Drive down La Cumbre Road toward Foothill this month and you pass two versions of the same shopping center within about four hundred feet of each other. On one side, a line out the door of a restaurant that just opened its hundredth location anywhere in the country. On the other, a fenced-off former department store waiting on a wrecking ball. Both are La Cumbre Plaza. Neither one tells you what the place will look like in three years.
That contradiction is not confusion on your part. It is the actual shape of what is happening a few minutes from Sierra Madre Road right now. The plaza is not being redeveloped as a single project. It is being redeveloped in pieces, on different clocks, by different owners, with no shared plan tying the pieces together. Once you understand that, every future headline about the mall reads differently.
Why there is no single date for "when the mall is done"
In 2024, the City of Santa Barbara asked the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments for $1.1 million to fund a specific plan covering all 31 acres and eight parcels of La Cumbre Plaza. That money would have let the city coordinate timing, design, and traffic across every property owner at once. SBCAG declined the request. Since then, redevelopment at the plaza has moved parcel by parcel instead of block by block.
The clearest example sits on the south end, at the old Sears site. The owner of that 9.5-acre parcel filed an application in May 2025 for a 443-unit rental project called La Cumbre South, built as two four-story buildings. In November 2025, the city's Architectural Board of Review sent the design back, calling the massing "decidedly vertical" and pushing for changes that would bring the buildings closer to Santa Barbara's Spanish Colonial Revival tradition, along with a public paseo through the site. The development team said the unit count and overall site plan would stay close to what they had already submitted. Translation for anyone watching from Sierra Madre Road: the facade will keep changing through more public hearings, but the scale of the project is close to fixed.
On the north end, the 8.7-acre Macy's parcel is on a slower track, largely because Macy's lease there runs through 2028. City Councilmember Eric Friedman, whose district covers the Sierra Madre and upper State Street area, has called the overall redevelopment "as significant to our city as when La Cumbre Plaza was originally built nearly 60 years ago." That is a statement about scale, not a completion date, and it is worth reading it that way.
A third project connected to the plaza is already out of the ground. On April 22, 2026, the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara broke ground on a 45-unit affordable housing building at 15 South Hope Avenue, just off the shopping center. The building will hold 17 studios, 13 one-bedrooms, and 16 two-bedrooms for Section 8 tenants, and the Housing Authority's CEO said at the groundbreaking that the project is about building "stability, dignity, and opportunity" on that block. It is expected to open roughly 18 months out from the groundbreaking.
None of these three projects share a permit timeline, a construction schedule, or an opening date. Asking "when will the mall be done" is asking the wrong question. The better one is which parcel, on what timeline, because the answer changes depending on which corner of the plaza you mean.
| Parcel | Status as of August 2026 | What's next |
|---|---|---|
| Former Sears site (9.5 acres) | Design sent back by Architectural Board of Review, Nov. 2025 | Revised design expected at future ARB hearings; unit count near 443 |
| Macy's site (8.7 acres) | Store operating under lease | Lease runs through 2028; redevelopment tied to lease end |
| 15 S. Hope Ave (affordable housing) | Under construction since April 22, 2026 | Opening expected roughly 18 months from groundbreaking |
| Restaurant row (State Street side) | Fully open, newest tenant added July 2026 | No redevelopment application filed for this stretch |
What's actually open right now
While the Sears site sits behind fencing, the working half of the plaza just added a restaurant worth knowing about. Mendocino Farms opened in July 2026 at 3851 State Street, the former Panera Bread space next to Chipotle. The Los Angeles-based sandwich and salad chain chose Santa Barbara for its 100th location nationwide, and the company describes its approach as working with local farms and small producers where possible, with a rotating seasonal menu.
If you already know the plaza for Lure Fish House, Islands, or a Bristol Farms run before a dinner party, Mendocino Farms fills a different slot: the fast, better-than-average lunch that doesn't require sitting down for a full meal on a Tuesday afternoon.
The plaza's other reliable draw has nothing to do with any redevelopment timeline. On the third Friday of every month, from 5 to 8 p.m., Gallery Row turns a cluster of storefronts behind the Starbucks into an open house for six galleries: the La Cumbre Center for Creative Arts spaces (Elevate, The Fine Line, and Illuminations), Voice Gallery, the Museum of Tibetan Art & Culture, and Grace Fisher's Inclusive Arts Clubhouse. The walk runs through September 18, 2026, with live music and wine alongside the art. It is free, it shares a parking lot with the new Mendocino Farms, and it will keep happening on its own schedule no matter what happens to the Sears building next door.
Two trailheads that don't care about any of this
For actual time outdoors, the two closest options from Sierra Madre Road are unaffected by anything happening at the plaza, and both are worth planning around specifically in August.
- Rattlesnake Canyon Trail starts at a creek crossing off Las Canoas Road, next to Skofield Park, just past the one-lane Stanwood Bridge. It is a moderate, mostly shaded climb that follows the creek for most of its length, and it is the only front-country trail in the area that bans mountain bikes entirely, which keeps it calmer on weekend mornings. The full out-and-back to Gibraltar Road runs 4.5 to 5 miles. Turning around at the meadow shortens that to roughly 3.5.
- Jesusita Trail picks up off San Roque Road, just past the Lauro Reservoir, and climbs toward the well-known overlook at Inspiration Point. Taking San Roque Road the whole way is close to 8 miles round trip with about 1,400 feet of elevation gain. Starting instead from Tunnel Road cuts that down to roughly 3.75 miles, though you give up the ocean views on the climb.
Both trailheads sit a five to ten minute drive from most of Sierra Madre Road, and both see enough weekday use from people treating them as a regular loop rather than a special occasion.
Why the piecemeal version matters more than the finished one
The plaza's ambiguity is likely to stay ambiguous for a while. The Sears site redesign is still working through the Architectural Board of Review. The Macy's site can't move until the lease situation resolves closer to 2028. Only the Hope Avenue project has a real, dated finish line, and even that is an estimate rather than a promise. In the meantime, the working part of the plaza still functions exactly as it always has: you can get lunch at the new spot, walk Gallery Row on the third Friday, and be on a trail an hour later.
Rather than waiting for one grand reopening announcement that ties the whole 31 acres together, it makes more sense to track this parcel by parcel, because that is genuinely how it is unfolding. No single article, including this one, is going to collapse it into one date.
If you are weighing what any of this means for your own corner of Sierra Madre Road, whether that's a remodel timeline, a future sale, or just wanting a second opinion on how the neighborhood is trending, David Magid has been walking these hills and this parking lot for years and is glad to talk it through, no obligation attached.
