Riverwalk
Mission Valley // After nearly 40 years of planning, 4,300 units of housing are finally being built on the golf course straddling the San Diego River. Here's the history of how we got here.
Once Mission Valley Center (aka Westfield Mission Valley, now just “Mission Valley”) opened in 1961, the area of Mission Valley itself became a hotbed for quickly built commercial uses. Everywhere you looked there was something new. There was Jack Murphy Stadium, and Fashion Valley, and the Town & Country Resort, and the Hazard Center - and more recently the Fenton Parkway Development, Rio Vista, and Civita.
The outlier to all this development sticks out like a sore thumb. Whether you knew it as the Mission Valley Golf Club, or the Stardust Country Club, or today as the Riverwalk, the massive 200-acre golf course straddling the San Diego River just west of Fashion Valley has somehow evaded development for nearly 80 years now.
Above: Riverwalk Golf Course aerial view, 2013. Google Earth Imagery.
That has not stopped the Levi-Cushman families, longtime owners of this property, from trying to change that. A master plan for the site, the Levi-Cushman Specific Plan, was created, approved, and entitled by the City of San Diego in 1987.
Above: Levi-Cushman Specific Plan, 1987.
And let us tell you, this 1987 plan was a doozy. “2.5 million square feet of office space, 1,000 hotel rooms, 1,235 dwelling units, and 200,000 square feet of support retail,” to be exact. Not to mention integrating a planned MTS (then MTDB) trolley extension of the Blue (now Green) line directly through it - with an below grade station to boot. And lest we forget, plans for a “theme tower” pitched as akin to the Seattle Space Needle. All surrounding a San Diego River segment that was to be channelized - not to the extent of the Los Angeles River, but far from how the San Diego River had existed before Mission Valley development began.
Above: Levi-Cushman Specific Plan, 1987.
Obviously, this plan never came to fruition. The Chevron Development Company, development partner to Levi-Cushman, moved to revise the project at some point in the early 1990’s. This scared MTDB - expecting the Levi-Cushman plan to at least be in progress by the time they were to break ground on their Mission Valley West trolley extension - enough for MTDB to draft two EIR alternatives in case the master plan did not start in time. One alternative followed Friars Road directly, while the other kept the planned Levi-Cushman alignment, but on berms and elevated along the San Diego River. As we know, the latter came to pass. In 2008, entitlements for the Levi-Cushman Specific Plan, that “contractually bound the City to allow the development to go forward if it were started within 20 years,” expired. Any potential redevelopment of the golf course site was back at square one.
Above: Levi-Cushman Specific Plan, 1987.
This did give Levi-Cushman a chance to revise their plans. Critics of the project had balked at the underwhelming amount of housing and the lackluster treatment of this segment of the river. In 2014, a new partner joined forces with Levi-Cushman, Related California, and with them came a new plan with three times the housing - although this plan has much less publicly available information about it, and did not have any legs either.
In 2017, though, Levi-Cushman announced a partnership with Houston-based real estate developer Hines. This partnership stuck, and after years of planning, the Riverwalk Specific Plan was revealed to San Diegans in 2020. This plan echoed a bit of the original impetus of the 1987 plan: mixed use housing, now 4,300 apartments in all, sandwiched between Friars Road and a trolley line with a station to boot (although this time of the infill variety). However, the south side of the plan is where the differences lie. What once was a channelized, virtually ignored river, is now a massive river park. Office space is kept to a minimum on the very southeast corner of the site.
Above: Riverwalk Specific Plan, 2020.
On September 21, 2022, the project officially broke ground. Originally the plans were to deliver the first buildings in 2025, and for the full buildout to cost $2 billion. All Hines got to, though, was $90 million’s worth of civil, utility, and road construction improvements, before putting the project on hold in May 2024 “pending an improvement in financial markets.” For over a year, the project remained dormant.
Above: Riverwalk aerial view, September 2025. Google Earth Imagery.
However, as of October 28, 2025, the Riverwalk project has officially restarted, due to securing “$380 million in construction financing” to begin “phase 1.” This first phase includes four mixed use buildings that tallies up to 721 market rate apartments, 75,000 square feet of retail space, a grocery store, and a “village green,” all scheduled to be open in 2029. The full plan build out is now quoted as costing $4 billion in total, so $380 million will only get Hines so far - but it gives the project much-needed momentum in a field where inertia is everything. It’s hard not to believe that once buildings (and transit) come online at the Riverwalk site, that more interest from developers and banks alike will follow.
Above: Riverwalk rendering. Credit Gensler
In addition to these four new buildings, The Becker, “a 190-home affordable housing community in partnership with Wakeland Housing,” began construction in July 2025.
Above: The Becker rendering. Credit MVE Architects
The timeline, constructor, and disruption to operations relating to the Green Line's planned infill trolley station lacks clarity at the moment, but its timeline was announced to have been “accelerated from a later phase thanks to a $41.1 million Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant.”
Above: Riverwalk rendering. Credit Gensler
It’s been nearly a 40 year road to get to this point, but it finally seems that construction of buildings on the site of the Riverwalk Golf Course is imminent. A mixed-use walkable new-build development - centered on a future trolley station that's just a 15 minute ride away from Downtown San Diego and just one stop away from a transit center in Fashion Valley, with buses reaching from North Park to Rancho Bernardo - is an absolute golden opportunity site for a city in San Diego desperate for new housing in walkable, connected areas. It’s exciting to see a development team that not only understands this, but is acting on it.
More info will be appended to this article as new developments occur.
SOURCES:
1987 Levi-Cushman Specific Plan: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/planning/community/profiles/missionvalley/pdf/plans/lcfull.pdf
2020 Riverwalk Specific Plan: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/dsd_pc_riverwalk_specific_plan_1.pdf
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/mar/01/start-over/
https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/37/154.html
https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/planning-commission/pdf/pcreports/pc04136.pdf
https://www.sdbj.com/real-estate/development/4b-mission-valley-project-resumes/