The Wave Pool Going Up Next to the Chargers' Facility Isn't Really About Surfing

Drive down Nash Street past the Chargers' training facility and you'll pass a stretch of chain link and idle asphalt that used to be part of Raytheon's old aerospace campus. For the past year, that's all it's been: a quiet nine-acre gap between a football team's new home and a Topgolf parking lot. That's about to change, and the fight over how it changes says more about how El Segundo actually gets built than the wave pool itself does.

The project is called the El Segundo Surf Club, and on paper it looks like straightforward good news for a town that already treats recreation as civic identity. Underneath the surf branding, though, the entitlement file tells a different story: two unglamorous zoning fights, one about a sidewalk and one about a parking law almost nobody outside city hall has heard of, that will shape how every future project near the K Line station gets built from here on out.

What the City Actually Signed Off On

The numbers, straight from the city's own project file, are specific. The site at 100-200 S. Nash Street would hold five pools: a roughly 600-foot main wave pool, a standing wave pool, and three smaller pools, spread across five buildings totaling about 50,236 square feet of floor area on a nine-acre lot. Around them: 63,312 square feet of landscaping, rooftop terraces, padel courts, and outdoor dining space large enough to require its own conditional use permit. An administrative permit would allow alcohol service alongside food.

The buyer is a company tied to Toba Capital, the venture firm run by billionaire Vinny Smith, who also backed the Palm Springs Surf Club, a 21-acre complex that opened in January 2024 and now draws roughly 150,000 visitors a year. Smith's development partner on the El Segundo project, Colin O'Byrne of Inland Pacific Companies, has said the goal is a wave lasting up to 20 seconds. "It's going to be a great wave," he told the Orange County Business Journal, pricing the full build north of $175 million.

None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is what the city's Planning Commission actually argued about when the project came up for a vote on August 13.

The Sidewalk That Almost Disappeared

When Continental Corporation first got this parcel entitled as part of the broader South Campus Specific Plan, the deal came with a condition: a five-foot pedestrian easement cutting through the property, connecting Nash Street directly to the El Segundo Metro K Line station next door. That easement made sense for an office park. It makes much less sense for a 600-foot wave pool.

So the applicant asked the Planning Commission to erase it. Principal Planner Paul Samaras told commissioners the site's long, narrow shape and the pool's orientation made the original path unworkable, and that routing pedestrians directly alongside pool operations raised its own safety concerns. Commissioners pushed back, asking whether real alternatives had been studied. Staff and the project team said they had, and concluded the options were either redundant with the existing sidewalk along El Segundo Boulevard, too circuitous to be useful, or unsafe next to the pools. The commission voted 4-1 to forward the whole package, easement removal included, to City Council as Resolution 2978. Only Commissioner Christian voted no.

That single vote is a preview of a pattern. As more of El Segundo's old office and industrial land sits within walking distance of a Metro stop, cities are going to keep getting asked to trade a public path for a private amenity. This is the first time it's happened at this scale here, and residents who use that stretch of Nash Street to catch the K Line should know the direct route through the property was never guaranteed to survive the project's second life.

The Parking Law Most Residents Have Never Heard Of

The second fight was about parking, and it hinges on a state law most El Segundo residents have never had reason to learn: Assembly Bill 2097. Passed to encourage development near transit, AB 2097 exempts projects within a half mile of a major transit stop, in this case the K Line station right next door, from local minimum parking requirements entirely. The Surf Club could have built zero dedicated spaces and stayed within the letter of the law.

Instead, the applicant voluntarily proposed 161 parking spaces and 18 bicycle spaces, including 33 tandem stalls reserved largely for employees. Commissioners still weren't fully satisfied. They pressed on whether that number would hold up during peak events and surf competitions, and the discussion turned to whether the city needed to lean on temporary-event permits and occupancy caps to manage the crowds a facility like this can draw on a busy weekend.

That tension, a state law removing the requirement to build parking and a city commission negotiating for more anyway, is going to define how every transit-adjacent project in El Segundo gets built for the next decade. The Surf Club is simply the first big test case.

A Neighborhood That Already Looks Like a Sports Campus

Step back from the entitlement fight and the location itself tells its own story. The Surf Club site sits about a block from the Chargers' 14-acre, $260 million training facility and headquarters, which opened in 2024 on the same former Raytheon campus. A few minutes away is a Topgolf entertainment complex, a Porsche test-driving experience center, and the headquarters of the World Surf League. Add a wave pool, and this pocket of El Segundo, once defined by aerospace contractors and defense manufacturing, is quietly becoming a compact sports and recreation corridor of its own.

There's an irony worth sitting with here too. The site is roughly a mile and a half from the actual Pacific Ocean. El Segundo has had a working surf culture since the 1950s, and the beach break at the end of Grand Avenue is a five-minute drive from the very lot where a machine will soon manufacture waves on demand. As one South Bay commercial real estate tracker put it to CoStar, the appeal isn't a lack of real surf, it's the crowding, the parking, and the water quality issues that come with sharing a real beach break with everyone else who wants one.

The Same Week, a Different Wave Pool Fight in Redondo Beach

Here's a detail that puts El Segundo's process in context: the same week the Surf Club headed to El Segundo's City Council, Redondo Beach officials were reviewing a competing concept a few miles south. Allen Sanford of the California Surf Club has proposed converting Redondo's aging Seaside Lagoon into "Ocean Park," a year-round recreation facility with a compact wave pool alongside a swimming lagoon and picnic grounds. Proponents estimate it could generate roughly $1 million a year in added city tax revenue while donating at least 100,000 waves annually to nonprofits like the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, and that proposal was also scheduled for review on September 15.

Two South Bay cities, two wave pool proposals, one calendar date. Neither project is guaranteed to break ground, and the two aren't really competing with each other so much as they are testing the same question from opposite ends: does the South Bay have room for manufactured waves when the real ocean is right there.

What to Actually Watch From Here

As of the most recent update to the city's own project tracker, the Surf Club was still listed as pending a City Council hearing scheduled for September 15, the final step before the project's entitlements, easement amendment included, become official. No groundbreaking date has been confirmed. O'Byrne has said publicly that he'd like the facility operational in time for the 2028 Olympics, but that's a target, not a commitment, and large California developments have a well-documented habit of slipping past their original timelines once construction costs and permitting realities set in.

What's already locked in, regardless of when the pools fill with water, is the precedent. The next time a developer wants to convert old Corporate Campus land near the K Line into something residents actually use, the same two questions will come up: does the public still get its promised path to transit, and how much parking does a project really need when state law says it needs none. El Segundo just answered both questions once. It won't be the last time.

If you're the kind of person who wants the block-by-block version of stories like this, not just the headline, that's exactly the kind of local detail Jenny Morant Group tracks every week across El Segundo and the rest of the South Bay. Reach out anytime you want the fuller picture of what's actually changing on your street.