The Empty Sears At Los Cerritos Center Was Supposed to Become Apartments. Cerritos Approved a Golf Simulator Instead.

Drive past Los Cerritos Center this month and the fence line looks different. The two-story Sears building that anchored the mall's south end, empty since December 2018, came down in June. For most of the last two years, the story around town was that whatever replaced it would have a roof over people's heads, not over a batting cage.

That's not what got approved.

What everyone assumed was coming

By late 2025, city staff were already talking publicly about a mixed-use future for the old Sears parcel. At an October 2025 Economic Development Commission meeting, staff described early conversations with Macerich, the mall's owner, about a concept that paired retail with a hotel and roughly 375 market-rate residential units, the kind of density state housing law increasingly pushes cities to find room for. Cerritos needs to plan for 1,908 new housing units under its current housing element, and the Sears site had been floated as one place to put a meaningful chunk of them.

If you'd heard anything about the Sears redevelopment before this year, that's probably the version you heard. Apartments over retail, maybe a boutique hotel, a way to turn a dead department store into density the city is required to plan for anyway.

What actually got approved

On July 27, 2026, the Cerritos City Council took a different path. It approved plans for a 141,630-square-foot, two-story Dick's House of Sport on the 4.65-acre Sears parcel, one of the first House of Sport locations in California. The concept isn't a traditional sporting goods store. It comes with an indoor climbing wall, golf simulator bays, HitTrax batting and pitching cages for baseball and softball, and an outdoor athletic field with synthetic turf and a perimeter running track, built for demonstrations and community use rather than just retail display.

No housing. No hotel. Just one of the largest experiential retail concepts Dick's Sporting Goods has built, going into a box that sat vacant for roughly seven and a half years.

Here's the two paths side by side, since the contrast is the whole story:

Plans can still shift before a shovel hits dirt, and Cerritos still has to find room for its state-mandated housing allocation somewhere. But for this specific 4.65 acres, the housing conversation appears to have lost out to a retail bet.

Why a mall owner chose rooftracks over rooftops

The decision makes more sense once you know Macerich's history with this particular building. Sears closed the location in December 2018 as part of a nationwide 142-store closure. For years afterward, Macerich only controlled half the real estate under it, splitting ownership with Seritage Growth Properties, the entity Sears spun off to hold its real estate. That joint structure is a common reason vacant anchor boxes sit untouched for so long: neither partner can move without the other agreeing.

Macerich bought out Seritage's remaining 50 percent stake in five former Sears boxes, including the one at Los Cerritos Center, giving it full control of the parcel. That gave the company room to redevelop on its own timeline rather than negotiate every move. And Los Cerritos Center wasn't a throwaway asset in that deal. Macerich has described it as one of its top-performing regional centers, the kind of property where a full-control redevelopment is worth doing well rather than filling quickly.

Other Macerich properties in that same five-box deal show the range of what "worth doing well" can mean. At Danbury Fair in Connecticut, the old Sears space went to Primark and Target. In Cerritos, it went to indoor turf and a climbing wall. Different malls, different bets, same underlying logic: a mall healthy enough to be worth reinvesting in gets a flagship tenant, not a placeholder.

What's already changed around it

The Sears news is the biggest single shift at the mall, but it's not the only one. North Italia moved into the space that used to hold California Pizza Kitchen, part of a wave of dining and retail turnover the mayor highlighted in a 2025 State of the City address alongside other business changes around town, from a new Starbucks drive-through at Bloomfield and Del Amo to a Tokyo Central Marukai taking over the old Pacific Sales space at Cerritos Towne Center.

The food scene just outside the mall has been moving fast too. Hakka Brother opened serving the sizzling teppan plates that made its predecessor a local favorite. Chubby Cattle brought its hot pot and Mongolian barbecue concept to town. And Seapot, a conveyor-belt shabu shabu and Korean barbecue concept, has a storefront up with a grand opening still to come. None of this is happening in a vacuum. It's happening around a mall the city and its landlord are both actively betting on.

The parts of the week that haven't moved

Not everything in Cerritos is being demolished and rebuilt. The rhythms that make this a place people actually live in, rather than just shop in, are still running exactly where they've always run.

The Cerritos Certified Farmers Market sets up every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon at Cerritos Towne Center, on Towne Center Drive at Park Plaza Drive, a few blocks from the mall and separate from it. It's been a state-certified market for years, and it's the kind of weekly fixture that doesn't care what's happening with a department store lease across town.

A short walk from the Civic Center, the Cerritos Sculpture Garden keeps doing what it's done for years too: a free, quiet stretch of art and koi ponds next to the library, the kind of spot locals use for a lunch break or a quinceañera photo shoot rather than a destination anyone drives across the county to see.

And the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, right by the farmers market, has a September calendar that reads like a mixtape. The Fabulous Thunderbirds and Ruthie Foster are on stage tonight for a night of blues. The Pop 2000 Tour, with Chris Kirkpatrick of NSYNC alongside O-Town and Ryan Cabrera, plays Wednesday. Geoff Tate's Operation: Mindcrime follows the night after that. It's a full house most weeks, the kind of programming that keeps a mid-sized city's performing arts center relevant without needing a single new anchor tenant.

What this actually tells you about the mall

The easy read on an empty department store is decline. The actual pattern here is closer to the opposite. A mall owner spent years and real money buying out a partner just to get full control of one box, then chose to fill it with one of the largest, most experiential retail formats currently being built anywhere in the state, rather than take the simpler route of converting it to apartments the city technically needs. That's not what a landlord does with a property it's trying to quietly wind down. It's what a landlord does with a property it thinks still has room to grow.

For anyone who's lived here through the fence line, the demolition dust, and years of "what's finally going in there," the answer turned out to be more interesting than apartments. Whether the climbing wall opens next year or the year after, the bigger fact is already settled: this mall just got a vote of confidence, not a consolation prize.

If you're curious how a shift like this tends to ripple into home values or buyer interest in the surrounding streets, that's a conversation worth having before the "for sale" signs show up. Tony Real Estate Group keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local change across Cerritos and the surrounding cities. Reach out anytime you want a grounded read on what's actually happening in your corner of the market.