Every Friday morning, folding tables go up in a parking lot on Avenida de la Carlota that used to belong to Macy's. Vendors set out California-grown produce, honey, baked goods, and Bolivian empanadas from a vendor known as Cali Pie Guy while shoppers push strollers past a chain-link fence marking the edge of a construction site. The market runs rain or shine every Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., one of eight certified farmers markets the Orange County Farm Bureau operates across the county.
On the other side of that fence sits the reason Laguna Hills has spent the better part of a decade being described as a city waiting for something to happen. The old Laguna Hills Mall closed for good on December 31, 2018, and the building came down in 2023. What's supposed to replace it, a 68-acre project called Village at Laguna Hills, is still working its way through City Hall in 2026, more than a decade after Merlone Geier Partners bought the land in 2013 for a reported $110 million.
Here's the part that doesn't show up in most coverage of the redevelopment. The gathering place that plan is trying to build already exists, just not on that particular 68 acres. It's a few blocks up the road at a brewery that opened this spring, next door to a bar concept finishing its buildout, and inside a restaurant with a patio that looks straight at Saddleback Mountain. Laguna Hills didn't wait for the mall. It built its own center of gravity somewhere else first, and the city's own revised plan for the mall site is quietly catching up to that fact.
What's actually approved, and what isn't yet
Start with the numbers, because they show how much runway this project still has. The Laguna Hills City Council approved entitlements for Village at Laguna Hills back in 2022, adopting a Development Agreement to govern the build-out. That version called for around 1,500 residential units, a movie theater, office buildings, retail, and a hotel spread across the old mall footprint at the interchange of I-5 and El Toro Road.
Then, on January 6, 2025, the developer asked to change nearly all of it. City Council directed staff to begin reviewing those modifications on August 26, 2025, and by this spring the shape of the new plan was public. The cinema is gone. A large chunk of the planned office space is gone too. In their place: a second hotel, a specialty grocer, and a reworked layout that shrinks retail to roughly 150,000 square feet arranged around what the developer now calls Village Park, relocated so it faces El Toro Road and sits next to the medical center rather than tucked behind other buildings. The revised plan trims the unit count slightly, from 1,500 to 1,456, but diversifies the mix beyond rental apartments to include for-sale townhomes and single-family detached homes. An April 2026 fiscal impact analysis submitted to the city projects the modified plan will generate 25 percent fewer daily traffic trips than the 2022 version, largely because it drops the theater and office space that would have pulled commuters and moviegoers in from outside the city.
None of it has broken ground. The project's own FAQ page put the goal for finishing the approval process at the end of 2025 or early 2026, with another six to twelve months needed after that just to get building permits before construction on the first phase could start. Anyone who has watched an Orange County entitlement process knows how often those timelines slip. Drive past the site today and you'll see the same fenced lot that's been sitting there since demolition wrapped in 2023.
Three blocks away, it's already happening
While City Hall works through modification number two, a different kind of gathering place has assembled itself along Avenida de la Carlota without anyone calling it a master plan.
In February, Docent Brewing announced it was taking over the former GameCraft Brewery space at 23301-C Avenida de la Carlota, its fourth location after San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, and Carlsbad. Co-founders Brian Hendon and Bryan Giesen were targeting a May 1 opening, bringing a beer list that includes Double Nickels, a pale ale that won gold at the 2024 World Beer Cup, alongside a food menu of Korean Reubens, smash burgers, and bowls that has already built a following at the brand's other South OC locations.
A few doors down at 24781 Alicia Parkway, Cory Danger and Matt Sharp are finishing out Bardega, a concept they describe as part bar, part market, part restaurant, built for a crowd that doesn't drink the way bars used to assume everyone does. Danger told the Orange County Register that "the palette for drinkers is changing," pointing to rising demand for lower-ABV and zero-proof options alongside a full deli case. Bardega is set to open this fall.
Down the street, Ironwood has staked out its own version of a gathering spot: a New American restaurant with a full bar, an open kitchen, and an enclosed, heated patio that looks out at the Saddleback Mountains, the kind of view that turns an ordinary Tuesday dinner into something closer to an occasion. Over at Laguna Hills Inn, public filings suggest a hotel restaurant called Tiller House is somewhere in the plan review pipeline as well, though the ownership group hasn't confirmed when, or whether, it will open.
The businesses that never left
None of this happened in a vacuum. The restaurants sitting closest to El Toro Road, at the edge of the old mall, kept serving customers through demolition, redesign, and two rounds of plan revisions. King's Fish House has anchored the corner since 1997, still running a menu of fresh oysters and seasonal catches that changes daily. Habana has poured Cuban-inspired cocktails since 1995. Mint Desi Craft Kitchen has built a following for Indian and Pakistani cooking since 2016. Whatever eventually rises on the 68 acres behind them, these three didn't need a master plan to find customers. They found them years ago and never lost them.
Why the sequence matters
Put these two stories side by side and the revised city plan starts to look less like a bold new vision and more like an admission. The 2022 version of Village at Laguna Hills bet on a cinema to pull people toward its central park, the standard anchor-tenant logic that's driven American mall redevelopment for years. The 2026 version drops the cinema entirely and leans instead on restaurants and a grocer arranged around outdoor space, the same formula Docent Brewing, Bardega, and Ironwood have already proven works on a smaller scale a few blocks away, without waiting on permits, entitlements, or a Development Agreement amendment.
That's less a coincidence than a market signal. Laguna Hills residents have shown, through where they actually spend their Friday mornings and Saturday nights, that what draws them out isn't a movie screen. It's a beer they trust, a market with produce picked that week, a patio with a mountain view instead of a freeway one. The city's traffic engineers and fiscal analysts eventually arrived at a conclusion the neighborhood had already reached on its own, years earlier, one lease at a time.
What this means if you live here now
None of this changes what to do this weekend. The farmers market runs every Friday morning at the old Macy's lot, rain or shine. Docent Brewing is pouring now on Avenida de la Carlota. Bardega should have its doors open by the time the weather turns this fall. If you want a table with a view, Ironwood's patio faces the mountains rather than the interstate.
What it does change is how to read the fenced lot behind that market. It isn't a countdown to some grand opening that will finally hand Laguna Hills a gathering place. That gathering place already exists, scattered across a half mile of Avenida de la Carlota and Alicia Parkway, built by people who didn't wait for the entitlement process to catch up to them. When Village Park eventually opens, whenever that turns out to be, it will be stepping into a role the neighborhood already assigned to somewhere else.
For residents watching how Laguna Hills is reshaping itself one lease and one City Council meeting at a time, Shannon Parks tracks these shifts as they happen, not just when they show up in a listing description. Let's Connect if you want the long view on what's actually changing in South Orange County.
