Cambrian Park Plaza Was Supposed to Be Finished This Year. It Hasn't Broken Ground.

Drive past the corner of Union and Camden on any given Saturday and the yellow sign is still there, carousel figures frozen mid-ride: a monkey on a bicycle, a man holding a giant beach ball, a couple of kids in a pram. It has stood over that intersection since 1953. Inside the plaza, the courtyards still have their white picket fences and picnic benches under the trees, and most of the storefronts under the covered walkway are still open for business.

Back in late 2021, before the city council even gave final approval, planning documents projected construction would wrap up by 2026, replaced by apartments, a hotel, and a walkable town square. It is 2026 now, and nobody has broken ground.

That is not the same as nothing happening. The project didn't stall out and die. It got reordered, and the piece getting pushed to the back of the line is the one residents fought hardest to get in the first place.

The sign everyone knows, the mall most people can't picture changing

The carousel sign earned historic status in 2016, which is why it survives every version of this plan no matter how many times the buildings around it get redrawn. Its lettering used to glow with neon before being swapped for backlit plastic panels, a maintenance-driven change rather than a stylistic one.

The plaza itself covers roughly 170,000 square feet, low-slung and shaped more like a village green than a standard strip mall, with storefronts in brick clustered around little courtyards rather than lined up along a single corridor. One thing has already quietly disappeared without any demolition permit: Cambrian Bowl, once part of the same complex, closed years before any bulldozer was scheduled to show up. It's a small preview of the kind of attrition that can happen to a property in limbo long before official construction begins.

This is the site the San José City Council voted to redevelop in 2022. Four years later, it's the same parking lot, the same sign, and in most units, the same tenants.

What San José actually approved in 2022

The plan the city signed off on, known formally as the Cambrian Park Plaza Signature Project, annexed 18.13 acres from unincorporated Santa Clara County into the city and laid out three buildings:

• Building 1: 305 apartments above roughly 50,990 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space
• Building 2: a 229-room hotel with about 4,610 square feet of commercial space
• Building 3: a 110-bed assisted living facility with 50 independent senior living units

Layered on top of that: 48 single-family homes with 27 accessory dwelling units, 25 townhomes, and four acres set aside as public open space, close to a fifth of the entire site.

During the approval process, District 9 Councilmember Pam Foley and the group Catalyze SV pushed the developer to raise its affordable housing commitment from 5 percent to 10 percent of units. Even at 10 percent, that's still short of the city's standard 15 percent requirement, so the developer paid roughly $7.88 million into San José's affordable housing fund to cover the gap, according to reporting at the time of the 2022 approval.

Here's the timeline in one place:

Why the math stopped working

Kelly Snider, a development consultant and San José State professor, put it plainly to KQED:

"The plan that you can look through on the city's website is not economically feasible to build."

Rising interest rates, higher construction costs, and changing retail habits have made large mixed-use projects across the Bay Area harder to finance all at once, and Cambrian Park Plaza is caught in that same squeeze. Building apartments, a hotel, senior housing, and retail simultaneously means lining up several different types of capital at the same time. When the numbers stop working for all four at once, the usual fix isn't to cancel the project. It's to change the order.

The plan didn't die. It got reordered.

That reorder is exactly what's now sitting in front of city staff. The permit amendment, filed February 13, 2026 under File No. PDA20-007-01, keeps the land use, unit counts, and commercial square footage the same as what was approved in 2022, according to the City of San José's project page. What it changes is sequencing and time:

1. No change to the number of residential units or the total square footage of commercial use approved in 2022
2. Housing portions move to the front of the schedule, ahead of the hotel and assisted living buildings
3. The entitlement window extends by up to four years beyond the current 2028 expiration
4. The first public comment letter on the amendment was due March 28, 2026, with city planner Laura Meiners listed on the file

As The Registry reported this week, Kimco is now formally asking the city for that extension while the redevelopment remains stalled. If the request is granted, entitlements that currently run out in 2028 could stretch as far as 2032, which means this exact corner could look substantially the same for another six years.

What Friends of Cambrian Park is watching for

The community group Friends of Cambrian Park has weighed in on this project for years. Their consistent ask, as KQED reported, was for something people would actually linger at: sit-down dining, not more fast food, closer in spirit to The Pruneyard in Campbell or downtown Los Gatos than to a typical suburban strip mall. During the 2022 approval, the city also required the developer to preserve existing uses at the site, including the farmers market and the seasonal holiday tree lot, once construction wraps.

The concern with the new phasing request is straightforward. If the residential buildings go up first while the hotel, senior living, and remaining commercial space wait for a later phase on a longer runway, that's the part of the project most exposed to being scaled back, delayed indefinitely, or reworked again before it's ever built. Neighbors and small business owners quoted in reporting on the amendment have said the new sequencing leaves them waiting years to find out whether the site becomes the community hub they were promised or simply more apartments with a historic sign out front.

There's also a smaller, more immediate friction point. Sidewalks are still missing along the east side of Union Avenue, a gap tied to the area's status as an unincorporated county pocket, as resident Mark Chou raised at an earlier town hall. That's a walkability issue for the exact "pedestrian-friendly" vision the plan is supposed to deliver.

What you'll actually notice this year

If you live nearby, here's the practical version. Most storefronts under the covered walkway are still open and trading normally, plaza and all, sign and all. No demolition equipment has shown up. City staff continue to review the phasing amendment and extension request. The next real milestone to watch isn't a wrecking ball. It's whether San José grants the four-year extension and the reordered phasing, and if it does, whether construction actually begins on the housing parcels in a timeframe that gives the retail and dining piece a real shot at showing up too.

Four years after the city said yes, one extension request is already on the table, and the part of the plan most residents cared about most is now the part scheduled to arrive last. That's worth watching regardless of whether you're thinking about your own property, simply because it will shape the character of this specific corner of Cambrian for a long time to come.

If you're a longtime Cambrian neighbor who wants someone local actually tracking the file on this, that's the kind of thing Taylor Lambert Group pays attention to as part of covering this neighborhood day to day. And if a story like this ever has you wondering what it means for your own home down the line, we're happy to help you get your free home valuation whenever you're curious, no timeline required.