JCPenney Westminster Mall Closure After 32 Years and What Comes Next

JCPenney permanently closed at Westminster Mall on November 21, 2025, ending a 32-year run as the shopping center’s last operating anchor. Five months later, the building is boarded up behind a perimeter fence, a demolition permit is pending city approval, and a developer has assembled all 83.3 acres of the site to replace it entirely.

The closure wasn’t an isolated business decision. It was the final event in a decade of documented revenue decline, four years under a bankrupt landlord, and the departure of every major tenant the mall had ever anchored.

At a Glance

When Did JCPenney Close at Westminster Mall?

JCPenney’s Westminster location stopped serving customers on November 16, 2025 and completed its permanent shutdown on November 21. The announcement came on August 20, 2025, through a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with California by Texas-based Penney OpCo LLC, meeting the state’s mandatory 60-day advance notice requirement.

The store had operated at 400 Westminster Mall since November 1993, having relocated from Huntington Center Mall, now known as Bella Terra in Huntington Beach. Its 32-year tenure made it the mall’s longest-running active anchor at the time it closed.

Why Did Westminster Mall Close?

Westminster Mall’s closure did not happen because of any single event. It came after a decade of measurable revenue decline, compounded by years under a landlord that had itself gone bankrupt.

The revenue decline, in numbers:

Westminster Mall shed more than 55% of its commercial value over a decade. For most of its existence, it had been the city’s primary sales tax generator, a fact recorded in the City of Westminster’s own official civic history.

The ownership failure accelerated the collapse. Washington Prime Group (WPG), which took over Westminster Mall in May 2014 after being spun off from Simon Property Group, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 13, 2021, carrying $3.9 billion in total debt across 102 malls. The company emerged from bankruptcy in October 2021, went private, and spent the years that followed selling off what remained of its portfolio.

Westminster Mall operated under a bankrupt landlord for roughly four years, with an owner that had no realistic capacity to reinvest in the property, renegotiate anchor leases, or attract replacements for the tenants already gone. By March 2024, an $85 million loan against WPG’s portion of the property had been transferred to special servicing for “imminent monetary default.” The value of WPG’s stake had dropped by $67 million since the loan was originally issued in 2014.

The anchor exit sequence reflects that same trajectory:

By October 29, 2025, the leases of all 168 remaining tenants had expired, effectively ending operations across the mall interior. JCPenney followed three weeks later.

Is Target Still Open at Westminster Mall?

Yes. Target was not part of the mall closure. The retailer owns its building and land parcel independently of the Westminster Mall structure and was never subject to the October 29, 2025 lease expiry that ended operations for the remaining tenants. Target has no announced closure plans and is expected to continue operating into the Bolsa Pacific redevelopment.

What Happened to the 76 Employees?

Penney OpCo LLC’s WARN filing confirmed 76 workers at the Westminster location would be permanently separated, with layoffs beginning November 10, 2025. The affected positions included:

• 19 cashiers
• 16 sales floor associates
• The store’s general manager
• Additional operations and support staff

JCPenney told employees on August 18 that management would try to identify transfer opportunities at other locations. No confirmed placements were publicly reported.

What Is Replacing Westminster Mall?

Irvine-based Shopoff Realty Investments has spent nearly four years assembling the full site. The final acquisition, completed February 2, 2026, consolidated ownership across 83.3 acres.

Shopoff paid close to $93 million for the final WPG parcel, according to real estate data firm CoStar. The replacement project, named Bolsa Pacific at Westminster and designed by architecture firm AO, is currently in the city’s entitlement review. The plan includes:

• 2,250 residential units, spanning for-sale homes, market-rate apartments, and affordable housing
• A 120-room hotel
• 220,000 square feet of retail, anchored by a 15,000 sq ft food hall and the existing Target
• More than 15 acres of open space, including an urban park, walking trails, and open-air promenades

Shopoff CEO William A. Shopoff said the company envisions Bolsa Pacific as a new kind of community gathering place, projecting up to 8,000 future residents on the finished development.

Is Westminster Mall Being Demolished?

Shopoff announced that demolition would begin by April 2026. As of January 14, 2026, the City of Westminster confirmed in an official statement that a demolition permit and plan had been submitted and were under city review at that point. Full construction of Bolsa Pacific is targeted to start in Q4 2026, after demolition is complete and entitlement approvals are finalized.

Since closing in October, the mall had become a persistent public safety problem. Westminster police logged more than 400 calls for service to the site, with 57 in a single week and over 30 arrests for trespassing and vandalism. Videos showing stripped interiors and graffiti-covered storefronts spread widely on social media before the building was boarded up and fenced off on January 12, 2026.

JCPenney’s Store Count and National Status in 2026

Westminster was one of several JCPenney closures that came out of the chain’s ongoing restructuring after its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in May 2020. The filing resulted in more than 200 store closures, dropping the chain’s count from approximately 850 to around 650 locations nationally.

In January 2025, JCPenney merged with SPARC Group to form Catalyst Brands, a retail holding company that also operates Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, Lucky Brand, and Nautica. A separately announced $947 million deal to sell 119 JCPenney-owned store properties to private equity firm Onyx Partners collapsed in December 2025, leaving those locations without a clear resolution. As of March 2026, JCPenney operates 646 stores across the country.

Westminster Mall opened on August 7, 1974, on land that had previously been the site of the world’s largest goldfish farm. The city it served has a 43.8% Vietnamese-American population, the highest municipal concentration in the United States according to the 2020 census, making Westminster the recognized center of Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam. Little Saigon generates close to $1 billion in annual sales along Bolsa Avenue, the same street that borders the former mall site.

For generations of Westminster families, the mall was woven into ordinary life. School clothes, first jobs, weekend afternoons. At its peak, it brought nearly $270 million a year into the city’s tax base. By the time JCPenney turned off the lights, it was producing $120 million and still falling.

What came after closure was a boarded-up building, a police perimeter, and more than 400 emergency calls in a matter of weeks. What comes next will take years: 2,250 homes, a hotel, a food hall, walking trails, and up to 8,000 residents. The mall that opened on a former goldfish farm in 1974 is gone. What gets built at the corner of Bolsa Avenue and Goldenwest Street will be something Orange County has never seen there in more than 50 years.

Sources: OC Business Journal (Emily Santiago-Molina, August 20, 2025), City of Westminster official press releases (January 14, 2026), Shopoff Realty Investments press release (February 2, 2026), The Real Deal LA, Wikipedia — Westminster Mall (California), KTLA, Urbanize LA, REBusiness Online, Bisnow LA, CoStar via DNYUZ/Los Angeles Times, FinanceBuzz, Coresight Research.