What's Actually Happening to the Puente Hills Mall

Drive past the Puente Hills Mall on a weekday afternoon and the parking lot tells you most of what you need to know before you even get out of the car. A cluster of vehicles sits near the Round 1 entrance and another near the AMC marquee. The rest of the lot, once built to hold shoppers streaming toward Macy's and Sears on a Saturday, sits open and quiet. Inside, storefronts that used to sell shoes and workout clothes are papered over or dark.

For a mall that opened in phases from February 1974 through the spring of 1975, and that briefly became a piece of movie history when its south parking lot stood in for Doc Brown's DeLorean experiments in Back to the Future, this is not a subtle decline. It is the last stretch of a closure that has been happening in full view for years. What most people driving the 60 Freeway past it don't know is who actually gets to decide what comes next, and that answer is the part of this story worth understanding if you live anywhere near Hacienda Heights.

The anchors left one at a time

The mall didn't lose its identity overnight. It lost it store by store, on a timeline you can trace almost exactly:

• Macy's announced its closure in January 2022 and shut its doors that spring
• Burlington closed on March 22, 2024
• 24 Hour Fitness closed in June 2025
• Ross Dress for Less closed on January 16, 2026

That leaves Round 1, the bowling and karaoke chain, and AMC Theatres as the only two anchors still open. Public records point to a final closure date of September 24, 2026, for those remaining tenants, which is only about five weeks from today. If that date holds, the mall as a functioning retail center effectively ends this fall, not at some distant point in the future planning documents like to gesture toward.

The part almost nobody votes on

Here is the detail that changes how you should read all of this. The Puente Hills Mall sits inside the City of Industry, a municipality built almost entirely around commercial and industrial land rather than homes. The city council that governs what happens to that 31-acre site is elected by a residential population of fewer than 300 people.

That council voted unanimously to change zoning rules to allow battery energy storage systems on sites like the former mall property. City officials have also acknowledged, without going on camera to confirm details, that data center development is part of the conversation for this site and others nearby. The residents who will actually deal with the consequences, in Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, and La Puente, don't have a ballot that touches that decision. At a packed council meeting, people who live in those surrounding communities raised concerns about noise pollution, rising water bills, and higher energy costs tied to the redevelopment. They were speaking as neighbors, not as constituents, because the vote wasn't theirs to cast.

This is the mechanism that explains why the mall's fate has felt sudden to a lot of longtime residents even though the anchor closures have been public for years. The zoning decision that determines what actually gets built there is made by a governing body that most of the people affected by it never elected.

Retail was actually the plan, once

There's a detail buried in county planning filings that runs against the story most people assume. Before battery storage entered the conversation, there was a real, on-paper proposal to expand and renovate the mall rather than replace it. A project filed with the state environmental review process called for a net increase of roughly 80,000 square feet of commercial space, split between new buildings on the west side of the property and the east side, with about 60 percent of the new floor area earmarked for restaurant and market space rather than traditional retail.

In other words, at some point there was an actual plan to make this a stronger dining and shopping destination, not a smaller one. That plan is not what's moving forward. The direction the City of Industry council has taken instead points toward industrial infrastructure, not storefronts. If you've been assuming the mall's owners simply gave up on retail, the paper trail says otherwise. The retail plan existed. It got overtaken.

What still works right now

None of this means the site is empty today. Round 1 still draws people in for bowling, arcade games, and karaoke, and AMC still runs a full schedule of showtimes in a 20-screen theater that's been open since 1997. The mall also functions as a working transit hub. More than a dozen bus lines, including the 482, 289, 185, and 178, stop or connect at the property, making it a midpoint for commuters traveling between the Inland Empire and the more built-up parts of Los Angeles County. If you take transit through this corridor, this mall is probably part of your route whether or not you ever shop there.

That transit role matters for anyone weighing what redevelopment could look like. A site with this kind of existing bus connectivity doesn't automatically get treated like a blank industrial lot, even under a rezoning built around batteries and server racks. Whatever gets built here will still sit at a transportation crossroads that a lot of daily commuters depend on.

What to actually watch for

If you live in Hacienda Heights or drive past this stretch of the 60 Freeway regularly, the next few months are the ones that matter. Watch whether the September 24 closure date for Round 1 and AMC holds. Watch City of Industry council agendas for further votes tied to specific battery storage or data center proposals, since the rezoning vote opened the door but didn't itself approve a finished project. And watch for any public comment opportunities, because even without a residential vote in City of Industry, surrounding cities and county supervisors can still weigh in on permits, environmental review, and infrastructure that crosses jurisdictional lines.

The honest version of this story isn't that a mall is dying. Malls close all the time and this one has been telegraphing its decline since Macy's left in 2022. The honest version is that the property's next chapter is being written by a governing body with almost no residents of its own, for a site that tens of thousands of people in the surrounding San Gabriel Valley communities use, remember, and drive past every day. That's worth knowing whether you've lived in Hacienda Heights for thirty years or you're just starting to pay attention to what's happening in your own backyard.

If you have questions about how changes like this affect property values or what to expect as a buyer or seller in the surrounding communities, Edward Wang is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.