If you sat through the packed San Mateo City Council meeting on November 3, 2025, or scrolled the "Hillsdale Reimagined" website after a neighbor sent you the link, you'd be forgiven for thinking the mall you drive past every week is about to disappear. Renderings show eight and ten story buildings along El Camino Real. A resident watchdog group called Checkpoint Hillsdale has been organizing since the plans went public. The word "demolition" shows up in city planning documents.
Here's what those documents don't tell you, and what a walk through Hillsdale this month does: almost nothing about your actual routine there is changing anytime soon. The mall's future is being negotiated in hearing rooms on a timeline measured in decades. Its present is being rewritten on a much faster clock, one restaurant lease at a time. If you're trying to figure out what's actually different about Hillsdale in 2026, you're watching the wrong story if you're only watching the redevelopment.
The Slow Clock: What "Reimagined" Actually Means for Your Calendar
The city's planning application for the Hillsdale redevelopment was deemed complete on June 1, 2026. That sounds like momentum, and in bureaucratic terms it is, but it's the start of a review process, not a groundbreaking. According to the project's own FAQ, the environmental review was projected to wrap around this point in 2026, with Planning Commission and City Council hearings still expected later this year. Only after that master plan is approved would individual buildings file their own separate entitlement applications, each with its own building permits.
The project's developers, Bohannon Properties working with Sares Regis and financial partner Northwood Investors, put the first phase of construction at roughly five years out. Full buildout is projected to take about 20 years.
| When | What's Actually Happening |
|---|---|
| Now through late 2026 | Environmental review (CEQA) wraps, city hearings begin, nothing on the ground changes |
| Around 2031 | Earliest anticipated start of first-phase construction |
| Through the 2040s | Phased buildout of housing, retail, and office space, likely in stages |
That last row carries a real caution. The proposal calls for up to 1,670 housing units, roughly 1,400 as currently structured, with room to grow. Fifteen percent of the apartments would be reserved as below-market-rate units for lower-income households, with another 15 percent of for-sale townhomes set aside for moderate-income buyers. Residents who spoke at the November 2025 meeting kept bringing up a local precedent: the Bay Meadows development, a project a few minutes away that was also given a 20-year timeline a generation ago and still has unfinished blocks today. If Hillsdale follows a similar path, "20 years" could easily become 25 or 30.
Andrew Turco, a vice president at Sares Regis, offered the developers' counterargument at the meeting. Leaving half the site undeveloped once housing construction starts doesn't pencil out financially, he argued, calling it "a natural market forcing mechanism" that pushes the team to build out the full plan once it starts. Whether that logic holds for two decades is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to promise in a hearing room and hard to guarantee in a market that will shift more than once between now and 2040.
What Isn't Moving
Two of the most common resident worries have already been addressed directly, and both answers favor staying put for now. Trader Joe's, the closest thing the shopping center has to a daily-errand anchor, is confirmed to remain open through the early construction phases, according to the project's own FAQ. The Beniamino Bufano sculptures commissioned for the mall in the 1950s, a detail longtime San Mateo residents bring up more than almost anything else about the property's history, are staying too. They'll be relocated within the site rather than removed, a decision the developers describe as tied to a personal history: the Bohannon family reportedly gave Bufano studio space in the shopping center's basement while it was first being built.
If you're the kind of resident who cares whether your grocery run or your Saturday habit of walking past those sculptures survives the next few years, both are covered.
The Fast Clock: The Restaurant Turnover Already Underway
While the redevelopment paperwork moves at government speed, the actual dining lineup at and around Hillsdale has been rotating in real time.
The newest addition is Bahche, an upscale Mezze restaurant and wine bar opened by Yusuf Karadogan, who grew up in the San Mateo County restaurant industry. His late father cooked at the Michelin-recommended sister restaurants Evvia Estiatorio and Kokkari Estiatorio and later ran his own Mediterranean restaurant in San Mateo. Karadogan also created the fast-casual chain Pita Gyros, now with three locations, before turning to Bahche as the family's next venture.
A few doors down the dining map, some of the area's longer-standing names are worth revisiting if you haven't been in a while:
- Flores San Mateo has earned three Michelin Bib Gourmand mentions and pours from a bar stocked with more than 50 rare and small-batch tequilas and mezcals. Owner Luis Flores leads a complimentary tequila tasting every Thursday.
- Pausa Bar & Cookery runs a modern Italian menu built on house-made pasta, wood-fired pizza, and house-cured meats, with a dining-time policy of two hours for parties up to six and two and a half hours for larger groups, a sign of just how in-demand the tables have become.
- Luceti's has served Italian food for more than three decades, tracing its cuisine back to chef Roger Bertola, who once cooked for generals Eisenhower and Patton and founded the legendary Doro's and Ruggero's in San Francisco.
- La Lanterna, open since 2001, is still run by Executive Chef Ramon Lopez and manager Jennifer Villa-McGuffin, both veterans of Peninsula fine dining before opening their own place.
Inside the mall itself, the food court renovation that came with the North Block's redevelopment a few years back leaned heavily into Asian fare, adding a poke option and a Japanese ramen counter alongside Panda Express, plus a new entrant in Midici's pizza. That renovation, along with the Cinepolis luxury cinema and the Pinstripes bistro-bocce-bowling concept, was part of an earlier phase of change at Hillsdale entirely separate from the redevelopment now working through city hearings. It already happened. It's already open.
Why the Two Clocks Are Easy to Confuse
The confusion is understandable. Both stories involve the same property, the same ownership group, and the same word: change. But one story is a set of leases that turn over on a normal commercial timeline, the kind that would happen at Hillsdale whether or not any redevelopment plan existed. The other is a 20-year entitlement process that hasn't broken ground and, based on how long Bay Meadows took, may not look exactly like today's renderings by the time it does.
There's a fiscal detail buried in the city's own presentation that's worth sitting with if you want to understand why the pace feels slow. City staff estimate that the full built-out project would generate between $1.27 million and $2.2 million in additional annual net revenue for San Mateo's general fund, close to a 30 percent increase over what the site produces today. That's meaningful money for the city, but it's also a number that only materializes once the project is largely finished, which is exactly why nobody involved has much incentive to rush a phase before the financing, the entitlements, and the market conditions line up. Slow and eventually profitable beats fast and half-built, at least from the city's ledger.
For residents, that math is oddly reassuring. It means the version of Hillsdale you know today, parking lot, food court, Trader Joe's, Bufano sculptures and all, isn't going anywhere fast. What's actually worth paying attention to this year isn't the eight-story renderings. It's the restaurant openings, because those are the changes that are real, dated, and already on your calendar.
If you're weighing what a home near Hillsdale looks like for your own plans, whether that's staying close to a neighborhood that's clearly not standing still, or figuring out how a decades-long redevelopment might eventually shape values nearby, Luis Vasquez has been tracking San Mateo's Hillsdale corridor closely enough to separate the signal from the renderings. Reach out for a market consultation, or grab the free Buying & Selling Guide, when you're ready to talk specifics.
