Two things are true about the three blocks around Alameda's South Shore Center right now, and they seem to contradict each other. The first is a headline: a national real estate developer wants to build up to 800 housing units on the mall's own footprint. The second is a data point: single-family sales in the South Shore neighborhood just posted a much quieter quarter than the one before it. Read them side by side and you'd assume the neighborhood is either about to get flooded with new supply or is already cooling off on its own. Neither read is quite right, and the gap between them is worth understanding before you make a decision based on either one.
The 800-unit number is real, and it is also years from meaning anything
Merlone Geier Partners, the firm that has owned South Shore Center since buying it from Jamestown in 2020, confirmed in February 2026 that it is in discussions with the city about building roughly 400 housing units on the southeastern corner of the shopping center, the parcel currently occupied by Big 5 Sporting Goods and a car wash. A second site at the center, home to OfficeMax and Southshore Cafe, is also being eyed for a similar-sized project. Add the two together and you get the 800-unit figure that's been circulating, a number that happens to line up with what Alameda's state-mandated housing element already calls for at this location.
Here's the part that matters for anyone weighing a purchase near the center this year: as of that February reporting, Merlone Geier had not filed an official development application with the city. Nothing has entered the review pipeline. Total unit counts and building sizes for both sites are still undetermined, and any project that does move forward will be required to include affordable units as part of the approval.
This is not the first time someone has proposed reshaping this land. Jamestown, the prior owner, floated a 1,200-unit plan back in 2019. That version called for an initial phase of 350 residential units, with Sushi House offered a chance to relocate inside the shopping plaza and Shoreline Car Wash losing its spot entirely. Jamestown targeted 2025 for that first phase to be complete. Residents at the time raised concerns about what more housing would do to Otis Drive and Shoreline Drive, both of which carry a lot of traffic on a single lane in each direction. The company itself acknowledged that environmental review and seismic planning alone could take two to four years before a shovel touched the ground.
None of that phase ever broke ground. Seven years later, the site is back to being a proposal, not a project.
| 2019 Jamestown Plan | 2026 Merlone Geier Discussions | |
|---|---|---|
| Units proposed | 1,200 total, 350 in phase one | Up to 800, split across two sites |
| Status at announcement | Proposed, pending environmental and seismic review | No application filed, still in early discussions with city |
| Estimated review timeline | 2-4 years for that review, per the developer | Not yet started |
| Outcome as of today | Never completed construction | Pre-application |
The lesson isn't that redevelopment can't happen here. It's that a headline about unit counts and a shovel in the ground are separated, historically, by years of review that this exact site has already failed to clear once.
Four sales are not a trend
While that story sat in the background, the South Shore single-family market quietly went through its own swing. In the fourth quarter of 2025, homes there sold for an average of $1.71 million, drawing two to three offers apiece, moving in about 17 days, and closing around 12% over list. By the first quarter of 2026, the picture looked different: just four single-family sales, averaging $1.4 million and $696 per square foot, sitting on the market for 36 days, and closing only about 2% over list with two offers on average.
Laid out that way, it reads like a market that cooled fast. But look at the sample size again. Four sales. In a neighborhood this size, four transactions can be four unrelated stories, an estate sale, a home that needed work, a seller who priced ambitiously, a buyer who negotiated hard, stitched together into what looks like a single narrative because they happened to close in the same ninety days. Alameda's broader single-family market is itself a blend of small, differently behaving pockets rather than one uniform trend line, which is exactly why a single quarter in a single pocket like South Shore deserves a second look before it gets treated as a verdict. A quarter of four sales tells you less about demand and more about which four houses happened to sell.
None of this means the South Shore numbers are meaningless. It means they need a longer look before you draw a conclusion from them, the same way you wouldn't judge a restaurant's popularity from a single slow Tuesday night.
What to actually watch instead of a single quarter or a single headline
If you're comparing South Shore to other Alameda neighborhoods right now, two habits will serve you better than reacting to either the mall headline or the last reported quarter on its own.
- Track days on market and sale-to-list ratio across at least three consecutive quarters, not one, before deciding a neighborhood is heating up or cooling down. One quarter tells you what happened to the handful of homes that sold. Three or four tell you whether that was a pattern or a coincidence.
- Watch for the actual filing, not the discussion. An application entering the city's planning review, an environmental impact report, or a public hearing notice is a different signal than a developer telling a reporter what it hopes to build. The gap between those two things is exactly where this site has stalled before.
If you own a home near the shopping center and you're weighing whether to sell now or wait, the honest answer is that neither piece of news changes your timeline much today. The redevelopment is not close enough to filing to affect buyer psychology yet, and a thin quarter of comparable sales is not evidence that your specific home would sell for less. What does affect both is preparation. In a market where a handful of transactions can swing the reported average by hundreds of thousands of dollars, the difference between a well-presented listing and an average one matters more, not less.
A few questions worth asking before you act
Has Merlone Geier filed an application with the city of Alameda yet? Not as of the most recent reporting. The company confirmed it is in discussions and has not submitted a formal development application, which means the project has not entered the environmental or planning review process that would set a construction timeline.
Does a housing announcement at South Shore Center affect my home's value today? Not directly, and not yet. Even in the 2019 version of this story, the developer estimated two to four years of review before construction could begin, and that version never broke ground at all. A pre-application discussion is a much earlier stage than that.
Why did South Shore home prices look like they dropped so much between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026? Largely because of how few homes sold. Four closings in a single quarter is a small enough sample that one or two unusual sales can shift the reported average significantly. Comparing a rolling several-quarter average gives a steadier read than any single quarter on its own.
South Shore is a neighborhood where the story people tell about it moves faster than the data actually does. If you're trying to figure out what a home near the center is really worth right now, or whether the redevelopment talk should change your timeline, that's exactly the kind of read Your East Bay Agent does for Alameda buyers and sellers every week. Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk through what the actual numbers, not the headline, say about your specific block.
