Walk out of a College Park driveway in one direction and you hit Bristol Street inside a few minutes, where The CAMP and The LAB Anti-Mall have spent the past year and a half swapping tenants block by block. Walk the other way and you reach the Placentia Avenue entrance to Fairview Park, where the city just signed off on a two-year study before anyone touches a shovel. Same neighborhood, same width of sidewalk on either end, but the two loops residents actually use are operating on completely different clocks right now.
That gap matters more than either update on its own. If you've been away from the Bristol side since last winter, you'll notice new storefronts that weren't there in January. If you've been watching the west bluffs at Fairview expecting the erosion problem to get fixed, the honest answer is not yet, and not for a while.
The Bristol Side Is Moving in Months
The anchor space at The LAB Anti-Mall, at 2930 Bristol Street, used to be Urban Outfitters. When the chain decided to leave rather than shrink its footprint, ownership didn't backfill it with another national name. Instead they started carving it up. Linda Sadeghi, who runs The LAB, told the Orange County Business Journal the new floor plan splits that anchor space into individual slots ranging from about 600 to 1,500 square feet, with one larger section set aside for a full-service restaurant. Six new stores were mapped into that layout, with roughly 30 percent of leases signed as of early 2025.
Renovation on the space began February 1, 2025, with an initial opening target of late 2025. But the announcements haven't landed all at once. The LAB has treated tenant reveals as staged rather than batch-released, which means the storefront lineup you saw in the spring may already be out of date. Two names have surfaced from that reset: Chafinity and Purrs in Paradise, a cat lounge.
Next door at The CAMP, the same staggering logic applies to openings rather than construction. Maleza, a Baja-Mexican concept from Drift Palm Springs, was on track this summer for a soft opening around Labor Day. None of this displaces what's already working. Mesa Lounge still runs its retractable-roof late-night program of small plates and cocktails. Salty Bear holds the craft-beer slot. Slurpin' Ramen and Wine Lab remain the two most dependable weekday sit-downs on that stretch. Over at The LAB itself, longtime tenants including Habana, Buffalo Exchange, Seabirds Kitchen, Nook Coffee, and Kuro Artisanal Pizza haven't gone anywhere.
The pattern worth naming is the choice to subdivide rather than replace whole. A single 9,000-square-foot anchor becoming six smaller leases means six separate opening dates instead of one ribbon cutting, and it means the businesses filling those slots are sized for independent operators rather than another chain trying to fill a big box. For a resident, that translates into a slow drip of new storefronts through the rest of 2026 rather than a single grand reopening you can circle on a calendar.
The Fairview Side Is Moving in Years
Fairview Park's west bluffs have been eroding for years, enough that the city built an emergency berm back in 2019 just to slow the slide. On April 8, 2026, the Costa Mesa City Council awarded a two-year, $533,189 contract to the engineering firm Psomas to develop an action plan for revitalizing that section of the park. The scope covers design, environmental planning, and cultural resource management, work that has to account for protected habitat and sensitive cultural resources before anyone can propose a fix.
The number is worth sitting with. The full west bluffs project is estimated at around $2 million, and more than $530,000 of that is earmarked just for the planning and outreach phase Psomas was hired to run. In other words, the contract signed in April isn't the repair. It's the bill for figuring out what the repair should be, and that study alone is budgeted to take two years. Possible solutions on the table include planting deep-rooted vegetation to stabilize the slope or installing retaining walls, and the retaining-wall option could require voter approval under the city's Measure AA.
One resident who raised the issue during council discussion put it plainly, describing worry about a section of bluff that "could collapse" and pointing to bluff failures already seen up the coast in Newport Beach and Corona del Mar. The city's response so far has been methodical rather than urgent, which tracks with how erosion projects on protected coastal bluffs tend to move.
None of this touches the rest of the park's 208 acres or its regular rhythms. The Orange County Model Engineers still run the Goat Hill Junction miniature railroad on the third weekend of every month, and the broader trail network connecting to the Santa Ana River Trail and Talbert Regional Park remains open for the walking and biking loops residents already use. The slow clock applies specifically to the west bluffs section, not to the park as a whole.
Two Clocks, One Neighborhood
| What's changing | The move | Timeline | What you'll actually see |
|---|---|---|---|
| LAB anchor space (former Urban Outfitters) | Subdivided into 600 to 1,500 sq ft slots for smaller, independent tenants | Renovation began Feb 2025; tenant reveals staged through 2026 | New storefronts appearing in waves through the rest of the year |
| The CAMP dining lineup | Maleza (Baja-Mexican) joins the standing roster | Targeted for a soft opening around Labor Day 2026 | One more sit-down option added to an already active weekday rotation |
| Fairview Park west bluffs | $533,189 two-year design and environmental planning contract awarded to Psomas | Contract awarded April 2026; study runs about two years | No visible construction this year or next; routing decisions wait for the plan |
| Fairview Park overall trail system | Unaffected by the bluffs study | Ongoing | Goat Hill Junction train rides continue on the third weekend monthly |
Put side by side, the contrast is the point. The retail side of College Park's routine turns over in a matter of months because subdividing a lease is a real estate decision two ownership groups can execute on their own timeline. The park side moves in years because a coastal bluff with protected habitat and cultural resources answers to environmental review and, potentially, a public vote before a single retaining wall goes in.
If you're mapping your own walk from College Park this fall, the direction toward Bristol Street is the one where checking back every few weeks will turn up something different. The direction toward the Placentia entrance will look the same for a while yet, and that's not a delay so much as the actual pace this kind of coastal engineering work runs on.
If you're curious what these two walks look like in person, or you're weighing what a College Park address puts within reach day to day, Better Living SoCal knows both directions well enough to walk them with you.
