Redevelopment of Grossmont Center starts with $10M face-lift

The future of Grossmont Center is taking shaping as the mall’s owner embarks on a multiphased redevelopment plan designed to refashion the sprawling 64-year-old outdoor center into a central gathering hub for the La Mesa community.

Last week, Maryland-based Federal Realty Investment Trust started its initial phase of work, a $10 million makeover of exterior storefronts, entrance ways, landscaping and common areas on the northern side of the center, between Target and Walmart.

The face-lift marks the first major overhaul to the regional shopping center since Federal Realty purchased a controlling interest in the property from the Cushman family in August 2021, and is deliberately conservative in scope.

“We bought the asset a little over four years ago with the plan to do a redevelopment. It was always going to be phased. It was just a matter of what’s the right time to move forward,” Jeff Kreshek, a Federal Realty executive who oversees the company’s West Coast portfolio, told the Union-Tribune. “It was pretty apparent very quickly during our due diligence and acquisition that scraping the whole site, even though it was set up in a way that that could have been the outcome, really just didn’t make a lot of financial sense, or really didn’t need to be done.”

The idea, he said, is to make intentional renov...