by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council on Tuesday night unanimously approved a proposed four-story, 161-room, 81,771 square foot hotel and an accompanying 14,500 square foot office and retail building on the former El Torito site along Sepulveda Boulevard.
The hotel takes advantage of “Sepulveda overlay” zoning, enacted in 2019, that allows a height of 40 feet and will thus become the tallest building in the city’s Sepulveda corridor. The size and height of the project attracted overwhelming neighborhood opposition from a group calling itself “MB Poets,” named for the section of town just east of the project site which has poet street names, such as Tennyson and Keats. Both MB Poets and the employee union representing another hotel in town, Westdrift, appealed the Planning Commission’s previous approval of the hotel, and filed lawsuits accusing the developer of defying California environmental law.