The Marina Shores shopping center at 6500 Pacific Coast Highway is officially on the way out. Demolition crews are tearing into the roughly six-acre site at the southeastern gateway to Long Beach, clearing room for Onni Group's five-story housing complex with about 600 apartments and a thin slice of ground-floor retail.
Plans have moved off the drafting table and into the dust and rubble. Heavy equipment is on site, and the developer has started demolition and site clearing. As reported by Urbanize LA, crews are dismantling the former shopping center as part of the Onni Marina Shores project.
What Onni Plans
Onni's entitlement drawings call for two five-story buildings holding roughly 600 apartments in a mix of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom layouts. Those homes would sit above about 4,000 square feet of commercial space, stacked on podium parking with room for more than 1,100 vehicles.
Coverage from Longbeachize notes that the project would cut a new central driveway between Marina Drive and Pacific Coast Highway and identifies Onni Marina Shores as the largest of three major developments planned along this stretch of PCH. Longbeachize has also tracked the project's entitlement path and unit counts as it moved through city review.
Design and Landscape
Solomon Cordwell Buenz is listed as the project's architect, with Salt Landscape Architects handling the landscape design. The look leans heavily into the marina and wetlands setting around Alamitos Bay.
Renderings published by Urbanize LA describe a podium base topped by crisp white volumes and terraces shaped with high-tide and low-tide motifs intended to tie the buildings visually to the waterfront. Urbanize LA also reported that a staff report recommended approval of the entitlements when the proposal went before planning staff.
How PCH Is Changing
The Onni Marina Shores site sits next door to the upscale 2nd & PCH retail center and is bracketed by other large housing proposals, highlighting how this stretch of Pacific Coast Highway is shifting from low-rise retail to dense residential.
Local reporting points to a Holland Partner Group project with about 281 units at 6700 PCH and a Carmel Partners proposal at 6615 PCH, turning this corridor into one of Long Beach's largest near-term housing clusters. Longbeachize has followed the broader packet of PCH projects as they work through city permitting.
Why It Matters
The sale and planned redevelopment follow rezoning under Long Beach's Southeast Area Specific Plan, which encouraged multifamily housing on these parcels.
In a December 2021 release, Newmark reported that Onni paid about $67.9 million for the 6.17-acre Marina Shores property. The firm cited the new zoning and local demand as key drivers of the highly competitive sale and billed the site as a trophy coastal opportunity for multifamily development.
What's Next
For now, demolition is the main event. After the old center is fully cleared, the project will move through permitting and site preparation before vertical construction starts in the coming years.
Onni already has large residential projects in downtown Long Beach, so its push onto PCH will be closely watched for how it affects nearby retail, parking conditions and coastal access. Expect construction staging, traffic controls and environmental safeguards tied to the adjacent wetlands to play a big role in shaping how the build-out unfolds on the ground.
