"Once you put up housing on any piece of commercial land, it's never going to be commercial again." That's what longtime Cambrian Park resident Peter Clarke told KQED this spring, and it's the sentence that actually explains what's happening at the corner of Union and Camden right now, four years after San Jose said yes to redeveloping Cambrian Park Plaza.
If you've driven past that same half-empty parking lot for four years, you already know that "approved" and "built" are not the same word. What's easy to miss is why the gap has lasted this long, and what's actually being decided this year isn't whether the plaza gets redeveloped. It's which pieces of the plan go up first, and which ones might never go up at all.
Approved in 2022, Still a Parking Lot in 2026
The plaza's carousel sign has marked the corner of Union and Camden since 1953, and the sign itself picked up historic status in 2016. In 2022, San Jose's City Council signed off on a plan to demolish the roughly 168,000-square-foot shopping center and replace it with a mixed-use project called Cambrian Village, spread across the site's 18 acres. The Planned Development Permit, filed as PD20-007, was approved on November 2, 2022. The carousel sign was written into the plan to survive, relocated to a spot along Union Avenue between the future apartments and senior housing.
Four years later, none of it has broken ground. The plaza is, as KQED described it this spring, still quietly doing business, storefronts open under the same covered walkway while its future sits on file at City Hall.
What Neighbors Asked For, and Almost Got
The push for a real town center didn't come from the developer. Friends of Cambrian Park, the community group that stayed engaged through years of hearings, kept pointing to the same two reference points: The Pruneyard in Campbell and downtown Los Gatos, places with sit-down restaurants and somewhere to linger, not another fast-food corridor. District 9 Councilmember Pam Foley leaned into that vision when the annexation was approved in 2022, telling San José Spotlight that she wanted a plaza where families "don't have to get in their cars and drive down to the Pruneyard, or to Los Gatos or Willow Glen."
The city also built in some protection for the plaza's current rhythm. As a condition of annexation, council members asked the developer to make sure existing uses, including the seasonal farmers market and the short-term Christmas tree lot, could keep operating in the new development once it's finished. Developers also agreed to offer relocation assistance to any business that had leased space at the plaza since 2015 or earlier.
None of that changes if the plaza gets built. It only matters once it does.
The Amendment That Actually Matters
In February 2026, the site's owner, Weingarten Nostat, Inc., with Kimco Realty listed as applicant, filed a Planned Development Permit Amendment, File No. PDA20-007-01. On paper it's a phasing request: build the housing portions of Cambrian Village first, then the retail, the hotel, and the assisted living center. According to the city's own project page, the amendment proposes no changes to the land use mix, unit counts, or total commercial square footage. Same plan, different order.
Here's what that order looks like, according to the approved 2022 entitlement:
| Component | Approved Plan |
|---|---|
| Apartments | 305 units |
| Hotel | 229 rooms |
| Assisted living | 110 beds plus 50 independent senior units |
| Single-family homes | 48 homes with 27 accessory dwelling units |
| Townhomes | 25 units |
| Open space | About 4 acres |
| Ground-floor retail/restaurant | About 51,000 square feet in the apartment building, plus roughly 4,600 square feet of commercial space in the hotel building |
Development consultant and San Jose State professor Kelly Snider told KQED this spring that the plan as approved "is not economically feasible to build," pointing to interest rates, construction costs, and shifting retail habits as the reasons large mixed-use projects across the Bay Area have stalled or been redesigned. Housing is the piece of Cambrian Village that pencils out fastest in this financing environment. Retail, a boutique hotel, and assisted living are the pieces that don't, at least not yet.
The Clock Nobody's Talking About
Separate from the phasing question, there's a harder deadline sitting underneath all of this. Permit records tracked by SJ Build show the original PD20-007 entitlement, approved November 2, 2022, was set to expire on November 2, 2026. The city has already granted a one-year extension pushing that date to November 2, 2027, described as the first of two one-year extensions the developer is allowed to request under the permit's terms.
That's not the extension making news this month. As of August 2026, The Registry reports Kimco is now seeking a four-year extension on top of the phasing change, a much longer runway than the standard one-year renewals built into the permit. Put those two filings together and the picture is a developer trying to buy both more time and more flexibility on sequence at the same time, while the entitlement clock it's currently operating under runs out this fall.
What's Still Open While Everyone Waits
Whatever happens with the amendment, the plaza hasn't gone dark. Longtime tenants have kept their doors open through years of hearings and renderings. Mary Burks, who runs the gym Lifeworx out of a plaza storefront, told CBS San Francisco back when the plan was first approved that she was excited about the changes but hoped to stay put through them. The farmers market and the seasonal Christmas tree lot that have long used the plaza's open lot are the specific uses the council told the developer to keep making room for, even after redevelopment replaces the building around them.
That continuity is worth noticing, because it's the thing residents actually interact with day to day. The renderings and permit files are abstractions. The gym and the market stalls are not.
Why Sequence Decides the Outcome
This is where Peter Clarke's warning stops sounding like generic skepticism and starts sounding like a specific, testable claim. If the amendment goes through as filed, apartments and townhomes get built on a timeline that makes financial sense right now. The retail corridor, the hotel, and the assisted living center, the pieces that were supposed to give Cambrian Park its Pruneyard moment, get pushed to a later phase that depends on construction costs and interest rates cooperating at some future point nobody can currently promise.
Snider's read on the economics and Clarke's read on the politics point at the same outcome from two different directions. One says the commercial piece is the hardest to finance. The other says once the land under it has apartments on it, there's little pressure left to ever finish the harder, less profitable half. Residents who've spent years pushing for a walkable gathering place could end up with the housing they were told would come alongside it, and still be waiting on the part they actually organized for.
None of this resolves in the next council meeting. The amendment is still in public review, the four-year extension request is still under consideration, and the November 2 deadline is close enough that something on the entitlement side is likely to move before the year ends. Whichever way the phasing question lands, it's worth watching, because it's going to shape what that corner looks like for a lot longer than the plaza itself has been sitting there waiting.
If today's plaza limbo has you wondering what it might mean for property values on your own block down the line, the Tenczar Team tracks filings like these the same way we track comps. Get Your Home's Value
