For 28 years, the barn-like building at the corner of 2nd Street and Sepulveda Boulevard was where Hill Section residents bought potting soil, ordered wedding flowers, and asked Jon Bell's staff why their hydrangeas kept dying in the salt air. Bell started sweeping floors there at 15, bought the business at 28, and spent the better part of three decades building Deep Roots Garden Center into one of the more trusted names on this stretch of the neighborhood's eastern edge. This year the barn came down. Bell relocated his nursery to Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance, south of the Galleria. The Sepulveda lot sat empty, the kind of quiet gap in a streetscape that everyone notices and nobody mentions.
Then a city planning notice went out to residents and businesses within a thousand feet of the site. The applicant of record for a new seven-story, 60-unit apartment building at that address was a company called Deep Roots MB, LLC.
Bell had nothing to do with it.
A Name Borrowed, Not Sold
The buyer of the old nursery site, an entity called The 119 LLC, formed a shell company for its housing application and named it after the business it had just displaced. City planning records list Deep Roots MB, LLC as the applicant for the project proposed at 201-207 N. Sepulveda Boulevard. Bell found out the way most of his former neighbors did, from the notice itself.
His response, sent to customers and neighbors by email and later reported by Easy Reader News, was direct: "Deep Roots Garden Center is in no way affiliated with this project." He told MB News the same thing in blunter terms, that his company has "absolutely no affiliation with the company planning this project."
The irony isn't only that a developer borrowed a small business's goodwill for a planning application. It's that the borrowing worked precisely because Deep Roots had spent nearly three decades earning trust on that corner, the kind of trust a shell company can't build in the time it takes to file paperwork.
Why the Petition Probably Won't Change What Gets Built
Manhattan Beach residents responded the way residents respond to a project like this: they started a petition. By mid-February 2026 it had gathered more than 350 signatures toward a 500-signature goal, according to MB News, arguing the development would cause lasting harm to the surrounding blocks and asking the city to scale it back wherever legally possible.
The problem is the city may not have that option. The Deep Roots site sits inside Manhattan Beach's Residential Overlay District, a zoning change the city adopted in March 2023 under Ordinance 23-0006 after the state required it to identify parcels for new housing as part of its 6th Cycle Housing Element. Projects inside the overlay that include a share of affordable units, in this case 12 of the proposed 60, qualify for review as "by-right," meaning city staff checks the plans against objective standards rather than sending them to a public hearing. There's no council vote to lobby and no discretionary review to slow down.
Under ordinary Sepulveda zoning, buildings top out at 36 feet. The proposed building at the Deep Roots site would rise nearly 69 feet, almost double the standard limit, a gap the state's density bonus law allows in exchange for those affordable units.
The city has already tested what happens when it pushes back. When Manhattan Beach initially resisted a different density-bonus project on Rosecrans Avenue, the developer threatened a $50 million lawsuit and two housing advocacy groups sued alongside them. Mayor Pro Tem David Lesser summed up what that fight taught the council: the state had taken away the city's ability to get meaningful public input on projects like this one.
The Corner Isn't the Only Thing Changing on Sepulveda
The Deep Roots site is one of several Residential Overlay projects moving through the pipeline along this same corridor, and they aren't all at the same stage.
| Address | Project | Status as of mid-2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 201-207 N. Sepulveda Blvd (2nd St) | 7 stories, 60 units, filed as Deep Roots MB, LLC | Still in planning review, per a June 2026 MB News report |
| 2301 N. Sepulveda Blvd | 7 stories, roughly 40 units | Cleared to break ground, with demolition and excavation expected to begin as early as July 2026 and total construction projected at about 22 months |
| 250 Sepulveda Blvd | Sunrise Senior Living, 95 assisted living and memory care units | Under construction, directly across from the former Deep Roots site |
The 2301 Sepulveda project, not the Deep Roots corner, is the one MB News has called Manhattan Beach's first seven-story apartment building to actually break ground. The Deep Roots site is still a few steps behind it in the process, which means the argument over signatures and public comment happening right now is less a one-time fight over one nursery and more a preview of what's coming to the rest of this corridor.
What Still Works on That Same Stretch of Sepulveda
None of this touches the parts of the Hill Section's eastern edge that already work well for the people who live here. Gelson's, at 707 N. Sepulveda, opened in 2018 and gave the neighborhood a genuine grocery option within walking distance for the first time in years. Its food-hall layout, with a wine and tapas bar and a full seafood counter, has become as much a gathering spot as a place to buy dinner.
Farther north on the same boulevard, near where it meets Manhattan Beach Boulevard, O-Sho Sushi has been serving the neighborhood since 1985. El Gringo, which opened its original location in Hermosa Beach in 1986 before restaurateur Bill Graw bought it in 2001, sits a short walk away on the same stretch. Neither has changed ownership, relocated, or shown up in a city planning notice.
That's worth sitting with. The section of Sepulveda attracting seven-story proposals and shell companies is the same street that still has a sushi counter your neighbors have been going to for forty years. Both things are true about this corridor right now, and the second one isn't going anywhere just because the first one is loud at the moment.
What This Means If You Live Near the Edge
The Deep Roots story matters to Hill Section residents for a reason that has nothing to do with potting soil. It's a clean, documented example of how little leverage a petition carries once a parcel sits inside the Residential Overlay District, and a preview of what the conversation around the next filing on this corridor is likely to sound like. If your property borders Sepulveda, or if you've been assuming the old hearing process still applies along this stretch, the last year on that one corner is the clearest evidence available that it doesn't.
We track every filing along the Hill Section's Sepulveda edge because it shapes what buyers ask about and what sellers need to think through long before a shovel goes into the ground. If you want a plain read on how a specific project might affect a specific property near this corridor, Jen Caskey Group is a phone call away.
