No Jokes, This One Time

Once a year, traditionally, we put our credibility on the line for some attempted yuks.

It's an April Fool's Day tradition at MB Confidential. In recent years, we also drew in our sister publication, MB News. (A fact that has not always sat well with its editor, Mrs. MBC.)

This year, we're sitting it out.

It's not that we're in a bad mood or anything. Some stuff could still be funny.

But we've begun to wonder... what if some of these posts were actually premonitions?

The first big wow moment came late last year, as (true) plans began to be discussed for a big apartment tower on the site of the former Fry's electronics shop.

On April Fool's 2022, we penned a post for MB News purporting to reveal secret plans for a 9-story apartment building at the Fry's site, "given a codename of 'Fry's Tower'" in a batch of "leaked emails" among state officials.

In the jokey post, the state was plotting "bold land seizures in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa and Redondo Beach."

Here in reality, the state has actually required cities like Manhattan Beach to rezone vast areas to allow residential or mixed-use development, and now builders are proposing big rental buildings for a few sites, including at Fry's.

Uh oh.

Our April '22 post suddenly ain't so funny.

And what about the city's very recently announced plans to acquire the Union Bank site in the middle of downtown Manhattan Beach? (See this (true) MB News story from last week.)

That one rings a bell. In April 2016, both MBC and MB News ran jokey posts about the surprise expansion of the California bullet train project to cover the greenbelt (Veteran's Parkway). There would be a stop in downtown MB, and a monster 8-story tower (plus 4 levels of underground parking) at the site of the Beach Vons and Union Bank, dubbed a "vertical downtown" with restaurants and shops with ocean views.

To date, the city has been hush-hush about their plans for the Union Bank site, with the city manager offering, vaguely, that the site offers a chance to "thoughtfully balance economic growth through the creation of sustainable revenue-generating development..."

Well that sure doesn't rule out an 8-story "vertical downtown!"

Oddly enough, the city's "big reveal" about what might actually happen at the site is slated for discussion tonight... April 1st.

Uh oh.

And lastly but not leastly, we've had flashbacks to our April 2009 post about the U.S. president opting to regulate home sales and prices in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, which had been triggered in part by overinflated home prices.

The jokey post featured a serious-sounding President Obama saying:

"What we need now is a real estate sales force that will help us to stabilize home prices, according to specific regulations and price points set by my administration. We need to take the emotion and the exuberance out of the process. We need predictable, orderly prices and guaranteed returns, at a specific and pre-identified rate, for people who make the decision to purchase a home during these difficult economic times."

Now, that's not happening, but we all have been living in the strange world of rental price regulations, in the immediate wake of the tragic L.A. County fires. Regulations were loosened for Manhattan Beach homes of 4BR or more, but price controls still (maddeningly) apply to 3BR and smaller homes here, and to all homes in neighboring Hermosa Beach. (Where we've just processed a rental listing that fell under the regs.)

Real estate price controls? Ha ha very funny.

Uh oh. Not so funny.

Not Happening Soon

We're not saying this blog has predictive power.

No one's going to be searching stone tablets 2,500 years from now looking for transcriptions of MB Confidential posts to scrutinize like Nostradamus' weirdo poems.

For instance, we hope never to see:

A volcano in Manhattan Beach. 

A new entertainment pier offshore from El Porto, ruining the surf break to mimic Santa Monica's pier ("El Porto Piero").

Hourly home rentals all over Manhattan Beach. (Talk about short-term rentals.)

Treehouse development to add density and population to residential areas of Manhattan Beach.

And yet there was at least one of those posts that was perhaps more aspirational than purely fun.

On April 1, 2017, we joke-posted that the city had exempted realtors from all parking regulations, on account of the contributions we make and the difficulty we face parking oh-so-often when arriving at the last minute for a showing.

That's still a pretty nifty idea, and we hope you'll sign our petition.