Marina is almost exclusivley condos/apt, most having been built within the last 10 years or so. There’s some very nice townhouses on Admiralty Way, if THs are your cup of tea.
The further inland you go, the more SFRs you get, but due to the 90 and the 405 crossing perpendicularly just above Linclon, you get a lot of freeway noise in the back streets. These are your standard 1200 sf 2b/2bs with sub-5000 lots, which at the moment are around 800K.The good new is that LAX noise is less of a problem than the freeway noise, and a good selection of stores in the mall on Mindinao/Glencoe.
Playa is nice – on the beaches its all condos/apts, but go inland, up on the bluffs near Loyola Marymount University, and there are some incredible (and incredibly priced) Mansions overlooking whats left of the Ballona Wetlands. A big new condo complex was bult last year right by Electronic Arts on Lincoln. The wetlands themselves are dimishing fast, and mainly just driven through at speed by people on their way to somewhere else. Beaches are OK, but get crowded in summer. If you’re picky about polloution, watch out for the chemical plant at the end of Imperial Ave, a couple of miles west of Playa proper.
A fun, if rather strange, beach experience is to sunbathe under the end of the LAX runway and watch the jumbos clear the end. If you lie in the right place, you can watch (and hear) them thundering away, not 100 ft over your head before they climb and disperse to all points of the compass.
Bad news – traffic can be a bitch. On the beachfront is a road that goes down to the south beach towns (Redondo, Manhatten, etc…) and further inland is Lincoln, which gets used as an alternative to the 405 and as direct route to LAX, so you’re pretty much caught between a rock and a hard place, as there’s very few times of the day when these two roads aren’t stop-start traffic.
Noise polloution from LAX varies – depending on the time of day and which way the wind is blowing. Nighttime flights by law have to embark and climb over the sea, so once they’re high enough the noise isn’t so bad.
There are no residential buildings at the end of the runway (though PdR village is only 1 mile down the road), so you won’t be woken up by your ornamants falling off the shelves, but you will live with a dull constant roar, which you may or may not be able to tune out..
Both places are a little too congested, crowded and expensive for my liking, but if you work on the Westside then they are a good alternative to unafordable Santa Monica and Apartment Hell West L.A.
