What do you do with a fifty-year-old shopping center after two different department stores go dark and nobody else wants the box?
If you've lived in Centennial for more than a few years, you already know the shorthand version of this story. Sears closed near the end of 2018. Macy's held on a while longer, but its lease at Streets at SouthGlenn expired in March 2022 and it closed that year too. For a stretch after that, the conversation around SouthGlenn settled into a familiar groove: too many empty storefronts, a movie theater and a Whole Foods propping up a shopping center that used to have real gravity. That version of the story isn't wrong, exactly. It's just out of date. What's actually happening at SouthGlenn right now is less about decline and more about a shopping center figuring out, box by box, what it's supposed to be instead.
The Boxes Sat Empty Longer Than Anyone Expected
The gap between "department store closes" and "something new opens in its place" at SouthGlenn hasn't been measured in months. It's been measured in years. Sears' building sat vacant from 2018 while Northwood Investors, which had bought the property in 2017 anticipating the closure, worked through what to do with it. Macy's followed the same pattern after its 2022 exit. For a while, public meetings involving the city and the two developers who control most of the center, Alberta Development Partners and Northwood, focused on traffic studies and unit caps.
That changed in 2025, when Alberta asked the city to revise SouthGlenn's master development plan and raise the cap on residential units allowed at the site from 1,125 to 1,675, a shift reported by Hoodline that quietly reset what SouthGlenn is now allowed to become. Once that ceiling moved, the two dead anchor boxes stopped being a retail problem and started being a housing opportunity.
Why Someone Just Paid $28 Million for the Part That Still Works
In January 2026, an investor named Asher Luzzatto, who's made a name for himself buying distressed Denver office towers and converting them to residential, closed on roughly 100,000 square feet of SouthGlenn's retail for about $28 million, according to Hoodline's reporting on the BusinessDen-sourced deal. His slice covers the building anchored by Whole Foods along with Sephora and Old Navy, three blocks fronting South York Street. He's calling the purchase a diversification move and says his portion of the center is already fully leased.
The logic here is not complicated once you see it. A grocery store pulls people in on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. Apparel and department stores, the categories that anchored the original 1974 mall, don't generate that kind of repeat traffic anymore. Betting $28 million on the Whole Foods block while the Macy's building sits empty a few hundred feet away isn't a contradiction. It's the same read on the retail math that's been playing out at shopping centers across the country: grocery anchors hold their value, department store anchors don't.
The Empty Macy's Becomes Somebody's Front Door
The clearest evidence of where SouthGlenn is actually headed sits on the old Macy's footprint. In February 2026, Denver-based Alliance Residential Company filed a pre-submittal application with the city to build a five-story apartment building there, with a structured parking garage and roughly 557 spaces, reported first by the Centennial Citizen. The Centennial Citizen's coverage cites 361 units. The project narrative Alliance filed with the city puts the figure at 358. Either way, it's not a store. It's several hundred households who will be able to walk to the restaurants and shops that are left.
The Centennial Citizen quoted Centennial communications director Allison Wittern saying:
"Reinvestment in housing is often the first step to stabilizing retail areas, because shops and restaurants depend heavily on a consistent customer base within walking distance."
That's the mechanism nobody explains when they complain about vacant storefronts. A dead department store doesn't just sit empty, it removes a pedestrian connection. The city's own project materials note that the old Macy's structure created a gap in the north-south walking path through the center, and Alliance's plan is designed specifically to restore that route with ground-floor townhome entries and a public plaza tying back to the original Macy's fountain. Construction is scheduled to start in the fourth quarter of 2026, according to the city's own project timeline.
Restaurants Never Got the Memo That the Mall Was Struggling
While the big boxes have taken years to turn over, the restaurant spaces at SouthGlenn and around it keep moving fast, and that gap tells you something the vacancy headlines miss. Three moves from the past year:
- Kinoya Sushi & Izakaya opened this year in the space that housed Bono's Pit Bar-B-Q for twenty years before it closed in October 2025, as Westword reported. The spot sits at 9393 East Dry Creek Road, steps from the Dry Creek light rail station, and it's run by local restaurateur Skye Ni, who also owns Shoyu Sushi & Japanese Cuisine in Parker.
- Bawarchi Indian Cuisine reopened in July 2026 at 11001 East Arapahoe Place after an August 2025 fire forced a lengthy closure, according to South Denver Guide's openings tracker, bringing back its biryani menu in a remodeled space.
- China Taipei, a Centennial fixture on South Quebec Street for more than three decades, closed in April 2026, per the same South Denver Guide reporting.
A twenty-year barbecue restaurant closes in October and a new tenant is serving sushi within months. Compare that to a department store box that's been dark since 2022 and still hasn't broken ground on its replacement. Restaurant space at SouthGlenn doesn't sit empty the way retail does, because the lease sizes are smaller, the buildout timelines are shorter, and the customer base that supports a sushi counter is a lot easier to hit than the one that used to support a Macy's.
What This Actually Looks Like If You Live Near Here
None of this is abstract if SouthGlenn is part of your weekly errands. This month alone gives you a decent snapshot of how the neighborhood actually runs day to day. The 20th annual Centennial Under the Stars was scheduled for Saturday, August 8, from 5 to 9 p.m. at Centennial Center Park, a free event with live music, food trucks, and a set from the Washington Park Band, per The Villager's community calendar. Two weeks after that, on August 22, Centennial Center Park hosts Cinematic Symphony: The Music of Star Wars, a free outdoor concert with a $25 VIP option for a reserved viewing area. Worth knowing if you're used to thinking of SouthGlenn as Centennial's only gathering spot: Centennial Center Park sits closer to City Hall on Peakview Avenue, a separate civic green a few minutes from the retail district, and it's where most of the city's larger free events actually land.
Back at SouthGlenn itself, the plaza pond has iced over into a seasonal skating rink called the Cube in past winters, typically running from mid-November into February, though whether it comes back depends on the weather and, in some years, on which retailer is managing the space that season. It's the kind of small seasonal fixture that's easy to take for granted until the year it doesn't show up.
The version of SouthGlenn that gets repeated in casual conversation, empty stores, dying mall, ghost town, was true for a few years. What's true now is that two separate developers are converting the emptiest parts of the property into housing, an investor just bet real money on the grocery-anchored block that's still working, and the restaurant lineup has turned over faster than most residents have noticed. If you live nearby and you've been avoiding the place because of what it used to look like, this is probably the year to walk through again.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for your own home's value in Centennial, or you're weighing a move within the neighborhood, Borremans Properties can walk you through what's actually changing on the ground. Get a Free Home Valuation and find out where your property stands in a neighborhood that's still very much rebuilding itself.
