Lakewood Center's Redevelopment Quietly Started With a Parking Vote, Not the Sale

On an April Tuesday night, the Lakewood City Council chamber held its usual crowd of maybe a dozen people, plus staff. An ordinance was read by title. A traffic consultant walked through a parking analysis. The council voted 4 to 1, and everyone went home. No press release went out. No headline ran in a business journal.

Compare that to August of the year before, when the sale of Lakewood Center made real estate trade publications from coast to coast. A joint venture of Pacific Retail Capital Partners, Lyon Living, and Silverpeak paid $332.1 million for the 2 million square foot mall, and the new owners talked about wellness amenities, elevated dining, and a next generation mixed use destination. That was the story everyone in Lakewood heard about, because it came with a number attached and a press release built for pickup.

The April vote is the one that actually did something. Ordinance No. 2026-1 reset the city's parking requirements for the Lakewood Center superblock, and it's the first concrete regulatory step toward whatever comes next at the mall most Lakewood residents pass on the way to Costco or Home Depot without a second thought.

Why a Parking Number Is the Real News

A regional mall built in the early 1950s was designed around a very different assumption than a mixed use district built today. Acres of surface parking sat empty for most of the week, held in reserve for the handful of peak shopping days a year, because the zoning code required it. That's not a criticism of the original design. It's just how postwar retail worked, and it's exactly the kind of requirement a developer has to unwind before any of that surface lot can become housing, green space, or anything else.

The April ordinance set a new standard of 3 spaces per 1,000 square feet for the Lakewood Center superblock. For the adjacent Candlewood shopping area, the council set a separate 5.25 per 1,000 standard.

That gap between 3 and 5.25 is the tell. It's not a uniform citywide policy change. It's a number calibrated specifically to let Pacific Retail start drawing a master plan for the mall property without every acre of parking locked in place by an old code. As traffic consultant Jason Mahershaw of Kimley Horn put it to the council, "We're not asking for a 2.43 parking ratio because we understand models could have some inaccuracies. We think 3 is a reasonable number to ask for." That's the sound of an entitlement process actually moving, phrased in the driest language a city council meeting can produce.

The Fight Over Candlewood

The vote wasn't unanimous, and the dissent tells its own story. Before the 4-1 vote, someone brought a substitute motion to carve North of Candlewood out of the new standard entirely, effectively asking the council to protect that area's existing parking requirements rather than fold it into the broader reset. The substitute failed, and the ordinance passed covering both the mall superblock and the adjacent shopping center.

That failed carve-out is worth sitting with for a second. Somebody on the council, or someone advising the council, thought the neighbors closest to Candlewood had a case for being treated differently, likely tied to concerns about parking spillover once construction on the mall side gets underway. The fact that the carve-out didn't survive doesn't mean the concern was baseless. It means the council decided a unified standard across both parcels made more sense for the master planning process than a patchwork of exceptions.

What Hasn't Changed Yet

None of this means residents should expect visible construction anytime soon. Nothing about the April ordinance triggers a demolition permit or a groundbreaking. What it does is remove one of the regulatory obstacles that would otherwise sit in the way of a master plan submission. Pacific Retail and its partners still have to design that plan, bring it back through the city's review process, and secure whatever additional approvals a project of this scale requires. The original announcement of the sale gave no construction timeline, and nothing since has changed that.

For anyone shopping at the mall's anchors this fall, the practical reality looks like this:

• Costco, Target, Macy's, and the mall's other current tenants are operating as they always have, with no announced closures tied to the redevelopment.
• The parking ratio change affects future construction requirements, not current parking availability on the lot today.
• No design renderings, tenant list, or construction timeline has been released publicly since the original acquisition announcement.
• The next visible milestone will likely be a master plan submission to the city, which is a separate and later step than the April ordinance.

Why the City Cares This Much

Lakewood Center isn't just another retail property to the city. It's the region's leading sales tax generator, according to the acquisition announcement, and it draws more than 22 million visitors a year, a figure that ranks it third in California and sixth nationally for mall traffic. The property still generates over $1 billion in annual sales despite being, in the new owners' own framing, an aging asset that no longer fit into Macerich's portfolio strategy. Nearly 150 acres of centrally located land in a city built around this mall since before Lakewood's 1954 incorporation is not a small thing to re-plan, and the city's willingness to move a parking ordinance through in April signals it wants to be an active partner in that process rather than a bystander waiting on someone else's design work.

What to Watch Next

The parking ordinance is a procedural unlock, not a blueprint. The actual shape of what replaces some of that surface parking, whether that's housing, a plaza, restaurant space, or something else entirely, still depends on a master plan that hasn't been made public. What residents can reasonably expect between now and whenever that plan surfaces is more of what just happened in April: quiet council votes on the technical prerequisites, each one a small, specific move that only makes sense once you know what it's clearing the way for.

If the pattern holds, the next real news out of Lakewood Center won't come with a splashy press release either. It'll show up as another item on a council agenda that most people scroll past, and it'll matter a lot more than it looks like it does.

If you live near Lakewood Center and you're curious about how a project of this size could eventually shape property values or plans on your own street, that's exactly the kind of local question worth talking through with someone who's watching it closely. Gina Oddo would be glad to walk through what's on the horizon. Let's Connect.