Drive down Harbor Drive in Redondo Beach and you pass one of the most valuable idle properties in the South Bay: fifty acres of fenced concrete and rusting infrastructure where a power plant used to hum, sitting a few blocks from some of the priciest streets in the city. Ask five people what happens to it next and you will get five confident answers. Ask when, and the confidence disappears. That gap between certainty about the outcome and silence about the timeline is the part buyers comparing Redondo Beach to Hermosa or Manhattan Beach tend to miss, and it is already showing up in the numbers.
A Fifty-Acre Question on Harbor Drive
The AES Redondo Beach Generating Station came online in 1954 and ran, at reduced capacity in its later years, until AES shut down the 1,300-megawatt plant for good on December 31, 2023. The closure ended a fight that residents had been waging since at least 2010, when California ordered coastal plants to stop using ocean water for cooling and Redondo Beach voters passed Measure G, rezoning the site to allow eventual park use. The plant is gone now. What replaces it is still an open question, and it is not a small one: whoever wins this argument determines what a large stretch of South Redondo's waterfront looks and feels like for decades.
Two Futures, Neither One Finished
The city has spent more than a decade angling for a park. The nonprofit South Bay Parkland Conservancy has pushed to remove what it calls the site's "major blighting influence" and replace it with parkland and restored wetlands, including the remnants of the old Salt Lake that once supplied Tongva and Chowigna communities before it was filled in for the plant. That effort has real money behind it. State Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi's office announced a $5 million state grant toward the city's acquisition of the land in 2023, bringing state funding for the purchase to $15 million.
At the same time, developer Leo Pustilnikov bought the site in 2020 and proposed a very different future under the name One Redondo. The plan started at roughly 2,300 residential units when he filed in 2022 and grew to as many as 2,700 homes, including 540 affordable units, plus a hotel and commercial space, by the time it reached the City Council. In May 2023, Redondo Beach's council voted unanimously to reject it on procedural grounds. The story did not end there. Pustilnikov's project had been filed under California's Builder's Remedy, a state law that lets developers bypass local zoning when a city's housing plan is out of compliance, and in August 2023 YIMBY Law sued the city over the rejection, arguing Redondo Beach never properly adopted a compliant housing element in the first place. That lawsuit was still unresolved in the most recent reporting available.
So the site currently has two legally active futures pointed in opposite directions: a voter-approved, state-funded park, and a Builder's Remedy lawsuit that could still force through nearly 3,000 units. Nobody involved is treating this as resolved.
This Fight Is Older Than Most Buyers Realize
What makes this different from a typical stalled development is how long the pattern has repeated. Back in 2000 and 2002, AES worked with the city on a plan to rezone the plant site for high-density condos under a proposal called Heart of the City. Residents defeated it with a referendum petition. Two decades later, the same parcel is caught in nearly the same argument, just with a different developer and a different legal mechanism. A buyer looking at a five-year horizon and assuming the site will resolve itself is working from a timeline this property has never actually kept.
What the Comps Already Show
Here is where it gets interesting for anyone using price as a proxy for how the market feels about the site's future. According to Redfin data for the three months ending May 2026, South Redondo Beach's median sale price sat at $1.6 million, down 4.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, with price per square foot down 3.6 percent to $878. North Redondo Beach, the inland half of the city with no waterfront exposure at all, posted the same $1.6 million median over the same window, essentially flat year over year, though its price per square foot fell further, down 9.13 percent to $727.
| 3-mo. median sale price (period ending May 2026) | YoY change | Price per sq. ft. | YoY change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Redondo Beach | $1.6M | down 4.1% | $878 | down 3.6% |
| North Redondo Beach | $1.6M | down 0.99% | $727 | down 9.13% |
If the waterfront carried an obvious premium tied to an incoming park, you would expect South Redondo to be pulling away from North Redondo right now, not converging with it. Instead the two halves of the city are trading at nearly identical medians while the oceanfront side is actually softening faster.
There is a second split worth knowing about. PropertyShark's first-quarter 2026 data for Redondo Beach shows single-family house prices up 6.4 percent year over year to a $1.7 million median, while condo prices fell 10.7 percent over the same period to $1.2 million. Condos are the product type most likely to sit closest to a construction zone or a future park view, and they are the segment losing ground, not gaining it. If a listing agent tells you a property near Harbor Drive is priced ahead of the market because of what is coming next door, ask them which of the two comings they mean, because the data right now does not support either story cleanly.
How to Actually Use This If You're Shopping Nearby
None of this means avoid the area. It means separate the property from the parcel. A home near the AES site should be evaluated on its own fundamentals first: condition, lot, sun exposure, proximity to the Riviera Village and King Harbor, the things that hold value regardless of what gets built two blocks over. Treat any pitch built around the park as a bonus, not a baseline, since the acquisition money is real but a completed park still requires design, environmental review, and construction funding beyond what has been secured so far. And if the Builder's Remedy angle resurfaces, understand that the underlying question, whether Redondo Beach's housing element is legally compliant, is a citywide issue, not one confined to a single fifty-acre lot, so it is worth asking any inspector or agent whether other parcels nearby carry similar exposure.
This is the kind of local nuance that does not show up in a listing sheet or an automated online estimate. It shows up when you have been watching a market long enough to know which stories are settled and which ones only sound that way.
FAQ
Is anything actually being built on the AES site right now? No. The site remains undeveloped. The park effort has state acquisition funding but no completed construction plan, and the One Redondo housing proposal remains tied up in litigation between YIMBY Law and the City of Redondo Beach, based on the most recent reporting available.
Does living near the site affect disclosures when I sell? Material facts about known nearby land use disputes are generally the kind of thing sellers and agents should discuss directly with a real estate attorney, since disclosure obligations depend on the specifics of the property and transaction.
Should I wait to buy near the water until this is resolved? Given that some version of this argument has run for over two decades, waiting for resolution is not a strategy so much as an indefinite pause. Buying on the property's own merits, with clear eyes about the site's uncertainty, is the more workable approach.
If you are weighing a purchase near Redondo Beach's waterfront, or trying to figure out how a parcel like this should actually factor into your offer, the Merritt & Sanderson Team can walk through what we are seeing on the ground, block by block, before you write a number down.
