El Segundo Keeps Building: A Surf Park, a Sparks Palace and L.A.'s Rare Office Boom

While the rest of the region's office market sputters, the small city by LAX is absorbing a $175-million wave pool, a $150-million WNBA headquarters and a once-in-a-generation rewrite of its own rulebook.

Los Angeles can't fill its office towers, but El Segundo has the opposite problem: fitting everyone in. Per CoStar, the aerospace-and-defense town beside LAX has emerged as one of the region's top office submarkets, lifted by a surge in federal defense spending and arrivals like hypersonic-aircraft maker Hermeus, while Italian 3D-printing firm Roboze is opening a U.S. aerospace and defense headquarters there, per Airframer. The scene Forbes has chronicled as the “Gundo” — the LAX-adjacent colony at the center of the defense-tech movement — now draws study tours: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer came through to examine the city's hard-tech growth model, per El Segundo's own, understandably pleased announcement.

The growth now comes with a leisure division. Per The Real Deal, Toba Capital founder Vinny Smith — the billionaire behind the Palm Springs Surf Club — paid $54 million for a nine-acre slice of a 30-acre former Raytheon property along El Segundo Boulevard, already home to the Chargers' new base, with plans for a surf park; the Orange County Business Journal pegs the wave-pool development at $175 million. Meanwhile, on Rosecrans Avenue just east of Sepulveda, construction is in full swing on the Sparks' $150-million, 55,000-square-foot headquarters and training facility at the Beach Cities Media Campus, per Urbanize LA — a project ESPN reported as the largest investment ever made in a single women's sports team, due to open in 2027.

All of it lands as the city rewrites its rulebook. El Segundo's Vision 2050 general-plan update hits a milestone on August 13, when staff present Land Use Concept Alternatives at a Planning Commission community workshop, with a City Council study session on a preferred alternative to follow in September, per the city's project page. For a town long defined by aerospace contractors and manufacturing floors, per CoStar, the question next week is unusually literal: how much wave pool, WNBA court and hard-tech floor space can one small beach city hold before it stops feeling like a small beach city?