This is the first in a new format we're calling Opinion. These pieces are personal takes, signed in my own name rather than the editorial "we" we use for analysis and recaps. The format exists to make explicit something readers have a right to know: when I'm sharing a view versus when I'm reporting on a record. I'll lay out the case I believe in, and then I'll take the strongest version of the disagreement seriously. The goal is for you to finish reading better equipped to form your own view, not more aligned with mine.
Walk south on Catalina Avenue from Avenue I to Avenue G, on a Saturday morning, and you are walking through one of the few stretches of the South Bay that actually feels like a place. The sidewalk is wide enough for two people and a stroller. The buildings are two stories. The retail tenants are a mix you can't easily replicate — Catalina Coffee Company, the Green Temple, Hennessey's, Naja's, a wine shop, a dive bar, a yoga studio, an old-fashioned barbershop. People you don't know nod at you. The trees are old enough to mean something. You can park, or you can not park, and either way you'll be fine.
This is Riviera Village. It is, by my count, the single most successful walkable retail district in the city of Redondo Beach. It is also one of perhaps four such districts in the entire South Bay — alongside downtown Manhattan Beach, downtown Hermosa around the Pier Plaza, and Main Street in El Segundo. Each of them works for the same handful of reasons, and each of them is the engine of its city's identity and tax base in ways that the surrounding sprawl is not.
Now keep walking. Past Avenue G. Past Avenue F. Across Pearl Street. Across Beryl. Across Diamond and into the heart of District 2.
Notice what changes. The sidewalk narrows. The trees thin out. The retail mix loses coherence. The buildings drop to one story or get replaced by surface parking. By the time you reach Torrance Boulevard, Catalina has stopped being a destination and started being a road. It carries cars to and from the harbor. People do not walk on it on Saturday mornings. There are reasons for this, and most of them are fixable.
That is what this piece is about. Catalina Avenue is Redondo's best unrealized asset. Not because it could become something it isn't. Because it could become more of what it already is, simply by extending the things that work in Riviera Village north along the same street.
What Riviera Village actually is, mechanically
Before making the case for the extension, it's worth being explicit about what makes Riviera Village function. Walkable retail districts are not magic. They are engineered. The ingredients are well-understood and visible in every successful one I named:
Two-to-three story buildings with retail at street level and apartments or offices above. Manhattan Beach Boulevard has this. So does Main Street in El Segundo, where the recently updated Downtown Specific Plan allows up to 45 feet — about three stories — with ground floor retail and residential or office above. Riviera Village has this in most of its core. It is, not coincidentally, what Catalina north of Pearl mostly does not have.
Sidewalks wide enough for two-way pedestrian traffic plus outdoor seating. Six feet is a sidewalk. Twelve feet is a place. The corridors that work have the latter.
A tenant mix dense and varied enough to anchor a half-day visit. Coffee in the morning, lunch, retail browsing, dinner and drinks. If a corridor is missing any one of those, it leaks foot traffic to whichever neighboring corridor has the missing piece.
Street trees, real lighting, and a public realm someone obviously maintains. El Segundo formed a downtown committee in 2017 specifically to install string lights at intersections, refresh landscaping, and add public art. None of these are individually expensive. Collectively they are the difference between a street and a destination.
Parking that is plentiful enough to be reliable and constrained enough to encourage walking once you arrive. Riviera Village solves this with a mix of street parking, small surface lots, and the unspoken understanding that you will walk between businesses once you've parked once.
Density of residents within a half-mile. Walkable corridors do not survive on tourists. They survive on regulars. The neighborhoods around Riviera Village provide them.
Most of these ingredients exist along Catalina north of Pearl Street, in some form. The buildings are mostly two stories. The neighborhoods on either side are dense enough to support real foot traffic. The street has good bones. What it lacks is the deliberate effort to put the other ingredients in place.
What the extension would actually look like
I want to be specific about what I'm advocating for, because the difference between a useful proposal and a vague one is whether you can picture it block by block.
Pearl Street to Diamond Street. This stretch has the strongest existing fabric. Some good restaurants and a few good retail tenants already operate here. What's missing is streetscape investment — wider sidewalks, more trees, better lighting, crosswalks at the avenues — and a tenant-mix strategy that treats the stretch as continuous with Riviera Village rather than as a separate, lesser version of it. This is the cheapest, fastest, most obvious place to start. Five years of patient streetscape and tenant work would produce visible results.
Diamond Street to Beryl Street. This is the harder middle stretch. The fabric is thinner, the buildings less consistent, and there is more surface parking and one-story commercial. This is where infill mixed-use development should go. The recent rezone described in our last recap, which allows 65 to 80 dwelling units per acre on identified housing sites with at least 50 percent residential floor area, is exactly the right tool for parcels along this stretch. Two- and three-story buildings, retail at street level, apartments above. This is how El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa got the densities that make their corridors function. It is also how the city absorbs a meaningful share of its state-mandated housing obligation without touching the single-family blocks on either side of Catalina.
Beryl Street to Torrance Boulevard. This is the connector stretch. The retail thins further and the road widens. The goal here is less about creating new destinations and more about making the walk from Riviera Village to the harbor pleasant enough that people might actually do it. Street trees. Continuous sidewalks. Decent lighting at night. Crosswalks at the avenues. Treat it like the seam between two great districts, because that's what it can be.
The cumulative effect, over a decade, would be a continuous walkable corridor from the Esplanade in the south to the harbor in the north — roughly a mile and a half — anchored by Riviera Village at one end, by King Harbor at the other, and lined with a steady mix of small retail, restaurants, and modestly scaled mixed-use buildings in between. There is no other South Bay corridor with that geometry available. PCH is too wide, too fast, too commercial, too state-controlled. Hermosa and Manhattan don't have a comparable stretch of mostly-intact two-story fabric between two anchor destinations. Catalina does.
The case I'm making, in one sentence
Catalina Avenue, between Riviera Village and the harbor, should be the single most deliberate urban design project the city undertakes over the next ten years.
The honest pushback
I owe readers the strongest version of the disagreement. Here is what someone who lives along Catalina, who has watched the city make and unmake plans for decades, and who voted for Measure DD in 2008 because they didn't trust outside developers to define their neighborhood, would say to me:
"We've heard this before." Every decade or so, somebody arrives in Redondo with a vision for Catalina. The CenterCal proposal in the 2010s was, in its own way, an attempt to fundamentally remake a waterfront corridor. It was rejected by 57 percent of voters in 2017. The instinct that says "this sounds good in theory and will end badly in practice" is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
This is the strongest objection and it deserves a serious answer. My answer is that the version I'm describing is meaningfully different from CenterCal in three ways. It does not require a single megaproject. It does not concentrate the value capture in one developer. It does not displace anything that currently exists in a way that triggers Measure DD. It is incremental infill, building by building, parcel by parcel, mostly on land that is already underused, executed over a decade with the city's role being to set design standards and invest in the public realm rather than to broker a megadeal. That is a fundamentally different theory of how a corridor changes.
"More density means more traffic and less parking." Inland Catalina is already a commuter route to and from the harbor and to PCH. Adding residents along it doesn't add proportional car trips because the whole point of putting housing on a walkable retail corridor is that those residents make a meaningful share of their trips on foot. The peer-reviewed literature on this is unusually clear, and the lived experience of Manhattan Beach Boulevard, Main Street in El Segundo, and Riviera Village itself confirms it. Parking ratios for new buildings should be set thoughtfully — the city's current Marina parking study is part of a broader pattern of recalibrating these ratios — but the binary of "more building means worse traffic" is not how walkable corridors actually behave.
"Catalina's character will be lost." This is the objection I take most seriously. The reason Riviera Village works is that it is genuinely particular — not a manufactured downtown, not a developer's invention, but something that accumulated. There is a real risk that a too-aggressive build-out replaces particular places with generic ones. The defense against this is design standards that mandate articulated facades, building setbacks, ground-floor transparency, and a tenant mix policy in city-controlled commercial spaces. El Segundo's Downtown Specific Plan requires 45-foot maximum heights with stepbacks. Manhattan Beach has comparable rules. These constraints are not anti-development. They are pro-character. They are the difference between extending Riviera Village and replacing it.
"This is a coastal-district priority, not a citywide one." Fair. Most of the corridor I'm describing is in District 2 and District 1. Residents east of Aviation have legitimate competing claims on the city's attention and capital budget. My answer is that walkable corridor investment is one of the most reliable ways to grow a city's sales tax base, which in turn funds services everywhere else. A working Catalina raises the tide for all five districts. That argument has to be made carefully and honestly, but it can be made.
What I'm not saying
I'm not advocating for a megaproject. I'm not asking for Measure DD to be circumvented. I'm not proposing a developer-led master plan. I'm not suggesting Catalina should become Manhattan Beach Boulevard. I'm not suggesting any specific parcel be redeveloped against its owner's wishes.
I am saying that the city has a corridor that already half-works, that contains within it the most successful walkable district in town, and that with sustained, modest, intentional effort — streetscape, design standards, infill mixed-use on commercial parcels, tenant strategy in city-controlled spaces — that corridor could become a defining civic asset over the course of a decade.
There is no other city in the South Bay with this opportunity available to it. Hermosa and Manhattan are essentially built out. El Segundo is constrained by its size and the sheer industrial mass to its east. Redondo has Catalina, mostly intact, mostly underused, sitting between two of the best assets on the coast. The question is whether the city sees it.
I think it should. That's the opinion.
— Samuel Thompson