They call it the Strand. Not officially a Kiwi place, not marked on any map, but if you walk south from the Manhattan Beach Pier on a Saturday morning in February, you can hear it. A long vowel here. A “sweet as” there. A flat white order at a window with a Dirty Harry mural behind the bar. Somewhere between El Porto and the volleyball nets, the South Bay turns, briefly, into Auckland’s North Shore.
By rough count there are several thousand New Zealand-born residents in the Los Angeles metro and tens of thousands more who would claim the Kiwi label by parentage, marriage, or accent. Manhattan Beach and the broader South Bay are where the heaviest concentration sits. The drivers are unromantic and specific: surf, film, aerospace, and the climate of an island people who recognised themselves in a Pacific coast that breaks just like Piha.
Manhattan Beach, The Place
Manhattan Beach is a small coastal city in southwestern Los Angeles County, wedged between Hermosa Beach to the south and El Segundo to the north. Population sits at around 35,500, on roughly four square miles of sand-dune grid, with the Pacific on one side and the 405 on the other.
The city was incorporated in 1912 after a coin toss settled the name in 1902. The Manhattan Beach Pier, completed in 1920, is the oldest concrete pier on the West Coast and the city’s defining landmark. The Strand bike path runs through it, an unbroken twenty-two miles of asphalt that connects Santa Monica to Torrance and threads every South Bay beach city in between.
Housing is dense, expensive, and unmistakably Californian: stucco bungalows pressed against teardown rebuilds, three-storey beach houses with rooftop decks, all of it within a salt-air walk of the water.
How LA Became Kiwi
Before the Kiwis
Before there was a Manhattan Beach, the land belonged to the Tongva people, whose presence on this coast stretches back at least seven thousand years. After Spanish colonisation it was folded into Rancho Sausal Redondo, a vast cattle holding that ran from Playa del Rey to Inglewood.
The beach town arrived in the early twentieth century: speculators, a railway, a pier, weekenders from inland Los Angeles. By the 1950s it was a surf town. Dale Velzy was shaping boards a block from the sand. Greg Noll was riding the pier breaks.
In 1958 a Manhattan Beach local named Bing Copeland sailed to New Zealand with another South Bay surfer, Rick Stoner, and spent four months at the Piha Surf Lifesaving Club outside Auckland, teaching local lifeguards how to ride a Malibu-style longboard. They left their boards behind. New Zealand’s commercial surfboard industry started, in effect, in Auckland that summer with a few unfinished blanks brought from California.
The thread, in other words, was already there. Long before any meaningful Kiwi presence existed in the South Bay, the South Bay had reached out to New Zealand and shaped the wave that would, generations later, bring New Zealanders back the other way.
The Kiwis Arrive
The first significant wave of New Zealanders to settle in Los Angeles came not from a famine or a war but from a cultural habit. The OE, or Overseas Experience, was popularised as a term in the mid-1970s and crystallised into a near-mandatory rite of passage for New Zealanders in their twenties. You finished university or a trade, you got on a plane, you worked abroad for a year or two. London was the historical default. By the 1980s, for a particular slice of Kiwi youth, Los Angeles was becoming a serious second option.
The pull factors were sharp. Surf-and-skate culture in the South Bay was already legendary, and the climate matched the upper North Island. Hollywood was hiring. The film and television production economy, dispersed across the Westside, ran on freelance crews and welcomed talent that arrived with a work ethic and an accent that nobody quite placed.
A few key institutions stitched the early community together. The New Zealand Society of Southern California, founded decades earlier as a small social club, ran picnics and a Waitangi Day breakfast. The consulate, now at 2425 Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, became the formal anchor: a flag, an address, a place to renew a passport.
South Bay at Its Peak
The 2000s and early 2010s were the moment. The success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, filmed across New Zealand and finished partly in Wellington’s Stone Street Studios, rewired the relationship between New Zealand and Hollywood. Crews who had worked on those films, on the Hobbit sequels that followed, and on Avatar, found themselves with credits the major studios wanted. Many flew back and forth. A meaningful number simply moved.
The actors followed the same pipeline. Karl Urban, from Wellington, played Éomer in Jackson’s trilogy and then built a Hollywood career that ran from Star Trek to The Boys. Anna Paquin, raised in Wellington, had already won an Oscar at eleven for The Piano and settled into a long Los Angeles run.
Taika Waititi moved his base to LA after Thor: Ragnarok. Cliff Curtis worked across two countries. So did Sam Neill, Russell Crowe (the contested case, raised in Australia but New Zealand-born), and a long second tier of working actors and screenwriters who never quite became household names but kept the rent paid.
The crews were the real centre of gravity. Camera operators, riggers, gaffers, costume supervisors, visual-effects artists trained at Wellington’s Weta Digital and shipped to LA on short contracts that stretched into long careers. Many landed in the South Bay because the rent in the late 2000s was still defensible, the surf was steady, and the schools were good.
By the late 2010s the South Bay was where Kiwi families clustered. Manhattan Beach, Hermosa, Redondo, El Segundo. The schools fielded rugby sevens teams. The pubs showed All Blacks tests at six in the morning. The cafes started serving flat whites that did not need to be explained.
The Change
The cluster never grew into a Chinatown or a Little Italy. It was always smaller, looser, more dispersed than the Australian community it sometimes overlapped with. Manhattan Beach has become one of the most expensive zip codes in the United States, and the entry price for a young Kiwi on a working-holiday visa has risen with it.
The pandemic shifted things again. A wave of Kiwi expats, suddenly able to work remotely, went back to Auckland or Wellington or Queenstown to ride out 2020. Some never came back.
Others did, and a quieter wave has arrived since, drawn now less by Hollywood than by the South Bay’s hard-tech and aerospace boom. SpaceX is headquartered six miles inland in Hawthorne. El Segundo has, by some counts, fourteen of the region’s fifty largest hard-tech companies. New Zealand has its own small space industry, and the route between Wellington’s Rocket Lab and El Segundo’s SpaceX runs straight through Manhattan Beach.
The shape of the community in 2026 is different from the one that took hold in the 2000s. Smaller, older in some pockets, younger in others. Still here.
The Landmarks of Kiwi LA
Two Guns Espresso, 875 Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Opened in 2011 by two New Zealanders, Andrew “Stan” Stanisich and Craig Olson, in a small Goat Hill Center storefront on Sepulveda. They put a La Marzocco machine on the counter, a large painting of Dirty Harry on the wall, and a flat white on the menu before most Americans had heard of one. There are now multiple South Bay locations. For the local Kiwi community it is something close to a clubhouse.
New Zealand Consulate-General, 2425 Olympic Boulevard, Santa Monica. The official anchor of the diaspora in Southern California. It is not in Manhattan Beach, but every Kiwi in the South Bay has been there at least once for a passport renewal or a notary. The consulate co-hosts Waitangi Day events and works with the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise office on the same floor.
The Manhattan Beach Pier. Not a Kiwi landmark, strictly, but the South Bay’s centre of gravity and the site of the unofficial Saturday morning surf gathering. Walk south of the pier at first light on any winter swell and you will hear at least three Kiwi accents in the lineup.
El Porto, northern Manhattan Beach. The most consistent surf break in the South Bay, sitting in the shadow of the Chevron refinery towers. El Porto is where the New Zealand crew tends to congregate, in part because the wave shape, fast and short-period, feels closer to home than Malibu.
Kiwis in LA. The community organisation, now twenty-five years old, has been the social spine of the diaspora since 2000. It runs the Waitangi Day Brekkie, a summer picnic, an annual Air New Zealand wine tasting, a Christmas party, and pub nights that rotate between Santa Monica and Costa Mesa. Membership is in the hundreds and grows every year.
Ye Olde Kings Head, 116 Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica. Not Kiwi-owned, but for two decades the default screening venue for All Blacks tests, Bledisloe Cup matches, and Rugby World Cup mornings. Black jerseys outnumber Springbok and Wallaby ones by a comfortable margin most weekends in the southern-hemisphere season.
The Underground Pub & Grill, Hermosa Beach. The South Bay’s working-class rugby room. Smaller, scruffier, less marketed than the Santa Monica venues. It tends to fill up when the All Blacks play at an inconvenient Pacific hour.
Where the LA Kiwis Came From
The community in the South Bay reflects the demographic shape of New Zealand itself. Auckland sends the most, by a wide margin: it is by far the country’s largest city and the place where most film, television, and tech careers begin. Wellington follows closely, because of the Stone Street and Weta pipelines and because the capital has long fed creative talent abroad.
Christchurch, especially after the 2011 earthquakes, contributed a meaningful share. Smaller numbers came from Hamilton, Tauranga, Dunedin, and the regional towns. A subset of the LA Kiwi community is Māori, and a further subset is of Pacific Islander descent: Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands New Zealanders for whom the move to Los Angeles is part of a broader Pacific diaspora that runs through Auckland and out across the ocean.
Manhattan Beach Today
The Kiwi presence in the South Bay in 2026 is small, established, and unshowy. There is no Little New Zealand. There never was. What there is, instead, is a network: a coffee shop, a consulate, a community organisation, a handful of pubs that know which rugby matches matter, and a few thousand people who recognise each other on the Strand by something in the gait.
The community is older now in some pockets, with the LOTR-era arrivals raising teenagers who consider themselves Californian first. It is younger in others, with a fresh trickle of aerospace engineers, software developers, and screenwriters arriving on H-1B and O-1 visas. The Australian community in the South Bay is larger and louder. The Kiwi community is content to be quieter.
The future of New Zealand in Los Angeles is unlikely to look like the past. The Hollywood pipeline has thinned as production has dispersed. The hard-tech corridor through El Segundo and Hawthorne has thickened. The OE is shorter than it used to be, and many of the people coming now are middle-aged engineers, not twenty-three-year-olds with a Lonely Planet. But on a Saturday morning at Two Guns, with the espresso machine pulling steam and someone at the next table arguing about a tight five, the South Bay still sounds, briefly, like home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did New Zealanders settle in Manhattan Beach?
New Zealanders gravitated to Manhattan Beach and the broader South Bay for a combination of climate, surf, and work. The Pacific coast and beach-town culture matched home, the Hollywood production economy hired Kiwi actors and crew through the Lord of the Rings era, and aerospace and tech hubs in El Segundo and Hawthorne created a steady pipeline of engineering jobs. The South Bay reads, to a Kiwi, like a warmer Auckland with bigger studios.
Is Manhattan Beach still a Kiwi expat hub?
Yes, though a quieter one than at its 2010s peak. The community is small, dispersed, and unmarked by any single neighbourhood enclave, but it remains the densest cluster of New Zealanders in greater Los Angeles. Two Guns Espresso, Kiwis in LA events, and the rugby viewing rooms in Santa Monica and Hermosa all still draw steady Kiwi crowds.
What are the most famous New Zealander landmarks in LA?
The most visible Kiwi landmarks in greater Los Angeles are Two Guns Espresso in Manhattan Beach, the New Zealand Consulate-General on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, the Kiwis in LA community organisation that runs Waitangi Day and other annual events, and the surf lineups at El Porto. Rugby pubs like Ye Olde Kings Head and The Underground are the unofficial Saturday gathering points.
Where in New Zealand did the LA New Zealanders come from?
Most LA Kiwis come from Auckland, the country’s largest city and the centre of its film, television, and tech industries. Wellington supplies a meaningful second wave, especially through the Weta and Stone Street Studios pipelines. Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Dunedin, and the regional towns all contribute smaller numbers, and Māori and Pacific Islander New Zealanders form a visible subset of the community.
When did New Zealanders first arrive in LA?
Small numbers of New Zealanders have lived in Los Angeles for more than a century, but the modern community took shape in the 1980s and 1990s as the OE, or Overseas Experience, drew young Kiwis to American cities alongside London. The Peter Jackson era from the early 2000s onward accelerated the trend dramatically, and the South Bay cluster as it exists today is largely a product of the 2000s and 2010s.
If your family’s story passed through Manhattan Beach, or anywhere New Zealanders have made a home along the Pacific, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Auckland’s North Shore to Wellington’s harbour, to the South Bay, to wherever you are now.