Sand Section

The standard Sand Section lot is 30 feet wide and 90 feet deep, 2,700 square feet, which is also the minimum lot size the code sets for Area District III. In the county's parcel data, 43% of the house lots here fall between 2,600 and 2,800 square feet, and about one in five is a half lot of 1,500 square feet or less.

The rules are what shape the houses. The height limit is 30 feet with up to three stories, measured from the average elevation of the lot's four corners. A house can have 1.6 times the lot area in floor space, about 4,320 square feet on a standard lot, and the count leaves out up to 400 square feet of garage and any basement that sits entirely below grade. The front setback is 5 feet. That formula is why a typical rebuild is a three-level house with a full basement. The code also says the height and floor-area numbers can't be raised unless voters approve it citywide.

About two-thirds of the parcels are zoned RM or RH, which allows more than one unit. On a standard lot the code allows one unit per 1,350 square feet in RM and one per 850 in RH, so a 2,700-square-foot lot can hold two or three units. That's where the duplexes, the side-by-side townhomes, and the small apartment buildings come from.

County records date 43% of the houses to before 1960 and 36% to 1990 or later. The older ones are small: their median is about 1,500 square feet of living space, against about 4,100 for houses built since 2010. When I pulled the listings for this guide in late September 2026, our mapped Sand Section had 35 properties for sale. Houses off the Strand asked about $2.2 million to $14.3 million, half of them above about $6.2 million. The six listings on the Strand asked about $9.6 million to $25 million, and duplexes and triplexes inland asked about $2.5 million to $6.5 million.

The Strand is the paved public walkway that runs between the beach and the first row of houses. Alongside it, on the beach side, the county's Marvin Braude bike path runs 22 miles from Will Rogers State Beach to Torrance Beach. The sand itself is public beach run by Los Angeles County's Beaches and Harbors department. The county also owns the El Porto and 27th Street parking lots, which the city operates.

The pier was dedicated on July 5, 1920. The Roundhouse at the end came in 1922 and was rebuilt in 1989, and the deck was fully replaced in 1992. The city lists the pier at 928 feet. It's a California Historical Landmark, No. 1018, and the state owns it while the city maintains it. The railings were replaced in 2024, and in August 2025 the council hired engineers for a structural inspection. The Roundhouse holds a small aquarium run by a nonprofit.

Every August the Manhattan Beach Open fills the courts next to the pier. It was first played in 1960, and winners get a plaque on the pier's Volleyball Walk of Fame. The city approved a six-year permit in March 2026 that keeps it on the third weekend of August through 2031.

Bruce's Beach, the park at Highland Avenue and 27th Street, has a history you'll hear about. Willa and Charles Bruce bought land along the Strand in 1912 and ran a resort for Black beachgoers until the city moved to condemn it in 1924. After a 2021 state law, the county returned two parcels to the Bruce family in 2022, then bought them back in January 2023 for nearly $20 million.

Not all of the Sand Section is in the Coastal Zone. The city's zoning map flags about 71% of the parcels inside it, mostly the blocks nearer the water and all of El Porto, and about 29% outside it, mostly on the eastern blocks. Inside the zone, new construction and major remodels need a coastal development permit under the city's certified Local Coastal Program, and some of those parcels are in the area where permits can be appealed to the Coastal Commission.

The line also decides short-term rentals. The city bans stays under 30 days in residential zones, but its current ordinance, in effect since December 2022, exempts properties inside the Coastal Zone. That follows a 2022 appeals court decision, Keen v. City of Manhattan Beach, which held the city couldn't enforce its earlier ban in the Coastal Zone without Coastal Commission approval. So two houses a few blocks apart can have different rental rights. If rental income is part of the plan, get the parcel's coastal status from the city before you write an offer.

On FEMA's flood map, the streets and the Strand are in zone X, minimal flood hazard, except near the far south end of the Strand around 1st to 5th streets. The sand below is in zones AE and VE with base flood elevations around 16 to 20 feet. The state's tsunami hazard map follows about the same line. These are point checks, not a parcel report, so read the natural hazard disclosure for the specific house.