Exclusive | San Pedros glow-up: How LAs gritty port town became the citys hottest real estate bet

San Pedro was long Los Angeles’ rough-around-the-edges harbor town — a sleepy, blue-collar enclave better known for longshoremen, fishing boats rather than luxury apartments and waterfront dining.For years, developers, investors and homebuyers have been betting that San Pedro’s long-awaited waterfront renaissance would eventually arrive.That bet has already been priced into the market, according to real estate agent Gary Krill.“People have been speculating — we’ve been talking about that waterfront — for more than 10 years,” Krill, of Selling San Pedro, told The California Post.“I feel like it’s already built into the values.”But now with a new wave of mega-bucks investment, driven by a major waterfront redevelopment, pandemic-era migration and a tightening housing market in other coast parts of the city, one thing is clear: San Pedro is set to be the next big thing in LA real estate.Over the past 10 years, average single-family home prices have climbed from roughly $700,000 to nearly $1 million, according to Krill.

Meanwhile, public and private investment money is pouring into the South Bay.“It’s one of the best-kept secrets in Los Angeles,” Eric Johnson, president of Jerico Development, the company behind the massive $500 million West Harbor project, told The Post.But that secret is getting harder to keep, and the shift has fundamentally altered who is looking to live there.“It’s absolutely changing,” Alex Valente, Principal at institutional development giant Trammell Crow Company, told The Post.

Valente’s firm has placed a massive bet on the neighborhood, launching construction on its first project in late 2022 and breaking ground on an additional 281-unit luxury waterfront building in early 2026.“We see it in our buildings,” Valente said.“We’ve got people living here who work at SpaceX in Hawthorne, who are waiting on their trillion-dollar IPO.

We have aerospace engineers from Boeing and Raytheon, Tesla employees, a...