Drive the corner of Cochran Street and Madera Road this month and you'll see something that hasn't been true in years: actual construction activity instead of another faded sign taped to an empty window. That distinction is worth sitting with, because a few miles away, at the Simi Valley Town Center, a much bigger promise of change is still sitting in a filing cabinet at City Hall.
Both stories have been covered as if they're moving at the same pace. They aren't. One is measured in months. The other is measured in years, and the people closest to it have said so themselves.
The corner that waited four years
The building at 20 W. Cochran Street used to be a Marie Callender's. After it closed, a group called Mad Era Brewing Company took over the lease with plans for a hometown brewery. For a while, locals tracked the progress on Facebook: building permits, a roll-up door, tile work, brewhouse equipment moving in. Then the posts stopped in May 2022, and the corner of Cochran and Madera sat vacant, the black-and-white Mad Era sign fading on the fence.
This year, a new team picked up where that one left off. Simi Valley Brewing Company is building out the same 8,400-square-foot space, this time backed by people with finished projects on their résumés: Ali Zia, a co-founder of Tarantula Hill Brewing and former Bottle & Pint executive in Thousand Oaks; Phil Adler, the restaurateur behind Freda's Pizza & Woodfired Kitchen; and Daniel Price, a brewer with more than a decade at Beachwood Brewing. The plan is a 400-seat taproom with a barbecue kitchen and a shaded patio, directly across from Costco and Chili's.
The team was targeting a June 2026 opening, with the caveat that inspections and a California ABC liquor license would decide the real date. That target has already come and gone as of this writing. If you've been checking the storefront and wondering why the doors still aren't open, that's the answer: permitting timelines rarely match press-release timelines, even for a project this far along. Watch the Instagram account for the actual date, but expect it within weeks, not another multi-year wait.
What's already open, no waiting required
While the brewery works through its final permits, other storefronts on the same stretch of town have already flipped their signs to "open."
Schatzi's Bakery & Cafe held its grand opening on July 26 in Unit 700 at the Town Center, tucked between Red Robin and California Pizza Kitchen. The menu runs pastries, coffee, matcha, and a banana pudding locals have already started talking about, with hours from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.
That's just the most visible addition. City officials used a recent economic development update to run through a longer list of businesses that opened or changed hands this year, including:
- Nectar of the Dogs, which relocated to a larger tasting room with live music and dog-friendly hours
- Pozoleria Doña Ana, expanding from its San Fernando Valley locations
- Simi Vibe, a new venue for live music and wellness events
- PC's Bar & Grill, reopened under new ownership
- Froyo & Fido and Pickle N' Play, both new to the local retail mix
City staff pointed to this churn as evidence the storefront-level economy is healthier than the empty windows along some blocks might suggest. The city issued 260 business tax certificates in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and by a follow-up report in July, industrial vacancy had eased from 9.3 percent to 8.8 percent, though it's still running well above the roughly 4.4 percent countywide average. Small spaces are filling. Big ones take longer.
The other clock: what the mall's paperwork actually says
That gap between fast and slow shows up most clearly at the Town Center itself.
SteelWave and Steerpoint Capital bought the mall in October 2024 for $38 million, inheriting a property that had lost its last anchor when Macy's closed earlier that year. Their pitch, repeated at community meetings since, is to cut the retail footprint roughly in half and replace it with housing, restaurants, and shared outdoor space. A summary of the current concept describes demolishing about 312,000 square feet of the center's roughly 594,000 total, adding 291 to 375 homes on about 15.75 acres, and building in around 42,000 square feet of new commercial space, with those figures still described as preliminary.
None of it can happen yet. The developers have filed a General Plan pre-screening request, GPPS-2025-0001, which only clears the way for the formal application, environmental review, and City Council votes still to come. At a January 2025 meeting, Steerpoint's director of leasing, Jason Jaffe, estimated construction on some pieces could begin within one to two years, with the full build-out taking five to six years. Measured from that meeting, the low end of his own construction estimate has already passed with the project still in pre-application review.
Not everyone inside the mall is cheering the timeline. Nigel Boucher, who has run the Museum of Military History rent-free inside the center for about 14 years, sits in a section slated for demolition. Annalise Lopez, who owns Ajna Urban Yoga at the Town Center, said she supports the concept but worries about "whether we can get enough foot traffic" during the years-long transition. Existing anchor tenants including Ulta Beauty, Marshalls, California Pizza Kitchen, Red Robin, and Starbucks are expected to stay in place, and possibly expand, while the rear-facing stores around the old Macy's buildings are reworked.
Two clocks, one useful habit
| Cochran Street storefronts | Town Center redevelopment | |
|---|---|---|
| Backing | Independent operators, self-financed builds | $38 million institutional purchase |
| Public process | Standard permits and inspections | General Plan pre-screening, CEQA review, council votes still ahead |
| Timeline as of August 2026 | Already open (Schatzi's) or weeks from opening (the brewery) | Still pre-application, no shovel in the ground |
| What could still slip | ABC license, final inspections | Rezoning approval, financing, tenant relocation |
The lesson isn't that one project is good and the other is bad. It's that they run on entirely different clocks, and treating a filed application with the same urgency as an open sign is how a neighborhood ends up perpetually surprised. If you've heard both stories this year and assumed the mall's transformation was just as close as the brewery's opening, the paperwork says otherwise. Steerpoint's own numbers put full completion somewhere in the early 2030s, not this year or next.
What's on this weekend, regardless of either clock
Both of those stories will keep moving at their own pace. In the meantime, the parts of Simi Valley that don't require a permit are running exactly on schedule.
- Free live music continues at the Simi Civic Center Plaza, with American Made, a tribute act, playing August 15 in the food court near the Regal Cinema
- Rancho Madera Community Park keeps its summer Movies in the Park and Music in the Park series going, with the next music date landing on the third Saturday, August 16
- For a weekend walk that has nothing to do with any of this, Corriganville Park's Loop Trail runs 1.2 miles around the sandstone outcropping at the center of the park, while the Interpretive Trail covers 1.1 miles with 20 signs placed by local Boy Scouts, a reminder that the same 246 acres once hosted more than 3,500 film and TV productions before it became a place to take the dog
None of that needs a filing number or an ABC license. It's already there, same as it's been all summer.
The corner at Cochran and Madera is the closest thing this town has to a live experiment in how fast change actually moves once it stops being a rumor. Keep an eye on when that door opens. It'll tell you more about the pace of this year than anything filed at the mall.
If you're curious how any of this is showing up in what your own home is worth this year, The Dingman Group offers a free home valuation, no obligation attached.
