If you've driven past Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard lately, you've heard it before you saw it: the backup beepers, the low idle of dump trucks, the particular grind of a demolition crew working through what used to be a Sears automotive bay. Ground broke on March 5, 2026, and the site has been in some state of dirt-work ever since.
The assumption a lot of neighbors made when the trucks showed up was that the mall itself was finally coming down after years of will-they-won't-they. That assumption is wrong, and the distinction matters if you're the kind of person who catches a Tuesday matinee at the Cinemark or picks up a last-minute gift at TJ Maxx. The city's own environmental review for this project draws a hard line between what's being demolished right now and what's staying put, and that line runs almost exactly where you'd hope it wouldn't: through the parking lot, not through the stores.
What's Actually Coming Down
The first phase of construction is narrower than the dust cloud suggests. According to the city's Final Environmental Impact Report for the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Master Plan, the demolition covers roughly 77,933 square feet of free-standing structures on the property, a fraction of the 42-acre site. What's on that list:
- The former Sears building and its attached automotive center
- The parking structure that served Sears
- A handful of surrounding restaurant buildings that sat near the automotive bay
That's the entire footprint of Phase 1. It's being replaced by 92 three-story townhomes running along Santa Rosalia Drive, with garages and shared courtyards, part of a first batch of homes that developer Harridge Development Group and its partners have said should be finished no later than 2029.
What the City's Paperwork Says Stays
The same FEIR is explicit on this point: the enclosed mall structure and the cinema are being retained. Not renovated later, not slated for a future phase of demolition. Retained now, as part of the plan as approved.
That means the Cinemark 15-screen XD theater, which has run since 1995 under its earlier Magic Johnson Theatres name, keeps operating through construction. TJ Maxx, the mall's last remaining department-store-scale anchor after Sears, Walmart, and Macy's all closed over the past decade, stays open. So does the annual rhythm built around the mall's public spaces: the Leimert Park Book Fair, which has used the property since 2007, and the Pan African Film Festival, which has screened films at the Cinemark for years. The Museum of African American Art, which has occupied a space inside the mall since 1976, is not on any demolition list either.
If you live in Baldwin Hills, View Park, or Windsor Hills and treat the mall as a place you actually go rather than a real estate story you read about, this is the detail that should shape how you plan the next few years. The dust is real. The mall closing is not.
The Man Who Sold Popcorn There Now Runs the Redevelopment
BHCPP's managing director, Jason Lombard, has a history with this building that predates his current title. He worked the concession stand at the Magic Johnson Theater as a young man, long before anyone put him in charge of a billion-dollar transformation plan for the same property.
"To be able to bring homeownership to the area is an important part of the project. In addition to that, being able to continue this as a regional center has always been important neighborhood-wise."
That framing, homeownership plus continuity rather than homeownership instead of the mall, is not just a talking point. It's the operating logic behind why the enclosed structure stayed off the demolition list while the parking lot didn't.
Why This Plan Survived When Three Others Didn't
This isn't the first attempt to redevelop the site, and it's worth understanding why the earlier ones collapsed before you decide this one will hold.
In April 2020, CIM Group agreed to buy the mall for more than $100 million with a plan to convert the empty Sears and Walmart buildings into office space. Community opposition killed the deal within two months, largely because the plan didn't include housing. Later that year, a proposed sale to LIVWRK and DFH Partners was scuttled in December after similar protests. Around the same time, a local investment group called Downtown Crenshaw Rising, led by developer Damien Goodman, offered to buy the mall through a community land trust structure. That bid did not move forward.
Three different ownership paths, three different outcomes, and one common thread: none of them centered homeownership for the surrounding community, and none of them survived contact with that community's response.
Harridge's plan did two things differently. It led with 92 for-sale homes as the very first phase, not a distant future promise, and it built in a commitment that 25 percent of the construction workforce come from the surrounding neighborhood. Natalie Powell, a member of the Crenshaw Manor Community Association who has attended nearly every public meeting on the project, put her reaction to the groundbreaking simply: she and her neighbors are happy the development is finally moving and are looking forward to the results. James Brumsfield, whose custom menswear shop has operated inside the mall for more than 25 years, framed the moment as change he's been waiting to see.
The Timeline, If This Is Your Neighborhood
Here's what the next several years actually look like, based on what's been publicly confirmed so far:
- Now through roughly 2028: Demolition and construction on the 92 townhomes along Santa Rosalia Drive, plus the ongoing noise and truck traffic that comes with any active job site of this size.
- By 2029: The first 92 homes are expected to be complete and occupied.
- Five to seven years from groundbreaking: The full build-out, up to 961 residential units total, a 400-room hotel, roughly 330,000 square feet of new retail and restaurant space, and an office component, is expected to be finished. That puts full completion somewhere in the early 2030s.
Public officials have described the investment in slightly different terms depending on which piece of the project they're referencing. Mayor Karen Bass called it a $90 million investment when she spoke at the March groundbreaking, a figure that appears tied to the public and infrastructure side of the deal. Developers, meanwhile, have described the entire multi-phase build-out's total price tag at closer to $1 billion. Both numbers can be true at once. One describes a slice of the funding, the other describes everything the site becomes over the next decade.
What This Means for the Neighborhood You Already Live In
Baldwin Hills has been described, accurately, as a place shaped by the mall's presence since Black families began moving into the neighborhood in the mid-1960s and made the Crenshaw Center, as it was originally called, into a cultural anchor with a Black Santa Claus tradition and dozens of Black-owned businesses as tenants. The current redevelopment is being talked about, including by the city itself, as an extension of that identity rather than a replacement for it. Whether that holds over five to seven years of construction is something residents will judge for themselves, block by block, as the townhomes go up and the rest of the plan unfolds.
For now, the practical takeaway is narrower and more useful: the movie theater is open, the book fair still has a home, and your next TJ Maxx run doesn't require a detour. The parking lot on the Sears side is a different story, and if you're heading that direction, plan for the trucks.
If you're watching how a project like this changes property values, permitting timelines, or what a home near a major redevelopment actually costs to insure and finance, that's the kind of block-by-block detail Keyholder Estates tracks across Baldwin Hills and the surrounding neighborhoods. Reach out when you're ready for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on your street, not just what's on a rendering.
