NantWorks Gets Redondo Beach Approval for Housing

A proposed housing development in Redondo Beach from Patrick Soon-Shiong’s NantWorks has earned a thumbs-up from city officials.

The City of Redondo Beach approved NantWorks’ plans for a 158-residence development at 2819 182nd Street consisting of 131 townhomes and 27 units of affordable housing, Urbanize Los Angeles reported. The homes would rise in a series of three-story structures built around several private driveways.

The 6-acre property was identified as a prime spot for development in the city’s housing element, leaving leaders little choice in rejecting the proposal. The site currently houses a former Frontier Communications facility.

“My preference was this vacant Frontier site would be a jobs center to address our jobs [to] household ratio,” Redondo Beach Mayor Jim Light said of the project. “Our ratio is less than one job per household, which is why we have so many commuters leaving town each morning. But once the housing element was approved, the fate of the site was sealed.”

The housing element is a state mandate that assigns cities throughout the state minimum thresholds for new residential development over a set timeline. The City of Redondo Beach is required to plan for 2,150 new homes by 2031.

“This is another example of how the state mandates have tied our hands on balancing development in the city,” Light said of the approval for the project by Soon-Shiong, widely known as a biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, among other media properties, and has seen his reputation lag as the flagship newspaper has lost hundreds of millions of dollars and failed to get close to lofty goals he set when he paid $500 million for it nearly 10 years ago.

NantWorks’ project would join other housing developments coming to the area surrounding the South Bay Galleria and recently completed Redondo Beach Transit Center. Last year, Redondo Beach officials approved a 350-unit proposal from Kennedy Wilson that would rise on a surface parking lot at 1815 Hawthorne Boulevard.

NantWorks, acting through an affiliate, purchased the property in 2019 from Overton Moore Properties for $27 million, The Real Deal reported at the time. The industrial park at the site spans 137,100 square feet. In the years since then, NantWorks has been on a buying spree in the South Bay, scooping up a handful of office buildings in El Segundo.

— Chris Malone Méndez