The Walk Score Nobody Talks About

By Garlin Smith | The Condo Experts | Redondo Beach, CA

If you look up the walk score for North Redondo Beach, you’ll get a 74. “Very Walkable,” it says — most errands can be accomplished on foot or by short bike ride. That’s a pretty good number for a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles County, where the baseline assumption is that you need a car to do anything. As Missing Persons sang, ‘Nobody walks in LA.’

But Walk Scores are averages. They don’t tell you which blocks are actually pleasant to walk, which corridor has the best taco spot, or where to go on a Saturday morning when you want coffee and don’t want to deal with parking. For that, you need someone who’s actually been walking these streets for 40 years.

That’s me. Let me give you the real tour.

Artesia and Aviation Boulevards: The Neighborhood’s Main Streets

Artesia and Aviation are the main arteries through this part of the South Bay. Aviation starts at PCH in Hermosa Beach and stretches north, serving as the west border of North Redondo Beach, cutting through East Manhattan Beach and running all the way up to LAX. Artesia runs west to east, touching Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and North Redondo Beach, filled with genuinely diverse dining, shopping, and services along the way — not curated, not performatively hip, just real.

World food, local coffee shops, bakeries, nail salons, dry cleaners, groceries, a hardware store. Everything you actually need on a Tuesday. The kind of street where people know their neighbors at the counter, where the same family has run the same restaurant for 20 years, and where you don’t need to make a reservation to have a good meal.

The North Redondo Beach Business Association even runs a “Dine Around ARTesia” event each summer — an evening stroll along the boulevard hitting the best bites and local art pop-ups. If you want to understand the neighborhood’s personality in a single evening, that’s your field trip.

What’s Coming

The Artesia corridor is also the center of something larger. There’s a long-term revitalization initiative working its way through the planning process — infrastructure upgrades, bike paths, public art installations, the kind of investment that signals a city is betting on a neighborhood’s future. It’s not finished. It’s not even close to finished. But if you’ve spent time in other Los Angeles neighborhoods that went through similar transformations, you know what that kind of momentum looks like early on. I’m not in the business of selling hype. But I do pay attention to where cities put their money.

The Beach Is Closer Than You Think

One thing that surprises a lot of buyers new to North Redondo: the beach isn’t that far. It’s 1.5 miles from the corner of Aviation and Artesia to toes in the sand — close enough for a short bike ride. For a neighborhood priced the way North Redondo is priced, that proximity is genuinely underappreciated.

The South Bay Bicycle Trail runs nearby, connecting you north toward Manhattan Beach and Hermosa without touching a car. On a clear day — and in the South Bay, most days are clear — that’s a commute, a workout, and a reason to live here all at once.

Everyday Walkability: What Actually Matters

A realistic day in North Redondo Beach looks something like this: coffee from multiple options on or near Artesia and Aviation, groceries covered by everything from local delis to specialty markets, fitness studios ranging from CrossFit to yoga to cycling — all within the neighborhood footprint. William Green Park, Perry Park, and several smaller parklettes are scattered through the grid. Redondo Union High School sits within the neighborhood boundary. And for buyers who commute, the 405 and 110 freeways are quickly accessible, with the Metro Green Line providing a car-free option toward LAX and beyond.

This is not a neighborhood where you need to budget 30 minutes to live your daily life. That’s rarer in LA than people think, and it’s a real quality-of-life factor that doesn’t show up in square footage or listing price — or in the condo search results, until you’ve actually walked the neighborhood.

The Bottom Line

Walk Scores are useful. But the best version of walkability is the one you feel — the neighborhood where leaving your front door can be the beginning of an energizing walk or bike ride, not the beginning of a commute.

North Redondo Beach has that. Not in a glossy, Instagram-curated way. In a real, lived-in, show-up-every-day way.

That’s the kind of neighborhood that holds its value.

Garlin is a South Bay native, 40+ year resident, and condo specialist at The Condo Experts, serving North Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Hermosa Beach.