Crenshaw Boulevard Construction, Untangled: One Project Has a Deadline, One Doesn't
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Dr. John Hardy has run his veterinary practice on Crenshaw Boulevard since 1966. One morning, without warning, he arrived to find his parking lot wrapped in chain fencing. No notice, no explanation, just an obstacle where his elderly clients used to park before carrying sick animals inside. He told the story at a packed town hall on July 30, and the parking lot has stayed fenced off since 2021.
Just up the same boulevard, a different construction crew broke ground in March with a mayor, a council president, and a press release promising the opposite experience: a bulldozer, a completion date, and a plan residents could actually watch unfold. If you live in View Park and use Crenshaw regularly, you are watching two enormous projects happen at once, and they are not experiencing time the same way.
The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza redevelopment and Destination Crenshaw sit on the same stretch of the K Line corridor, but they are separate undertakings with separate funders, separate timelines, and, as it turns out, separate relationships with the calendar. The mall sits at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Crenshaw, near its own K Line station. Destination Crenshaw runs about 1.3 miles farther south along Crenshaw Boulevard, from Sankofa Park by the Leimert Park Metro station down to I Am Park at Slauson Avenue, with pocket parks and murals planned at four points along the way, according to the project's own design documentation.
Both are described by their backers as investment in South Los Angeles. Only one of them is currently the subject of a formal letter demanding accountability.
Harridge Development Group broke ground on Phase 1 of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza redevelopment on March 5, with Mayor Karen Bass, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and Councilwoman Heather Hutt on site. The scope is not modest. Developer CEO David Schwartzman put the overall price tag at $1 billion across the mall's 42-acre footprint, and the city's own environmental review lists the full buildout at roughly 331,838 square feet of added retail and restaurant space, 143,377 square feet of office space, a 400-room hotel, and 961 residential units, per the Los Angeles Department of City Planning's environmental impact report.
Phase 1 alone is a demolition of the former Sears building and the construction of 92 townhomes along Santa Rosalia Drive, part of a 290-unit block where 10 percent will be set aside for households earning between 60 and 80 percent of area median income. Organizers told ABC7 the project would take about six years, and a separate report put the 92 homes on track to be finished no later than 2029. Schwartzman also committed to sourcing 25 percent of his construction workforce locally, telling reporters at the groundbreaking, "some of the people you hire will become your buyers."
What stays open during all of this matters as much as what's coming down. The demolition targeted the Sears building, its parking structure, and the strip of detached buildings mall staff call restaurant row. TJ Maxx remains the mall's operating anchor, alongside Albertson's, Foot Locker, and the Cinemark theater, and the smaller retail units and the Magic Johnson Theatre were spared from the current phase of demolition.
Destination Crenshaw broke ground more than six years ago, on February 29, 2020. It was supposed to open in 2023. That slipped to fall 2024. It is still under construction in August 2026, and residents are no longer being patient about it.
On July 30, a coalition calling itself "Keep the Promise, Destination Crenshaw" packed Bethesda Temple Church for a town hall moderated by KBLA Talk 1580's Tavis Smiley. He opened by asking the question that has followed the project for years: "Where did all the money go?" according to reporting from LA Focus News.
What followed was two hours of testimony that reads less like a public art update and more like a grievance hearing:
Pastor Kyron Shorter, who represents Bethesda Temple Church and helped organize the meeting, summed up the frustration with the project's own language: "it's been 90% complete for two years." Six days later, on August 5, a coalition of residents and business owners delivered a formal letter to Harris-Dawson demanding the project be finished within a year, that a public construction timeline be established, and that a Business Interruption Relief Fund be created for merchants and property owners who've absorbed years of lost foot traffic, according to the Los Angeles Wave.
Destination Crenshaw's chief of staff, Terrii Young, told reporters construction is moving forward to complete the final phase of work at Sankofa Park and that crews are working to start construction at the Crenshaw Wall.
Here is the part that actually matters if you live nearby and are trying to figure out how long the disruption on either end of this corridor will last: the mall redevelopment has enforceable delivery gates written into its city approval. Ten percent affordable set-asides, a hiring quota, a phased build sequence tied to specific parcels. Those numbers are not marketing copy. They're conditions the developer has to meet to keep its entitlements.
Destination Crenshaw does not have an equivalent mechanism. It has a scope, a design, and a series of verbal assurances that the project is nearly finished, repeated for two years without a binding date attached. That is the actual difference between the corridor's two most disruptive projects right now. It isn't the size of the investment or the good faith of the people running it. It's whether there's a document somewhere that says what happens if the deadline slips again.
Expect the mall site to stay a construction zone through at least 2029 for Phase 1, with the broader 42-acre buildout stretching five to seven years total. Expect Destination Crenshaw's Sankofa Park work to continue, with Crenshaw Wall construction starting soon per the project's own statement, though "soon" has not historically meant much on this corridor.
One date is fixed regardless of either project's status. Taste of Soul LA returns to Crenshaw Boulevard on October 17, 2026, closing the street between Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Leimert Park Village for what organizers expect to be more than 300,000 attendees in a single day. The K Line stop at Leimert Park Village will be the easiest way in. If you're planning around either construction project, plan around that closure too.
If you're watching either project from a home in View Park, the practical read is simple. The mall's disruption has an expiration date attached to specific milestones you can track. Destination Crenshaw's does not, at least not yet, though the August 5 letter is the first real pressure campaign aimed at changing that. Whichever one affects your commute more, the corridor is not going back to how it looked in 2020, and neither project shows signs of slowing down.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for property values or timing a move in View Park, that's a longer conversation, and it's one Greg Jones has been having with neighbors on this corridor for decades. Schedule a free consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
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