Making its downtown area more lively and walkable has been a goal of Santa Maria’s since 2004. About four years’ worth of community workshops ushered in the city’s first downtown revitalization plan, adopted in 2008 with hopes of increasing foot traffic through new retail, restaurants, and housing opportunities.
But over the course of the next seven years, the area remained “largely unattended,” despite a few new developments, including the Town Center mall’s addition of its Regal movie theater in 2010, Santa Maria planners noted in a 2015 update.
Another decade and two local department store closures later, a new “catalyst for the transformation of our urban core” broke ground on Aug. 6, Community Development Director Chenin Dow told the Sun.
“In short, this is a transformational moment for the city and downtown Santa Maria,” Dow said via email about the Heritage Walk Lofts—an upcoming apartment complex under construction at the former site of both Mervyn’s and Fallas, shuttered since the latter store’s 2022 closure.
“The project will bring 104 new units of housing downtown, adding new energy and vibrancy with the attraction of new residents,” Dow said. “These new residents will help support the small downtown businesses that help shape the character of our community while also creating jobs and strengthening our local economy.”
The Heritage Walk Lofts is the first of five Vernon Group projects in downtown Santa Maria to reach the groundbreaking phase. Some are solely dedicated to housing, while others integrate space for commercial businesses. There’s a mixed-use project, for example, set for the building formerly occupied by Boot Barn on the southwest corner of Main and Broadway streets. It’s currently in the design phase, Dow said.
Set for the northeast corner of that intersection, a separate Vernon project stirred discordant discourse at the Santa Maria City Council’s Aug. 5 meeting—held the night before some of the officials seated on the dais took up shovels at the Heritage Walk Lofts groundbreaking ceremony.
Most of the public speakers who opposed the Perlman Apartments proposal echoed concerns about the six-story affordable housing project’s proximity to Union Plaza, a seven-story apartment complex established in 1975. Like Union Plaza, Perlman would include more than 100 housing units if built as proposed.
“That’s a lot of people that you’re jamming into a small area,” Santa Maria resident Susan Sorenson said. “I think there were other choices that could have been made.”
Some elected officials stressed how choiceless the City Council actually was in terms of narrowing down a location for Perlman.
“If there were other places we could build, we would. But … the city is fully built-out,” Councilmember Maribel Aguilera-Hernandez said. “We’re actually looking at annexing property because the city of Santa Maria has run out of locations to build. We are mandated by the state to provide housing.
“And just like anything, when you want to reduce the price of anything, … you have to flood the market,” Aguilera-Hernandez continued. “The more there is of a product, the lower the price gets. So if we know that in Santa Maria, we have nowhere else to build but downtown, that’s where we have to do the building.”
Although the Perlman project has one less story than Union Plaza, it will technically be taller by about 10 feet thanks to some tower element architecture, which caught AT&T’s attention.
“AT&T’s south-facing antennas on [Union Plaza’s] rooftop will be entirely blocked by the proposed Perlman apartments, which will obstruct critical wireless services in coverage and capacity to large and busy portions of the city,” Dan Revetto, director of external affairs at AT&T, said during public comment at the Aug. 5 meeting.
Revetto said that blocking those specific antennas would create “a significant gap in AT&T’s wireless coverage” at Santa Maria’s City Hall building, courthouse, library, and the Town Center mall among other places, as well as with certain FirstNet services, “which are dedicated to first responders whose communications could be impacted with losses to coverage and capacity,” he added.
“While AT&T appreciates the need for affordable housing, approving this proposal at this time will have immediate negative impacts on wireless telecommunications in the area,” Revetto told the council, which ultimately approved the project 4-0 (Councilmember Carlos Escobedo was absent).
Before the vote, Community Development Director Dow reminded the council that it falls on AT&T to perform an assessment if the company’s concerned about interference issues related to the Perlman proposal.
“Essentially there’s nothing that needs to be done on the city’s behalf at this time to approve the entitlement,” Dow said at the Aug. 5 meeting. “If there’s a desire perhaps to relocate some of those [antennas] to this [Perlman] building or have additional ones on this building, that’s a conversation that can be had with the applicant too during this next phase of the process.”
Regarding AT&T’s concerns about cell tower service in downtown Santa Maria, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-California) said he has no doubt that the wireless carrier and the city will “find solutions.”
“Those are challenges that’ll continue to be worked out. … Anytime you have a development, there’s always a few things that need to be worked out,” Carbajal told the Sun. “But at the end, this effort, notwithstanding a few little speed bumps that they’ll encounter, … will be a win-win for the city and the residents of Santa Maria.”
As for the Heritage Walk Lofts project a few blocks away, Carbajal said that he remembers shopping at the building back when it was a Mervyn’s many years ago.
On a wall outside of the vacant 72,000 square-foot structure, a big, red sign with a winking face emoji spells “BLACK FRIDAY” in all caps, a leftover from the Fallas Discount Store days, visible during the Aug. 6 groundbreaking.
Carbajal called the Heritage Walk Lofts project “a real tangible initiation” of Santa Maria’s aim at revitalizing its downtown.
“This is the culmination of years of an extensive process bringing people together to design; get ideas of what they want to see downtown so that they can be proud of and frequent that area,” Carbajal said. “This housing development is a major part of it, and it’s a kick-off of more to come.”
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 14-24, 2025.
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