At the groundbreaking ceremony on February 3, 2026, with Calabasas City Manager Kindon Meik and council members David Shapiro, Alicia Weintraub, and Ed Albrecht standing beside him, developer Rick Caruso told the assembled crowd:
"We want to have our capital here. We want to be a partner here."
It was a good line for a groundbreaking. It was also, as of this writing, still just a line. If you've had a burger at HiHo Cheeseburger this year, or grabbed a table at BLVD Steak, or tried the hand rolls at KazuNori, you have almost certainly told a friend that the Commons is changing. You're right that it's changing. You're wrong about which part you ate at.
Every one of those restaurants opened inside the existing Commons at Calabasas, the same 215,000-square-foot outdoor mall that's been standing since 1998. HiHo took over the old Pick Up Stix space. BLVD Steak replaced CrossRoads, a few doors from King's Fish House. Bacio di Latte moved into what used to be Jenny's Ice Cream. Superba Food + Bread opened next to Polacheck's Jewelers back on March 28, 2025, nearly a year before anyone broke ground on anything new. That's ordinary retail turnover, the kind every shopping center does every year. It has nothing to do with Commons Lane, the actual construction project everyone means when they say "the Commons is getting a renovation."
Two Different Projects, One Address
Commons Lane is the roughly 190,000 square feet of new construction going up where the Regency movie theater used to stand. The theater closed for good at the end of December 2025, with demolition and new construction following in early 2026. According to the property's own FAQ page, the reasoning is straightforward: a movie theater made sense in 1998, before streaming reshaped how people watch things, and it no longer pencils out as a use for that land. In its place, Caruso's plan calls for 12 to 14 new shops and restaurants on the north side of the street being called Commons Lane, and 80 apartment homes on the south side, on the footprint where the theater once sat.
None of that is open. As of the current construction phase, which runs from July through September 2026, crews are still handing individual spaces over to incoming tenants so they can begin their own build-outs. That's a meaningfully earlier stage than "opening." A tenant taking possession of a shell space in September is not the same as a tenant seating customers in September. The property itself has been careful about this distinction, describing the new shops and restaurants as targeted for "about midway through the project," with the apartment building following in fall 2027.
Here's the sequence, pieced together from the city's own approval history and the developer's public statements:
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Calabasas City Council approves the redevelopment plan | December 2023 |
| Regency Cinema closes | Late December 2025 |
| Site construction begins | January 2026 |
| Official groundbreaking ceremony | February 3, 2026 |
| Tenant spaces turned over for build-out | July–September 2026 |
| First new shops and restaurants expected to open | Late 2026 |
| 80 apartment homes completed | Fall 2027 |
So if you've been telling people the new Commons has arrived, what you've actually watched is the old Commons doing what shopping centers do between leases. The new Commons, the one with your name on a waitlist for an apartment or a first look at a restaurant nobody's tried yet, is still a construction site as of late summer 2026.
Why Apartments, And Not Another Restaurant
This is the part that's easy to skip past if you're only counting new burger joints. Caruso didn't fill the old theater's footprint with more retail. He filled it with housing, and he was specific about who it's for. At the groundbreaking, he talked about residents who want to stay in Calabasas as their lives change: empty nesters ready to trade a house for an apartment, parents who want a child living nearby, people who want to downsize without leaving the community they've been part of for decades.
That's worth sitting with if you've lived here a while. Calabasas doesn't have a lot of ways for someone to do that right now. The housing stock runs heavily toward single-family homes in gated communities built for families, not toward smaller units for people at a different stage of life. Eighty apartments won't solve that on their own, but the choice to build them instead of, say, three more restaurants tells you something about which pressure the city and its biggest commercial landlord agreed was worth addressing first.
What You Can Actually Use Right Now
None of this means there's nothing happening at the Commons this season. The existing center, the one that's been open the whole time, has a full run of weekly programming through the rest of the summer:
- Live music every Thursday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., set up between Toscanova and Marmalade Cafe
- Live music again every Saturday, all summer
- A weekly kids' event every Tuesday in the Courtyard, between Marmalade Café and Toscanova
- Commons Night Out, Monday through Wednesday, with prix fixe menus at BLVD Steak, Marmalade Cafe, Superba Food + Bread, and Toscanova
That's the version of the Commons you can walk into tonight. The construction fencing around the old theater site is a different story, and it's one that won't have a next chapter for most residents until sometime after Labor Day, when the first of those 12 to 14 new tenants may start to open. Even that "late 2026" window comes from the developer's own public statements about timing, not a firm date, so treat it the way you'd treat any construction estimate: directionally right, not something to plan a dinner reservation around just yet.
What This Actually Signals
The interesting thing about a 30-year-old shopping center adding apartments instead of expanding retail is what it says about how the city sees its own future. Calabasas has never had an obvious place where residents simply gather without a reason. The lake stays behind private gates most of the year. Old Town's stretch of shops along Calabasas Road is compact. By default, the Commons has carried the weight of being the one place in the city where people from every neighborhood cross paths. Turning a corner of that property into housing, rather than into more places to shop, is a bet that the space works better with people actually living inside it than with people only passing through.
Whether that bet plays out the way Caruso described it at the groundbreaking is something residents will be able to judge for themselves once actual tenants move into actual spaces. For now, the honest version of the story is that the Commons you've been eating at all year is the same one that was always there, doing normal turnover on its own schedule, and the one everyone's actually waiting on is still behind a fence.
If you're thinking about what a changing corner of Calabasas means for your own home's value or your next move in this market, that's a conversation worth having with someone who's been watching this corridor for a long time. Valerie Punwar and her team track these shifts as part of daily business in the Las Virgenes corridor, not as a one-time news item. What's My Home Worth?
