On the last Wednesday in April, Kathleen and Jessica Altobelli walked less than a mile from their house to buy tamales, almond butter, and hummus off a folding table on Green Lane. They came back the next week for a cinnamon roll and missed it by minutes. That is not a headline. It is what happens when a neighborhood that has never had anywhere to walk to suddenly gets one.
North Redondo Beach has spent decades being the part of the city you drive through rather than the part you linger in. It holds the aerospace campuses, the engineering firms, the strip malls along Artesia Boulevard that exist to be passed on the way to somewhere else. South Redondo has Riviera Village. Hermosa has Pier Avenue. Manhattan has its downtown. North Redondo has had Artesia and Aviation, an intersection built for cars.
That is changing, and it is worth understanding why three unrelated bets landed on the same stretch of Artesia within the same six months.
The North Redondo Beach Farmers Market debuted on Earth Day, April 22, closing a single block of Green Lane between Artesia Boulevard and Vanderbilt Lane next to the North Branch Library. Organizers had planned for 300 to 700 visitors. More than 2,000 showed up, and several vendors sold out mid-afternoon, including an egg seller who told local reporters he'd brought four boxes expecting them to last the day and was nearly cleaned out two hours in.
The market is run by OurNRB, a nonprofit formed specifically for this project, and its founders have been unambiguous about what they are actually trying to build. Teresa Mitchell, who leads the organization, put it plainly to reporters after the debut:
"We want to turn the corner into a main street where it's walkable."
That is not incidental commerce. It is a stated strategy, and the market's revenue model backs it: profits get reinvested directly into the Artesia and Aviation corridor rather than distributed elsewhere. The market runs Wednesdays from 2 to 7 p.m. and, as of this writing in mid-August, has been operating for roughly four months straight without missing a week.
The second data point is less flashy but arguably more telling, because it came from a business with seven decades of survival instinct behind it. Mickey's Deli, a Hermosa Beach fixture since 1953, opened its first-ever second location this past February at Inglewood Avenue and Artesia Boulevard, a few blocks from the farmers market site.
The new shop is smaller than the original, food-only rather than full grocery and liquor, and run by Mickey Mance, a third-generation family member who worked in marketing in Torrance before joining the business full time. On opening day the new Redondo location gave away a debut sandwich, the Redondo Chicken Cutlet, to the first 100 customers. It runs seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
A restaurant that stayed a single location for over seventy years does not expand casually. Whatever the Mance family saw in that corner of Artesia was enough to bet a new lease, new construction, and the family name on it.
The third piece is the largest and the slowest, and it explains why this corridor has momentum at all beyond two independent small businesses. The South Bay Galleria, the enclosed mall at the east end of Artesia where it meets Hawthorne Boulevard, lost anchor tenants one by one over the past decade. Nordstrom relocated to Del Amo Fashion Center. Forever 21 closed as part of its nationwide bankruptcy filing. By 2025, the mall's owner at the time, L Catterton, had defaulted on the property, and it went to foreclosure. Beverly Hills-based Kennedy Wilson took control on July 31, 2025.
Rather than walk away, Kennedy Wilson picked up a redevelopment plan that had been circulating under various owners for more than a decade, branded now as the South Bay Social District. The Redondo Beach Planning Commission approved Phase Two of that plan on August 21, 2025: 350 residential units on the mall's southwest parking lot, ranging from three-story townhomes along Kingsdale Avenue up to eight stories closer to the mall, with 8,300 square feet of ground floor commercial space. That adds to a previously approved 300-unit Phase One on the opposite lot. Together the two phases put roughly 650 new residences within walking distance of the Galleria's front doors.
The coworking company Industrious has already signed a 20,000 square foot lease inside the old Nordstrom space, now occupied by a Wonder of Dinosaurs exhibit, with plans to open flexible office space there. As of the most recent public updates, no groundbreaking date had been announced for either phase. City planning records list Phase Two as approved but not yet under construction, and Kennedy Wilson representatives have said the redevelopment will happen in stages while parts of the mall stay open.
It would be easy to string these three stories together into a tidy renaissance narrative, and that would overstate what is actually happening. Not every bet on Artesia has paid off on schedule. A multi-kitchen food hall called GrubHaus was announced in 2022 for the former Kurt Hardware and Yanagi Kitchen site, with permits filed and a target opening of late 2023. As of the most recent check, the project's own website still reads "coming soon." That is not a failure, but it is a reminder that announced projects and open storefronts are different things, and the corridor's transformation is happening at the pace of actual construction and actual capital, not press releases.
The Galleria redevelopment carries the same caveat at a larger scale. Approval is not construction, and a project that has been in some form of planning for over ten years under three different ownership groups has earned a healthy dose of patience rather than certainty.
None of this requires you to do anything. If you already live in North Redondo Beach, the practical takeaways are small and immediate. The farmers market runs Wednesdays, 2 to 7 p.m., on Green Lane at the North Branch Library, and that stretch closes to through traffic during those hours. Mickey's second location is open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Inglewood and Artesia if you want to compare the new location's smaller menu to the original Hermosa shop. And if you drive past the Galleria and notice construction fencing at some point in the coming years, it will most likely be the southwest lot, not the mall's working storefronts, which are staying open through the phased build.
What is genuinely new is the shape of the bet itself. For the first time in a long while, a nonprofit, a family restaurant with seven decades of history, and an institutional real estate owner are all making moves on the same run of Artesia, and all three are explicit about the same goal: turning a corridor built for cars into somewhere people walk. That is not a claim about property values. It is a claim about what this specific stretch of North Redondo is going to feel like to live near over the next few years, and it is worth watching whether or not you ever plan to sell.
If you are curious about what any of this means for your own street, your own home, or a property you have been eyeing in North Redondo Beach, Billings Beach Homes knows this corridor block by block. Work With Us.
Compass
2141 Rosecrans Avenue, Suite 1120
El Segundo, CA 90245
Brook Billings | CA DRE# 01997704
Billings Beach Homes and Associates
