Manhattan Beach — Three Sections, a Century-Old Pier, and a Volleyball Court on Every Block

What Actually Makes Manhattan Beach Different

Start with the geography almost every other page about this city gets slightly wrong by flattening it into one thing: Manhattan Beach is locally understood, and is marketed by every real estate source covering it, as three genuinely distinct sections. The Sand Section runs along the roughly two-mile beachfront and is the densest, most walkable, and most expensive part of the city -- smaller lots, walk-street access (car-free pedestrian streets running perpendicular to the beach), and the highest price per square foot in Manhattan Beach, with some listings on The Strand itself running well into eight figures. The Hill Section, immediately inland and south of downtown, is the smallest section by land area but has some of the largest lots and the city's most dramatic panoramic ocean and city-light views -- a quieter, more architecturally driven pocket that trades walkability for privacy and vista. The Tree Section, west of Sepulveda Boulevard, is the largest and most suburban of the three, named for its tree-themed streets (Walnut, Pine, Elm, and similar), typically offering larger homes -- four to five bedrooms, 3,000-plus square feet on 4,400-5,400 square-foot lots -- and a more conventional family-suburb feel than the Sand or Hill Sections. Local MLS practice sometimes adds a fourth informal category, East Manhattan Beach, for the area nearest Manhattan Village. Treating these as one undifferentiated market, the way a generic national data source often does, misses real, sourced differences in price, lifestyle, and daily texture that every serious local buyer already knows to ask about.

Manhattan Beach was founded on a coin flip. Developer John Merrill purchased the southern part of the coast in 1901, and he and his partner George Peck flipped a coin to decide whose hometown would name the new settlement -- Merrill won, and named it after his home borough of Manhattan in New York City. That is the entire, sourced connection between this Manhattan Beach and the far better-known Manhattan Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York: none. They are two unrelated places that happen to share a developer-chosen name, and this page is exclusively about the California South Bay city, incorporated in 1912 in Los Angeles County. The city's other defining early landmark, the Manhattan Beach Pier, was designed by City Engineer A.L. Harris and built 1917-1920 with a distinctive rounded end engineered to withstand Pacific wave action; it survives today as Southern California's oldest reinforced-concrete pier. The Roundhouse building at the pier's end started life as a 1922 pavilion, was converted into a marine-science teaching aquarium in 1979-1981 by the nonprofit Oceanographic Teaching Stations, and reopened in 2018 after a $4 million interior renovation funded partly by the Harrison Greenberg Foundation -- it remains a real, currently operating public aquarium, not a historical relic.

Two identities coexist in Manhattan Beach that most outside coverage treats separately but locals experience as connected: beach-sports culture and aerospace/tech wealth. The AVP Manhattan Beach Open, established in 1960, is the longest-running and most prestigious beach volleyball tournament in the United States, drawing an estimated 60,000-plus people over three days and uniquely allowing amateurs to qualify into the same draw as touring pros; champions are memorialized on bronze plaques along a "Volleyball Walk of Fame" mounted on the pier itself. That competitive culture runs deep into youth sports too -- multiple currently operating junior beach-volleyball clubs (MBsand, Manhattan Beach Surf Volleyball Club, WestCoast Volleyball Club among them) develop young players locally, part of why Manhattan Beach carries a genuine, sourced reputation as a beach-volleyball capital rather than a marketing slogan. Running alongside that is a real aerospace-and-defense economic backbone: Northrop Grumman's Space Park engineering campus, dating to 1961 in adjacent Redondo Beach, expanded into roughly 90 acres of Manhattan Beach itself in 1968 -- though a meaningful share of that original 90 acres is no longer active aerospace use today, with 15 acres converted to public sports facilities between 1987 and 2001 and another 22 acres sold in 1996 to become the MBS Media Campus, per the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Northrop Grumman still operates the remainder of the Manhattan Beach expansion. Companies including Raytheon/RTX, Boeing, and The Aerospace Corporation have had a substantial historical presence in the wider South Bay aerospace corridor. That legacy industry, paired with newer defense-tech and space-sector wealth concentrated in the South Bay more broadly, is a real contributor to the city's income profile -- not the whole story, but a genuine and often underreported piece of it.

The school-district reputation is real and independently verifiable, not just local boosterism. Manhattan Beach Unified School District ranks among the top 2% of the roughly 1,568 school districts statewide on multiple third-party rankings, with all seven schools in the district carrying 5-star ratings and 97th-percentile-or-higher statewide performance; Mira Costa High School consistently ranks in the top 10% of California high schools and was named a recipient of the 2026 California Exemplary Arts Education Award. That reputation is directly reflected in the tax bill: Manhattan Beach voters have twice approved a Measure MB parcel tax funding district staff and programs (renewed March 2024, $225 per parcel annually), and in November 2024 approved a separate $200 million Measure RLS facilities bond, assessed at roughly $320 per million dollars of assessed value -- both real, currently active local levies that show up as line items on a Manhattan Beach property tax bill, on top of the county's general rate.

Downtown Manhattan Beach and Manhattan Village round out the city's commercial identity. The walkable downtown core around Manhattan Beach Boulevard and Highland Avenue holds the city's restaurant and boutique-retail concentration near the pier, while Manhattan Village -- a mixed retail-and-residential master-planned area east of the Tree Section, with its mall opening in 1981 and residential development following through the mid-to-late 1980s -- serves as the city's larger-format shopping and newer-housing hub. Both are real, currently active commercial districts rather than legacy or declining ones, and both come up repeatedly in local buyer conversations about day-to-day convenience versus beach proximity.