Most people who drive Aurora Avenue past the old Sears assume the whole thing runs on one clock, that someday a fence comes down and a finished shopping center just appears. Scroll through the comments on any Shoreline Area News post about the site and you'll find a familiar refrain: it's been years, why is this still just a parking lot with cranes in it.
The truth runs closer to the opposite. Shoreline Place has already opened in pieces, gone quiet for stretches, and started up again more than once. The City of Shoreline and Merlone Geier Partners signed a development agreement on September 9, 2019, and what's visible from Aurora this fall isn't the beginning of that agreement. It's the third wave.
What Already Opened While Most People Weren't Watching
Sears sold its roughly 17-acre parcel to Merlone Geier Partners in 2017 and closed the store the following year, ending a run that had anchored the shopping center since 1967. That's the part most residents remember. What tends to get lost is that construction actually started on the site in the spring of 2019, less than a year after Sears went dark, when Trammell Crow Residential broke ground on the 330-unit Alexan Shoreline apartments across Westminster Way.
Then came the retail. By July 2024, Round Table Pizza and Chipotle had already opened on the lower level of the shopping center, and Mod Pizza and Big Chicken had signed leases for space nearby. Pet Evolution, a pet food, supplies, and grooming shop, held its ribbon cutting on July 27, 2024. None of that made much noise, because none of it involved the building people actually picture when they say "the old Sears."
What's Under a Crane on Aurora Right Now
As of August 2026, Shoreline Area News reported that construction is well underway at the site of the former U.S. Bank building, at North 155th and Westminster Way. That parcel is now referred to internally as Block E4: a single-story, 9,179-square-foot retail building planned as five separate storefronts, with individual spaces ranging from roughly 1,465 to 2,535 square feet, sitting near the existing Town & Country Market.
A separate parcel, Block D, is moving through building permit review. It sits on the vacant 3.2-acre lot along Westminster Way where the Sears Auto Center used to stand, between Mustache Milk and Chipotle. When complete, Block D is expected to add about 370 new homes and roughly 16,200 square feet of ground-floor retail, designed by Urbal Architecture. The City of Shoreline's own project page lists construction as expected to begin later in 2026.
Here's the detail worth sitting with: the city's project page also states that new stores in the current construction wave aren't anticipated to open until 2028. The visible progress on Aurora this fall is real, but it's a two-year runway to a grand opening, not a countdown to one.
A few numbers worth keeping straight, since marketing materials and city filings don't always match:
- The original 2019 development agreement called for 1,358 apartments across the full site. Recent leasing materials from Merlone Geier round that closer to 1,500.
- The former Sears parcel alone is about 17 acres. The full Shoreline Place footprint, including the existing Town & Country Market and the Marshalls-anchored center, spans closer to 27 acres.
- The existing shopping center, the part that isn't being torn down, is roughly 186,000 square feet. The new retail being added across every phase totals somewhere north of 56,000 square feet.
The Building Everyone Actually Means
None of Block E4 or Block D is the old Sears building itself. That structure has sat vacant since 2018, eight years now, while smaller pieces of the property around it got built out first. In August 2026, Shoreline Area News ran an item headlined "The old Sears building at Shoreline Place: Chipping away at the past," which suggests work has finally started on the shell that most residents mean when they ask what's happening to the mall.
That's a meaningfully different timeline than the retail going up at Block E4 or Block D. The keystone Sears property was always framed as the longest piece of the project. Merlone Geier's own community renewal page describes the full redevelopment of that parcel as a $400 million mixed-use undertaking spanning three new city blocks, built out over 10 to 20 years from when the process began. Even under an optimistic reading, that puts full completion somewhere in the late 2030s.
What's Still Just a Plan
A few pieces of Shoreline Place exist only on paper right now. The project has long promised a public plaza called Town Green, and the Saturday farmers market, currently held in the surface lot, is slated to relocate there once it's built. That piece of the plan hasn't broken ground as of this writing.
There's also a quieter storyline on the west side of the site that most coverage skips. The Washington State Department of Transportation operates an office building there, and rather than being redeveloped, it's being expanded, with room for roughly 200 additional Department of Ecology workers. Not every building inside the Shoreline Place boundary is headed for demolition. Some of it is simply staying, and growing.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
If you shop at Town & Country Market or grab a slice at Round Table Pizza, nothing about your routine changes. Those businesses aren't part of the current construction and aren't scheduled to be. What's changing is the parking lot edges: the former bank site, now framed out as five new storefronts, and the empty stretch along Westminster where the Sears Auto Center used to sit.
If you're the type who's been tracking this since the "coming soon" signs first went up, the honest update is that construction activity right now is a real signal, but it points toward 2028, not next spring. The Sears shell itself, the part of the story that's dragged the longest, appears to finally be moving too, though the city's own materials suggest the full build-out of that piece is still a decade or more out.
Shoreline changes in increments like this more often than people expect, a few storefronts at a time, years apart, easy to miss unless you're paying attention to the right corner of Aurora. That's part of what makes tracking a specific property's context, not just its listing price, worth doing before you buy or sell here. If you'd like to talk through what a particular block or building's timeline means for a home you're watching in Shoreline, Andrew MacGillivray is glad to walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
