled the block three times looking for a spot near Metlox, this is the meeting where your two cents actually lands before the concrete gets poured.

Manhattan Beach isn't short on parking spaces citywide. It's short on the right spaces in the right place, and the decisions made this fall about Lot 3 and 400 MBB will determine whether that gap closes or just moves somewhere else.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific property, a commercial lease, or an investment near downtown, Alexandra Gauss has been tracking these local shifts block by block. Let's start the conversation today.