Nobody moves to Playa del Rey because they saw it on a list. There's no "Top 10 LA Neighborhoods" article that includes it. No influencer has ever filmed a "day in my life" walking around Culver Boulevard. The subreddit for it has maybe three hundred members, and most of the posts are about parking.
I moved here because the rent was right and it was close to the water. That was the whole calculus. I'd been looking at Venice, which was more expensive than I wanted, and Santa Monica, which was more expensive than I could justify, and someone mentioned Playa del Rey and I said "where is that." They pulled up a map and pointed to the small pocket of residential streets wedged between the Ballona Wetlands and Dockweiler Beach, directly south of Marina del Rey, directly west of Westchester, and directly under the flight path of every plane landing at LAX.
That last part is the thing everyone asks about. Yes, the planes fly over. No, you don't notice after the first week. Your brain filters it the same way it filters traffic noise or the neighbor's dog. It becomes part of the ambient texture of the place, and then it becomes nothing.
Playa del Rey is small. Genuinely small. You can walk end to end in twenty minutes. The commercial strip is Culver Boulevard, which has maybe a dozen restaurants and a handful of shops. There's a grocery store. There's a CVS. There's a coffee shop where the same guy has been making pour-overs since before pour-overs were a personality trait.
The Tripel is probably the best restaurant in the neighborhood. The food is better than it needs to be for what the place looks like from outside. I've eaten there more times than I should admit. The burger is excellent. The fries are the kind that you keep eating after you're full because stopping feels wrong.
There's a place called the Shack that looks like it should be in a beach town in New England. Fish and chips, clam chowder, outdoor seating that's slightly too close to the sidewalk. It's not trying to be anything other than what it is, which in LA is a rarer quality than people think.
On the hill above Culver, the houses get nicer. Some of them have views of the ocean that would cost you four times as much in Malibu. Most of them have been there since the fifties and sixties — small ranch-style homes that haven't been torn down and replaced with modern boxes yet. Give it ten years. But for now, the neighborhood still looks like someone's idea of what California was supposed to be before it got expensive.
Dockweiler is the beach that borders Playa del Rey on the west. It's the longest stretch of beach in LA where you can have a bonfire, which means on weekends it fills up with families and college kids and groups of friends dragging coolers across the sand. On weeknights it's empty.
I walk Dockweiler at least three times a week, usually in the evening. The sun sets directly in front of you. The planes come in low on your right, landing gear down, close enough that you can read the airline on the fuselage. The combination of the sunset and the planes and the empty beach and the sound of the waves creates something that I think is unique to this specific stretch of coastline. It's beautiful and industrial at the same time. It shouldn't work. It does.
The water at Dockweiler is warmer than El Porto to the north because the seafloor is sandier and shallower. The waves are smaller, which makes it good for swimming but not great for surfing. I swim here in the summer. In the winter I drive up to El Porto or Point Dume for waves.
The Ballona Wetlands sit between Playa del Rey and Marina del Rey. They're the last remaining coastal wetlands in Los Angeles — something like six hundred acres of marsh, channels, and open space that somehow survived a century of development on all sides. There's a restoration project underway that's been the subject of intense debate for years. I'm not going to get into the politics of it. What I will say is that having six hundred acres of undeveloped land next to your neighborhood in the most built-out city in America is a strange and wonderful thing.
I run through the wetlands on the paved path that follows the channel. Herons stand in the shallow water and don't move when you pass. Red-tailed hawks circle above the reeds. There are ground squirrels everywhere, which sounds unremarkable until you've lived in a city long enough that wildlife of any kind feels like a minor miracle.
The air in the wetlands smells different from the air on the street. It's not the ocean smell — it's something earthier, a mix of mud and salt grass and whatever the tides brought in. I associate that smell with the beginning of a run and the beginning of a day.
I've thought about this, because people ask. They ask why I don't live in Venice (too expensive, too much going on). They ask why I don't live in Santa Monica (too expensive, too clean). They ask why I don't live in Manhattan Beach (too expensive, too suburban). They ask these questions because they've heard of those places and they haven't heard of Playa del Rey, and in Los Angeles, where you live is supposed to say something about who you are.
Playa del Rey doesn't say anything. That's why it works.
It's a neighborhood where people live because the rent is reasonable and the beach is close and the grocery store has what you need and the neighbors wave but don't ask what you do. There's no scene. There's no identity attached to it. You're not a "Venice person" or a "Silver Lake person" or an "Echo Park person." You're just a person who lives near the airport and the ocean and the wetlands, and your rent is lower than your friends', and you can walk to a bonfire on a Tuesday night, and nobody is writing a think piece about how your neighborhood has changed.
It will change. Everything in LA changes. The wetlands restoration will bring attention. A developer will build something on Culver Boulevard that doesn't look like it belongs. The rent will go up. The coffee shop guy will sell. This is the cycle.
But for now, Playa del Rey is the neighborhood that nobody moves to on purpose, and I moved here by accident, and I'm not leaving until I have to.
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