In February 2023, the loudest night University City had heard in years came from a shopping center that had been closed for months. As CBS 8 reported, the U.S. Army used the abandoned Costa Verde Center for an overnight combat training drill, with loud booms and low-flying helicopters. One longtime resident told the station it frightened people in the nearby high-rises.
Few vacant strip malls end up as a military training site. This one sits across Genesee Avenue from Westfield UTC, right next to a trolley station, and it had been fenced off since mid-2022. The fencing is finally doing its job. The buildings are coming down. Neighbors who expect a new village to replace them right away are in for a wait. The plan approved for this land puts in streets and utilities first and leaves the buildings for later, block by block, because of how the site got stuck in the first place.
A grocery-store rule from 1986
Costa Verde Center was built in 1989, and Bristol Farms was among its tenants. The center was built under the 1986 Costa Verde Specific Plan. According to a history by the local urbanism publication BuildSD, that plan required the strip-mall parcel to be a commercial center with local shops and a grocery store, and it banned housing there. The homes were supposed to go on the residential side of Costa Verde, which shares the name but was planned as a separate development.
That rule aged badly once transit arrived. The Mid-Coast Trolley Extension opened in 2021 with an elevated Blue Line station over Genesee Avenue, between UTC and Costa Verde. UTC had already built the station's elevator banks into its expansion. The elevators on the Costa Verde side opened onto a shuttered center. The 2024 University Community Plan Update raised the allowed density on the site to 218 residential units per acre. Even so, nobody could build homes there without first amending a plan that banned them.
The lab plan that never broke ground
Housing wasn't part of the first redevelopment attempt. In 2020, University City News described a proposal from Regency Centers and Alexandria Real Estate Equities. It included 400,000 square feet of office and R&D space and a 200-room hotel. The ownership changes since then explain much of what the site is becoming now.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1986 | Costa Verde Specific Plan requires a commercial center with a grocery store and bans housing on the site |
| 1989 | Costa Verde Center built; Bristol Farms is among its tenants |
| 2020 | Regency Centers and Alexandria propose a life-science hub with office/R&D space and a hotel |
| About a year later | Regency sells its stake to Alexandria for $125 million, and the center closes for good |
| Mid-2022 | Site fenced off from public access |
| February 2023 | Army holds an overnight training drill in the vacant center |
| January 2025 | Alexandria sells for $124 million on the condition that the site never be used for life science |
| October 23, 2025 | City Council approves removing the site from the Costa Verde Specific Plan and dividing it into 13 parcels |
| By July 20, 2026 | Demolition underway |
| September 2026 | "High Street Village" name and renderings announced |
| October 13, 2026 | Developers update the University Community Planning Group |
The most important line in the table is the January 2025 sale condition. By then, the lab-building boom of 2020 had produced plenty of supply across the region, and BuildSD argues the area needed housing more than more lab space. Alexandria sold the land for $124 million with a requirement that it never be used for life science. That ruled out a return to the biotech plan and left housing as the obvious use.
What the current plan actually approved
The buyers were Global Mutual, a London-based real estate investment firm, and its local partner, Cass Street Venture. Times of San Diego reports that the team's co-presidents, Luke Daniels and Michael Yanicelli, got the land-use restrictions changed and their final map approved for a 13-block plan. In September, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported the new name, High Street Village. The developers describe it as a European-style retail street lined with stores, cafés, boutique wellness businesses and a small market.
The numbers below describe how large the project could get. None of them is a finished program yet.
- Site: 12.6 acres, divided into 13 blocks
- Homes: entitled for up to 2,738
- Retail: about 100,000 square feet of planned neighborhood-serving retail, including cafés, a grocer and shops, around a central piazza near the trolley
- Infrastructure: about $20 million in site work before vertical construction
- Construction start: targeted for 2028
The 2,738 figure, reported by The Registry, is the maximum the entitlement allows, not a building count. Daniels told Times of San Diego that "the final number of affordable homes and parking spaces will be determined as the project advances." No grocer has been named. Coverage from 2025 mentioned a boutique hotel as a possible use on some parcels, but the October 2026 reporting focuses on housing and retail.
Why the buildings will go up one block at a time
The current team designed its plan to avoid the problem that stalled the last one. As BuildSD describes it, Cass Street does not plan to build all 13 buildings at once, and it may not develop all of them itself. The firm plans to handle demolition, new streets, and civil and utility work. It could develop some or all of the parcels later, or "sell off some of the blocks to recoup costs" once the civil work is done.
That is why the site is split into 13 parcels. A single master building can stall because of one market cycle, as the lab plan did. A grid of separate blocks can fill in as each block finds a builder. For people living nearby, the next stage will look like road and utility work, with buildings following parcel by parcel.
Earlier timelines set expectations that didn't hold, so it helps to compare them. CBS 8's 2025 coverage said the developers hoped to start demolition in late 2026 and open the first new buildings by 2028. The October 2025 Union-Tribune report said the center would be razed early in 2026. Demolition is in fact underway, but the October 2026 reporting puts the start of construction in 2028 and gives no opening date. Under the current timeline, 2028 is when building starts, not when the first stores open.
What the planning group is pushing for
The University Community Planning Group took no action at its October 13 meeting, which was informational. University City News posted the meeting recording, and the High Street Village presentation starts about ten minutes in. Before the meeting, UCPG chair Chris Nielsen told Times of San Diego that residents especially liked the planned grocery and pharmacy, and that they wanted more information on affordable housing and traffic.
He also pointed to a detail that shows how closely the plan was fitted to its surroundings:
"They will have native plantings throughout the site, not palm trees that dump seeds into the canyon and create an environmental mess. It's this sort of attention to community concern that ends up making a big difference."
Nielsen added that this was the first plan in a long time to make real use of the site's location next to transit, and the first to include housing. If the grocer arrives as planned, it will fill the gap Bristol Farms left, the same use the 1986 plan required. The difference is that this time it would sit on a street with homes above and around it, a short walk from the Costa Verde-side elevators that have opened onto a closed center since 2021.
The planning group will see this project again as each block moves forward, and the details that matter most to neighbors, like affordable-home counts, parking and traffic, will be set then. At Cohen Albrecht Real Estate Group, we follow these block-by-block decisions in University City and can talk through what they may mean for streets near the site. Schedule a Private Consultation.
