Tanforan Is Mostly Empty. Here's What San Bruno Gets to Keep.

When you park at The Shops at Tanforan this month, which of your stops will still be there in five years? The city's October 20, 2026 Planning Commission staff report calls the mall "mostly vacant." The exceptions it names are Target, the Cinema, BJ's Restaurant, Planet Fitness, and several smaller stores and restaurants.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities wants to replace the enclosed mall with a 44-acre transit village. Its plan treats the busiest survivors as fixed points. Target and the theater would stay and be renovated. Two of the site's historical markers would move into its new main pedestrian area. The redevelopment is laid out around the pieces of Tanforan that still pull people in.

How the mall got to "mostly vacant"

Tanforan's decline happened one anchor at a time. SFGATE's October 26 report lists the losses. Sears announced its Tanforan closure in 2019. JCPenney, one of the last holdouts, shut in 2025. Barnes & Noble closed earlier this year.

San Bruno City Council member Marty Medina put the decline in revenue terms. He told SFGATE: "This is a big space that was providing tax revenue for decades, and it's dried up." Once the major tenants went bankrupt, he said, the mall "kind of took on a death spiral."

The businesses that outlasted that spiral are mostly ones you can't easily get online: a big-box store for weekly errands, a movie theater, a sit-down restaurant and a gym. The mall's own directory lists the theater as Century Theatres and the restaurant as BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse.

What the plan keeps, moves and adds

The city staff report describes the project in detail. Here is how each familiar piece of the site fares under the proposal.

Today the site is one large building surrounded by surface lots and three parking structures. The plan swaps that for a tree-lined grid of streets with sidewalks connecting El Camino Real, Huntington Avenue and Sneath Lane. A pedestrian-scale retail village at the core would tie "the existing Target, Cinema and adjacent BART station into the heart of the project site," in the staff report's words.

Homes would rise on the parcels north of the retail village. Offices would go near the Interstate 380 off-ramp. The remaining edges are "Flex Zones" that could hold housing, retail, a hotel or offices, depending on market conditions. Christian Gunter, a senior vice president at Alexandria, explained the appeal of the site at an October 20 meeting, as SFGATE reported: "It's not often you get 44 acres connected by three major highways, BART on-site, Caltrain down the street, and SFO around the corner."

At least 15% of the homes must be affordable. SFGATE reports that roughly 268 of the up to 1,500 units would be, which is more than that minimum. The Bay Area Council called the project San Bruno's best bet for meeting its state mandate to plan for 3,165 new homes by 2031 under the city's 2023 to 2031 Housing Element.

The landmarks move toward the people

Before 1971, when the mall opened, the land was a horse racetrack for around seven decades. Over the years it was also an army airfield, a golf course and, during World War II, a detention center for Japanese Americans. The mall got a major renovation in 2005.

The plan relocates two reminders of that history, the Seabiscuit statue and the Tanforan Assembly Center Commemorative Garden with its memorial plaque. Both would move into the retail village, which the staff report calls the "primary pedestrian area of the project." In practice, the markers people mostly pass on the way to the parking lot would end up where the foot traffic is.

The Tanforan Memorial outside San Bruno BART is a separate site. SFGATE described it in July 2025. The names of 7,984 Japanese Americans who were forced to live on the site are etched in metal there. A bronze statue shows two sisters, 3-year-old Hiroko Mochida and 6-year-old Miyuki Hirano, as Dorothea Lange photographed them. A committee began work on the memorial in 2012 and unveiled it about a decade later. Inside the station, a BART informational exhibit pairs Lange's photographs with photojournalist Paul Kitagaki's portraits of the same people later in life.

A representative for Alexandria told SFGATE that access to the memorial will stay unimpeded under current plans, and will even improve.

The construction years, as currently estimated

San Bruno Community Development Director Peter Gilli and SFGATE have described a phased schedule. All of these dates are estimates and depend on final approval:

1. End of 2027 at the earliest: demolition of the mall could begin.
2. 2028: the first phase of building construction could start.
3. Near the end of 2030: the second phase could begin.

That puts several years of active construction next to the BART station, the police station and nearby homes. The project's Final Environmental Impact Report, released October 5, 2026, rates the noise and air-quality impacts "significant and unavoidable." Heidi Mekkelson, a senior managing director at ICF, the consulting group that prepared the report, said at the October 20 meeting, as SFGATE reported, that such impacts "result mainly from the scale of the project and the duration of construction."

The report's listed mitigations include clean diesel construction equipment and dust controls. Crews would also have to put up a temporary noise barrier whenever nighttime work happens within 500 feet of a home.

Not everyone thinks that goes far enough. The nonprofit Climate Resilient Communities pointed out that the area already has more exposure to diesel particulate matter than 84% of California census tracts. It asked the city and developer to supply nearby households with portable HEPA air purifiers, indoor air monitors and N95 masks. The Federal Aviation Administration raised a different concern. The site is 0.7 miles from San Francisco International Airport, and FAA Regional Administrator Raquel Girvin wrote that housing there would be "a new incompatible residential land use" in an area already affected by SFO arrivals and departures.

Airport compatibility also figures in the approvals. One of the actions the City Council must take is an override of the Airport Land Use Commission's consistency determination.

What still has to happen

The city has been working on this for four years. Alexandria filed its preliminary application on October 5, 2022, and the city went on to hold 19 community open houses, along with surveys and joint study sessions. The Planning Commission took up the project on October 20, 2026, then continued the hearing to a special meeting on October 26.

The commission's role is to make a recommendation. The City Council makes the final decision, and the staff report lists what that requires:

• Certifying the Final EIR and adopting its CEQA findings, monitoring program and statement of overriding considerations
• Approving the Water Supply Assessment
• Amending the General Plan, rezoning part of the site from Regional Commercial to Transit Oriented Development
• Adopting the Planned Development zoning, Development Plan and Development Agreement
• Acting on the Vesting Tentative Map
• Approving the Airport Land Use Commission override

Hearing dates and packets are posted on the City of San Bruno's agenda center, and public comment is part of each hearing. Until demolition starts, Target, the Century cinema, BJ's and Planet Fitness carry on inside a mall the city describes as mostly vacant. Under the plan, two of those four would become the center of what replaces it.

If you own a home within walking distance of Tanforan and wonder how a years-long build next to BART fits into your own plans, Nick Villanueva can go through the project timeline with you alongside a current valuation of your property. Start with Get Your Instant Home Valuation, and we can talk through the details from there.