How many times can you drive past a chain-link fence before you stop noticing it's there? On Del Cerro Boulevard, right at Madra Avenue, that fence has been up long enough to answer the question for you. Anyone who has lived here since 2022 has watched two buildings sit empty behind it, first quietly, then not so quietly, while a mixed-use project that was supposed to replace them has changed owners without changing much else.
Here's what's actually been happening on that corner, and why the neighborhood's most visible construction story isn't the one that's moved the needle.
What Used to Be There
Before the fence went up, the corner held two working businesses. One building was home to Madra Liquor & Deli, where Oscar Ramos had worked for nearly 25 years. The other housed a gym, Define U Fitness. A third tenant in the same commercial stretch, Coar Design Group, turned out to be the architecture firm behind the very project that would displace it.
In 2022, developer Jeff Katz of Tapestry Development Company announced plans to demolish both buildings and put up a mixed-use development with more than 100 apartment units. Katz told ABC 10News he'd given tenants a heads up nearly three years before formal notice went out, and leases were set to terminate that November 30. Ramos, for his part, said he'd miss the customers he'd come to think of as family.
The buildings emptied out on schedule. What didn't happen, on any schedule, was construction.
The Permits Ran Out Before the Building Came Down
For roughly three years, the two vacant structures just sat there behind Katz's original plans. Then, according to a July 2025 update from the volunteer group Friends of Del Cerro, the building permits for what locals had started calling "the megastructure" expired that June, without a shovel ever hitting the ground.
In the gap between demolition announcement and actual demolition, people started living inside the empty buildings. Friends of Del Cerro asked the city on residents' behalf whether the structures could simply be leveled, both to stop the ongoing issue of people sheltering inside them and to remove what the group called an eyesore on the boulevard. Neither happened right away. The buildings stayed up, the fence stayed up, and the corner stayed exactly as unresolved as it had been the year before.
A New Owner, Same Plan, Still No Date
The site changed hands in 2025. Jakob Ventures, a San Diego-based family investment firm, acquired the property from Jeff Katz Architecture, and by July 2026 the new owner was ready to talk about what comes next.
Kevin Woo, Jakob Ventures' co-founding principal, told Times of San Diego that the mixed-use vision hasn't changed, describing the goal as turning "a long-vacant, underutilized site into a thoughtfully designed mixed-use community" with housing aimed at middle-income buyers alongside neighborhood-serving retail. He said the firm submitted a building permit application in December and has since received the city's first round of review comments, with architects and engineers now working through those comments while coordinating with SDG&E and a set of civil, structural, electrical, and stormwater consultants.
What Woo couldn't offer was a start date. He said one isn't possible until the engineering and permitting work is farther along. Before finalizing plans, Jakob Ventures met with Friends of Del Cerro, the community group Voice of Del Cerro, local business owners, and District 7 Councilmember Raul Campillo, and presented to the Navajo Community Planners, the advisory body that reviews land use proposals for Del Cerro and its neighboring communities. That outreach is now on the record, though it hasn't yet produced a construction timeline residents can circle on a calendar.
The Guardrail Got Fixed While the Building Didn't
While the boulevard's biggest project stalled, the smaller fixes kept happening, just not from the direction most people would expect. Friends of Del Cerro has spent the past couple of years filing requests through the city's Get It Done app, the same portal any resident can use to flag a broken sign or an overgrown median. In one recent stretch, the group submitted more than 25 requests in a single month. Several were completed:
- Two street signs replaced
- Palm trees trimmed on the west side of College Avenue near the I-8 westbound offramp
- A guardrail repaired near 6729 Del Cerro Boulevard
- Weed abatement at St. Therese Way and St. Denis Terrace
None of that required a developer, a permit application, or a construction crew. It required volunteers noticing a problem and submitting it through the same app available to anyone with a phone.
The city's own infrastructure work has followed a similarly modest, steady pace. Street resurfacing on the west side of College Avenue has worked its way through Arno Drive, Helena Place, Genoa Drive, Capri Drive, and Rockhurst Drive, with the surrounding blocks slurry sealed in the months before. It's not glamorous work, and nobody's writing headlines about repaved cul-de-sacs. But it's visible, it's finished, and it happened on a timeline the megaproject still can't match.
The Signature Drive Nobody's Rushing
The most ambitious thing Friends of Del Cerro has taken on isn't a pothole or a palm tree. It's a years-long effort to establish the Enhance Del Cerro Maintenance Assessment District, a mechanism that would let property owners pay an annual fee dedicated specifically to local upgrades, the kind of median landscaping and entrance signage the city's general fund doesn't stretch to cover.
As of an April 2026 report from FOX 5 San Diego, organizers needed roughly 900 signatures from Del Cerro's approximately 2,800 property owners just to trigger a public vote on whether to create the district. FODC president Mark Allan put the city's funding gap plainly, telling FOX 5 that the city "doesn't have any money" for the kind of upkeep an assessment district could pay for directly. An engineer's report the group commissioned in 2024 put the total estimated cost of proposed projects at nearly $750,000, which would work out to an annual fee of around $240 per property owner.
Not everyone's on board. Longtime resident Joe Ney has opposed the idea for more than two decades, having helped defeat a similar proposal in the early 2000s, and he's still asking the same question out loud: what exactly would residents get for that money, and how would it be tracked. Allan's answer is that every dollar would be recorded by the engineer and the city, restricted to Del Cerro's own medians, entrances, signs, and parks rather than folded into the citywide budget.
Neither side has settled it yet. The petition is still short of the signatures it needs, and the vote it would trigger hasn't been scheduled.
What This Adds Up to on the Boulevard Today
Walk or drive that stretch of Del Cerro Boulevard this month and you'll see the same fenced lot that's been there since 2022, now with a second owner's name attached to the same unbuilt plan. A few blocks over, you'll see a guardrail that got fixed, palm trees that got trimmed, and street signs that got replaced, all because a group of residents filed the paperwork themselves. And somewhere in a filing cabinet at Friends of Del Cerro, a signature count is inching toward the number that would finally put a maintenance district in front of voters.
The corner that gets the attention isn't the one that's actually changing. The one that is runs through an app most people have never opened.
Julie Rose lives in Point Loma, not Del Cerro, but she keeps an eye on how neighborhoods like this one move, both the parts that make headlines and the parts that don't. If you're watching this corner too, or you've got a question about what a stalled project like this means for property nearby, Point of View Properties is a good place to start that conversation. Let's Connect.
