The Old Laguna Hills Mall Site Just Lost Its Office Towers. Here's What Replaced Them.

Drive past the corner of El Toro Road and Avenida de la Carlota and you'll still see the same thing you've seen for years: a fenced 68-acre lot, mostly flat, mostly empty, sitting across the street from City Hall like a placeholder nobody got around to filling in. The mall that used to occupy it closed at the end of 2018 and came down in 2023. Since then, the site has mostly been a rumor with a chain-link fence around it.

But the plan for what replaces it changed substantially this year, and the version most residents remember, if they remember one at all, isn't the version that's actually headed for a city council vote.

The Plan You Might Still Be Picturing

The plan the city approved back in 2022 was, by most accounts, an office-and-entertainment complex with housing attached. It called for up to 1,500 apartments spread across five complexes, a single hotel with 100 to 150 rooms, and four office buildings totaling roughly 465,000 square feet. There was a movie theater in the mix too. Retail ran around 250,000 square feet, including the restaurants that already sat along El Toro Road.

That plan sat mostly on paper. In January 2025, the developer, an affiliate called MGP Fund X Laguna Hills, LLC, asked the city to reopen negotiations. The stated reason was straightforward: market conditions had shifted enough that the 2022 numbers no longer made sense to build. The city formed an ad hoc committee that April, held an open house that August, and has spent the months since working through a revised development agreement with city staff.

The result is a plan that looks nothing like the office park with apartments that residents have been picturing.

What Changed, Side by Side

The office towers are gone. So is the theater. In their place: a second hotel, a real grocery store, and a housing mix that finally includes homes people can actually buy rather than just rent.

Why the Office Towers Got Cut

The developer's own explanation, laid out on the project's public FAQ, points to falling demand for commercial office space and a shift toward for-sale housing and different retail and entertainment patterns. Rather than build four office buildings speculatively into a market that doesn't want them, the revised plan swaps that square footage for a second hotel and more housing variety.

The two hotels, once built, will carry 239 rooms combined under two flags from the same international hospitality brand, described as complementary but distinct offerings. That's a meaningful jump in Transient Occupancy Tax revenue for a city that lost a lot of sales tax when the mall's anchor stores closed one by one between 2014 and 2018.

The city's own fiscal impact analysis, dated April 21, 2026, backs up the logic. It projects the 2022 approved plan would have generated an annual General Fund surplus of about $1.39 million. The 2026 modified plan, despite dropping the office component and trimming total housing units slightly, is projected to generate roughly $2.27 million a year, an increase of nearly $900,000, driven largely by the second hotel. A smaller, more residential-and-hospitality-focused project pencils out better for the city than the bigger, office-heavy one did.

The Park Moved to the Corner You'll Actually See

One detail easy to miss in the square-footage tallies: Village Park, the central gathering space at the heart of the whole project, has been relocated. Under the earlier plan it sat buried in the middle of the site. In the 2026 version, it's been moved to be visible from El Toro Road, adjacent to the medical center, which means it will actually register as a landmark to anyone driving by rather than something hidden behind buildings.

The architecture is getting a specific treatment too. The modified plan commits to a Spanish Colonial Revival style throughout, a choice the developer has tied directly to matching the design of City Hall, which sits right across the intersection at El Toro Road. Alongside the park, the plan adds a Festival Street built for art, music, and food truck events with festoon lighting, plus a dog park, walking paths, and small pocket parks connecting the site to the medical center, City Hall, and the Trader Joe's-anchored center to the south.

There's even a small, telling detail buried in the project FAQ about golf carts: internal streets are being designed for low speeds, and street-legal carts will be accommodated if they can safely reach the site from outside streets. It's a minor point, but it signals the kind of low-key, walkable neighborhood the developer is aiming for, a departure from the office-park feel of the earlier design.

What Doesn't Change

If you've eaten at BJ's Restaurant and Brew House, grabbed a Double-Double at In-N-Out, or ordered oysters at King's Fish House along that stretch of El Toro Road, none of that changes. Across every version of this project going back years, those three restaurants have sat outside the demolition footprint. Whatever the council decides, that corner of the site stays put.

The Timeline, If You're Tracking It

Here's where things actually stand. Since the August 2025 open house, Merlone Geier has been working with city staff and the council's ad hoc committee to finalize the terms of an amended development agreement, including the fiscal, environmental, and traffic analyses that go with it. As of the developer's most recent public update in May, the project was expected to come before the city council for a vote sometime in June or July of 2026, a window that has already closed as of this writing. Whether that vote happened on schedule, slipped, or already produced a decision isn't something the public record shows yet, so the city's own project page is the place to check for the outcome.

Once a vote does happen, the project still needs another 6 to 12 months for site development and building permits before the first phases of construction can start. The developer has said that if approval comes this summer, the goal is to have one of the two hotels open for business by 2028, timed to the Los Angeles Olympics that year. That's an ambitious target for a site that's been sitting empty since 2018, but it gives residents a concrete marker to watch for rather than another vague "coming soon."

Where Laguna Hills Is Already Gathering This Summer

Village Park doesn't exist yet, but the instinct behind it, a free public place for the city to gather, already has a stand-in. The city's Summer Concert Series has been running since June, moving between Gallup Park and the Community Center on Alicia Parkway depending on the week. The lineup has included Wayward Sons and Surf City All Stars at Gallup Park, and, most recently, Redneck Rodeo at Gallup Park on August 7 and ACME Time Machine at the Community Center on August 14.

It's a small thing, but the pattern says something: long before any ribbon gets cut on a Festival Street or a relocated Village Park, Laguna Hills already gathers on summer evenings with a blanket and a folding chair. The redevelopment isn't inventing that instinct. It's trying to give it a permanent address.

Whatever shape the Village at Laguna Hills eventually takes, its ripple effects on housing demand, hotel traffic, and daily patterns along El Toro Road are worth watching closely if you live nearby or are thinking about a move within the area. If you want a read on how projects like this tend to shift home values in the neighborhoods around them, or you're weighing your own next move in Laguna Hills, Mike Doyle can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground, not just what's on the renderings.