"I think by Pride it might look complete, but I don't think they're gonna open it to the public because there's a bunch of stuff they have to do to get it 100 percent," Hillcrest Business Association executive director Benjamin Nicholls said in late June, a few weeks before this year's Pride parade stepped off a few feet from an active construction zone. He was talking about the Pride Promenade, the transformation of Normal Street that has been promised to Hillcrest for so long that discussions about it date back to 2015. Nicholls turned out to be right. The plaza looked close enough to finished for photos. It did not open.
If you live in Hillcrest, you already know the fencing, the noise, and the detours. What most residents have not connected is that two separate multimillion-dollar construction projects have been tearing up two different streets at the same time, for two entirely different reasons, on two very different timelines, and only one of them beat its deadline.
Two Holes in the Ground, Two Different Stories
The Normal Street Promenade is a long-planned civic project, jointly funded by the City of San Diego and the San Diego Association of Governments, meant to turn the west side of Normal Street between University and Lincoln into Hillcrest's first real public park, complete with a children's play area, a restored trolley car, and a Pride Plaza built around the neighborhood's landmark rainbow flag. Construction broke ground in February 2025, budgeted at roughly $27 to $28 million. City officials originally said it would be finished in time for Pride 2026. By this July, Nicholls was citing a total closer to $30 million, the extra cost coming from underground infrastructure crews didn't expect, including old streetcar lines and storm drains that never connected properly under University Avenue. The completion date has since slipped to 2027.
A few blocks away, a second project has been digging up Fifth Avenue for a different reason entirely. The Fifth and Brookes Storm Drain Upgrade is a roughly $7 million fix that the city undertook after a legal settlement over chronic flooding on nearby properties. It has no Pride branding and no ceremonial groundbreaking. It was still tearing up the street as of early February 2026, according to local coverage, yet it finished ahead of its own internal schedule. The green fencing that had blocked visual access to dozens of Fifth Avenue businesses came down in early July, about a month before its original January 2027 target.
| Project | Budget | Original Target | Where It Stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normal Street Promenade (Pride Promenade) | ~$27-28M at groundbreaking, near $30M by mid-2026 | Pride 2026 | Fencing mostly gone by Pride, but full public opening pushed to 2027 |
| Fifth and Brookes Storm Drain Upgrade | ~$7M | January 2027 | Fencing removed early July 2026, ahead of schedule |
The irony is not lost on the people running businesses next to both sites. The decades-anticipated civic showpiece slipped a full year. The unglamorous, court-ordered drainage fix came in early.
What the Ledger Actually Shows
Numbers from public tort filings put a real figure on what Fifth Avenue businesses absorbed while waiting. Hash House A Go Go estimated losses between $28,000 and $40,000 a month during the height of construction. Divo Diva Cafe and Beauty by Dolly filed similar claims with the city, which rejected them. Nicholls did not mince words about the contractor's communication, calling the project "sort of like the poster child for doing it wrong."
On the Normal Street side, the damage has looked different but the pattern is familiar. Hillcrest Brewing Company reported a 20 percent revenue drop over the past year. Cellar Hand, in the same corner retail plaza off University and Normal, estimated a 25 to 30 percent reduction. NOLA on 5th's general manager described a 25 percent drop in a single December, tied directly to noise and lost patio seating. At least one water and electricity outage forced Hillcrest Brewing Company to close for a full day because there was no way to meet sanitation requirements without running water.
Divo Diva co-owner Victoria Robertson put the turnaround into blunt terms once the Fifth Avenue fencing finally disappeared: "As soon as we got rid of that fencing, we kind of sprung back." She is opening a second Divo Diva location in Little Italy this year, a detail that says as much about Hillcrest's resilience as any construction update does.
The Hillcrest Business Association's response has been to lean into the disruption rather than apologize for it. Its "Still Fabulous" campaign runs a monthly raffle for anyone who shops or dines at participating businesses during construction, with prizes designed to keep spending inside the neighborhood. Marketing coordinator Natalie Starr has framed the goal plainly: remind people that Hillcrest is open even when it does not look like it.
The Farmers Market Everyone Assumed Would Shrink
When the Hillcrest Farmers Market moved off its longtime home in the DMV parking lot on Normal Street in January 2025, the early prediction was contraction. Reporting at the time estimated that the smaller University Avenue footprint would force out close to 47 vendors from a roster that had grown past 175 over nearly three decades.
That is not what happened. By early 2026, Nicholls was telling reporters that attendance had grown, sales were up, and more vendors had joined the market since the move, not fewer. The market, which started in 1997 with 27 vendors and now draws more than 10,000 visitors most Sundays, found a more visible spot on University Avenue and simply kept growing there. When the Promenade eventually opens, the market's plan has always been to land there permanently, in a purpose-built space that eliminates the need to close streets for it at all. For now, it stays put on University Avenue between Herbert Street and Park Boulevard, every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., rain or shine.
New Doors Kept Opening Anyway
Construction fatigue has not stopped Hillcrest's restaurant scene from moving. Origen, a coastal Mexican concept from Franco Mestre and Sebastian Berho, took over the former XOXO Retro Neighborhood Diner space on Park Boulevard last year. Trust, a wood-fired New American spot also on Park Boulevard, picked up an Eater San Diego award for Best Neighborhood Trailblazer and a San Diego Magazine nod for Best New Restaurant. DASHI brought a sleeker, moodier take on modern Japanese dining to University Avenue. Rocko's Modern Taphouse, a family-friendly arcade and beer bar aimed partly at Scripps Mercy Hospital staff on their breaks, opened on Fourth Avenue in early 2026.
Even the businesses absorbing the worst of the construction found ways to expand rather than retreat. Hillcrest Brewing Company got city approval to push its patio 15 feet further out, betting that more outdoor seating would offset the customers construction scared off. None of this erases what the tort filings show. It does mean the neighborhood's daily rhythm, new openings, Sunday market crowds, patio expansions, kept moving even while its most visible infrastructure project stalled.
The Pride That Happened Without Its Own Plaza
This July, San Diego Pride's parade still stepped off from University Avenue and Normal Street, right where the Pride flag has always stood, drawing a crowd organizers put at more than 250,000 along the route. But the Stonewall Rally, normally anchored at Pride Plaza, had to move to a site across the street from the Brass Rail because the plaza was still fenced off. San Diego Pride's executive director KishaLynn Elliott confirmed the workaround publicly weeks before the event.
That is the detail worth sitting with if you live here. Hillcrest's most Pride-branded piece of public infrastructure, sitting at the intersection that gives the neighborhood its rainbow crosswalk and its flag, missed the very celebration it was built to host. Not because anyone lost interest in finishing it, but because retrofitting a hundred-year-old streetcar corridor turned out to be slower and more expensive than anyone laying underground pipes ever wants it to be.
What to Watch For
If Nicholls's read from late June holds, the Promenade will look essentially finished before the end of 2026 but will not formally open to the public until sometime in 2027, once the underground work is fully signed off and the surface details, shade structures, lighting, the restored trolley car, are locked in. The Fifth Avenue stormwater project has already shown that a construction deadline in Hillcrest can beat its own schedule. Whether the Promenade does the same or slips again is the one thing left to watch on a project the neighborhood has been waiting on since 2015.
For now, the market meets every Sunday on University Avenue, the fencing on Fifth Avenue is finally down, and a new round of restaurants keeps filling storefronts around both construction sites. Hillcrest has spent two years building its own park in public, one delay at a time, and the neighborhood kept its Sunday routine running the whole way through.
If you're weighing what a home in a neighborhood this actively in motion actually means for your plans, the team at Native Real Estate spends its time exactly where Hillcrest's changes are happening. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
