What we've learned about Manhattan Beach
Manhattan Beach has been tearing itself down and rebuilding for two decades, and that shows up in the work. Most of what we clean in the Sand Section and the Tree Section is new construction on an old lot: three levels, a tight staircase or a small home elevator, wide-plank floors, a below-grade room nobody counts as a bedroom, and glass on every wall facing the water. Square footage runs well above the South Bay average, and so does the share of it that is hard surface.
The other half of the city is quieter and much older. Liberty Village, Manhattan Heights and the rest of East Manhattan Beach are postwar tract homes on roughly five-thousand-foot lots, plenty of them remodeled but still one or two stories with a real yard. Manhattan Village adds gated townhomes with their own access rules. A visit near Polliwog Park and a visit two blocks off the Strand are genuinely different jobs.
What we walk into in Manhattan Beach
These are the biggest homes of the four beach cities on this stretch of coast. Sand Section lots are about thirty by ninety feet, but the houses on them go three levels and often add a basement, so a small lot still produces several thousand square feet of floor. Finishes are hard throughout: wide-plank wood, stone, polished concrete, glass railings. Between the stairs, the roof decks and the ocean-facing windows, time on site tracks the floor count more closely than the bedroom count.