How Los Angeles aims to make its port a destination for locals — and the world

For Jerico Development President Eric Johnson, the Ports O’ Call Village complex on the main channel of the Port of Los Angeles wasn't only a nationally significant redevelopment opportunity, but a chance to reimagine a piece of his childhood.

As a boy, he rode his bike to San Pedro, where he watched sport-fishing boats leave the harbor and walked around the faux-seaport marketplace of chowder stands that felt messy, alive and unmistakably Los Angeles.

Now, this harborside that opened in 1961 also belongs to his future, as he helps lead one of the most complicated and expensive public-private redevelopment efforts on the Southern California coast. It's a project that seeks to reverse decades of decay that led to a waterfront that became more ghost than destination — and help the area better match the ambitions of the bustling Port of Los Angeles and the community living beside it.

Driven by this year's FIFA World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games, he's part of a rush to finish transforming one of the nation’s busiest industrial gateways into a place visitors will want to spend time and money, a project that could influence port revitalization around the country.

Years of planning, permitting, redesigns and pushback have led to the roughly $500 million West Harbor project, a mile-long waterfront promenade anchored by roughly 300,000 square feet of dining, retail and entertainment uses, to begin its phased debut on 42 acres this summer.

The lineup includes a 6,200-seat amphitheater operated by Nederlander Concerts, a 175-foot Ferris wheel expected to be the tallest in California, an expanded San Pedro Fish Market, padel and pickleball courts operated by King of Padel and a mix of restaurants including a satellite location of Hollywood mainstay Yamashiro.

“To have the opportunity to essentially reimagine it,” Johnson told CoStar News, “is something I pinch myself about.”

The project has yet to open, so it's too soon to tell whether visitors will make the trek to San Pedro over more well-known tourist hubs like Santa Monica and Hollywood. Still, West Harbor has already been designated a Los Angeles World Cup 26 Fan Zone site, giving it a chance to bring in international visitors ahead of a more local test.

The Port of Los Angeles remains one of the most powerful economic engines in the country, with the San Pedro Bay port complex handling a large share of U.S. cargo and anchoring jobs, trucking, warehousing and trade throughout the region. San Pedro, the town next to the LA port and the 23rd biggest city in Los Angeles County with some 83,000 residents, is the consumer-facing part of that port complex.

The problem was that, for decades, San Pedro’s public-facing waterfront looked increasingly disconnected from that economic power. The old Ports O’ Call Village no longer generated the kind of activity, tax revenue or civic pride that city officials, business groups and community leaders believed the area deserved.

That mismatch grew more urgent as Los Angeles moved toward a run of global events that will bring millions of visitors to Southern California.

The World Cup and Olympics did not invent the desire to modernize the LA Waterfront, but they gave public officials and private investors a deadline they could not ignore, said Elise Swanson, president and CEO of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce.

If Los Angeles were going to present itself to the world, civic leaders did not want one of its most visible harbor districts to remain a half-forgotten stretch of decaying buildings and missed opportunity. The announcement of LA's selection as host for the 2028 Olympics in 2017 triggered a more cohesive public-private push for redevelopment than San Pedro had seen in years.

The port advanced long-discussed infrastructure upgrades, community groups pressed for better access and stronger local inclusion, and developers were asked to imagine a project that could attract outside capital without severing the waterfront from the working port that defines it, Swanson said.

“I’ve been at this since 1999,” Swanson, a longtime San Pedro resident who has worked in local politics and real estate development and who likes to watch the container ships from her windows at home in San Pedro, told CoStar News. “West Harbor is bringing new life back to what was literally termite ridden and falling down.”

The public-side payoff is what makes the project bigger than a standard mixed-use development. Success will be measured not just by raw traffic but by what visitors do once they arrive: how long they stay, how much they spend and whether they begin to see San Pedro as more than a pass-through, according to Harbor Commissioner Lee Williams.

“West Harbor will be a game changer,” Williams told CoStar News. “It will give folks an immediately recognizable place to spend their time on the LA Waterfront.”

Developed by Jerico Development — with Johnson as senior project executive — and Los Angeles-based The Ratkovich Co., with equity partners Osprey Investors and Carrix/SSA Marine, the mixed-use complex is poised to become the clearest sign yet that San Pedro’s decades-long stalemate with the port has given way to an uneasy but increasingly productive truce.

The broader LA Waterfront effort took shape over many years as the port, the city and San Pedro community groups tried to work through a history of mistrust rooted in land use disputes, pollution fights and a longstanding sense that the port’s economic success had not always translated into quality-of-life gains for nearby neighborhoods.

Swanson, who has lived through much of that arc, described an earlier era when the port and community were effectively at war with one another.

In her telling, the turnaround came only after civic leaders and port officials accepted that long-term progress required a healthier partnership to connect industrial land, public space and neighborhood business districts.

The port’s investment was essential to making that credible. Swanson said the Port of Los Angeles has poured more than $1 billion into infrastructure such as roadway improvements, sidewalks, promenades and beautification meant to improve access and signal that private developers would not be left to solve the waterfront on their own.

That groundwork fed into the San Pedro Connectivity Planning Process, an effort launched in 2023 that brought together port officials, residents, business groups and waterfront stakeholders to address transit, pedestrian routes, bike access, signage, wayfinding and parking.

It also reflected a more mature recognition that a waterfront redevelopment is only as strong as the system moving people through it.

“It’s a partnership,” Swanson said. “We’ve come a long way.”

West Harbor is being built alongside a broader rethinking of how visitors interact with the port, particularly as cruise activity rebounds.

The Port of Los Angeles handled a record 1.6 million cruise passengers across 241 calls in 2025, and officials are now planning a major expansion of cruise infrastructure through a joint venture between Carrix and JLC Infrastructure.

The Port has hired a joint venture between developers Carrix and JLC Infrastructure to build an Outer Harbor cruise ship terminal envisioned as a modern, ring-shaped waterfront complex with integrated park space, public access and facilities designed to handle the largest next-generation ships. Officials have yet to set a firm opening date as the project advances alongside a broader overhaul of the existing World Cruise Center to capture growing passenger demand. That project will be connected to San Pedro's West Harbor project through free trolleys and trams.

After breaking ground in 2022, the LA Waterfront’s overhaul is unfolding in phases.

The first activations — such as the San Pedro Fish Market and waterfront promenade — are now open, while the first major public spaces — such as the sky wheel, the beer garden, the amphitheater and the World Cup fan zone — will debut this summer. A full build-out is expected before the 2028 Olympics.

The project openly pays homage to the industrial economy that built the harbor in the first place.

It leans into warehouse-like forms, industrial materials and an open promenade that puts the water and working channel at the center of the experience, Johnson said.

The amphitheater may be the most visible symbol of what the project is trying to do. Rather than functioning as a sealed-off performance box, it is designed to work as both a public gathering space and a concert venue, with the harbor and passing ships remaining part of the visual experience.

That matters in San Pedro, where the working port is not just background infrastructure but part of the attraction itself.

“Our port is theater,” Swanson said. “People literally drive down and have lunch to watch the cruise ships come in, the container ships come in.”

Across the country, cities have spent decades experimenting with how to reposition once-industrial edges for new forms of tourism, entertainment and mixed-use development.

Baltimore’s Inner Harbor became one of the best-known examples of an older waterfront reinvention model. San Francisco’s Embarcadero shows how public access and civic identity can be strengthened when the edge is opened up. New York City has spent years reworking parts of Brooklyn’s waterfront while trying to balance maritime uses, housing, recreation and economic development. And Cleveland has initiated efforts to clean up legacy pollution and reconnect neighborhoods to the city's heavily industrialized lakefront.

The lesson from those cities is not simply that waterfronts are valuable. It is that they are hard to get right.

Move too far toward commerce and a district can feel generic, over-programmed and disconnected from its roots. Preserve too much of the past without reinvestment and the area can stagnate. Ignore access, wayfinding and neighborhood connections and even a well-funded project can end up functioning like an island, Swanson said.

West Harbor, officials argue, could become a useful case study if it succeeds, due to its combination of public and private spending and community negotiation.

The immediate question, however: Will people actually come?

Even with the guarantee of World Cup — and potentially Olympics — visitors, the broader strategy should be to win locals first, Johnson notes.

“If you build something that South Bay residents actually use, visitors will follow,” he said.

West Harbor leasing is handled by Retail Insite's Natalie Ward and Allison Campbell.