Two projects are moving through San Leandro's shoreline right now, and they are running on completely different clocks. One is a free outdoor fitness court landing at Marina Park this fall, built by the city, on schedule, no drama attached. The other is the nine-hole Marina golf course a few hundred yards away, which was supposed to get a full redesign as part of a 500-unit housing project. In March 2026, the City Council terminated the developer's ground leases for the hotel, housing, restaurant and retail elements on the west side of that project, after the developer failed to obtain permits and stopped paying property taxes on the land. Same 75 acres. Two timelines. Only one of them has a delivery date you can circle on a calendar.
If you walk, bike or run the shoreline regularly, this split explains a lot about what's changing under your feet this year and what still isn't.
What actually shows up this fall
The city owns roughly 950 acres of shoreline along the bay, and most of it isn't tangled up in any development fight. That's the part getting visibly better right now.
The Outdoor Fitness Court at Marina Park is scheduled to open this fall, free equipment for residents of all ages and abilities, no membership or reservation required. A few hundred feet away, the Shoreline Dog Park keeps doing what it's done for years: you find it by walking past the Bay Trail entrance and looking left after you pass the EBMUD building's whale mural, still one of the more useful landmarks in San Leandro for giving someone directions that actually work.
At The Landing at Monarch Bay Bistro & Bar, the kitchen equipment upgrade is already finished, which means the restaurant is running fresh menu offerings rather than waiting on a permit or a funding round. The Wes McClure Boat Launch stays open to the public daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and roughly two miles of the Bay Trail's regional path still run directly through San Leandro's shoreline, connecting south toward Oyster Bay.
None of this required a developer to close on anything. It's the city's own park and facilities budget doing what it does every year, and this year that includes a new piece of exercise equipment that didn't exist last fall.
Why the library keeps moving and the golf course doesn't
The Mulford-Marina Library is under construction right now, a 3,900-square-foot branch designed by Studio Urbis with Group 4 Architects, built around a garden reading area on the quieter side of the site, away from the two busy streets that border it. The city expects it done by January 2027. That timeline hasn't moved.
Compare that to the golf course. The Monarch Bay Shoreline project was structured as a public-private partnership: the city would get a modernized nine-hole golf course, a new library, and park improvements, while the developer, Cal-Coast Companies, would build roughly 500 homes, a hotel, and retail space on land the city sold it for the deal. The library is a city-funded, city-built project. The golf course redesign depends on Cal-Coast actually building the housing that was supposed to pay for it.
That housing side stalled in June 2024, when an affiliate called Monarch Bay For Sale Residential LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after defaulting on a $24.9 million bridge loan the city itself had extended for the westside homes. The city filed its own Chapter 11 liquidating plan in October 2025, amended it again in February 2026, and is now working the case as a secured creditor trying to force a sale to a new, qualified developer. Two potential buyers negotiated with the bankruptcy estate over the past year. Neither one closed escrow.
The March 2026 termination only covered the westside piece, the hotel, multifamily housing, restaurant and retail elements. The eastside, which includes the golf course redesign and a separate set of single-family homes and townhomes, is still technically alive. City staff and Cal-Coast held a community meeting on July 30, 2026, to walk residents through the proposed redesign of the existing nine-hole course. Whether that meeting leads anywhere depends on whether Cal-Coast can actually execute, which is the same question that's been open since the loan default in 2024.
Why the marina needed replacing at all
It's worth knowing why any of this is happening, because the answer isn't cosmetic. The original small boat harbor was built in the early 1960s, expanded in 1970 and 1972, and improved again in 1984 and 1991. The problem was never the docks themselves. It was the channel. Natural currents kept filling it with silt, which meant the city had to dredge it constantly just to keep boats moving in and out, an expensive fight against sediment that never really ended.
In 2008, San Leandro lost the federal funding it had been using to dredge that channel. Rather than keep paying for it out of the general fund indefinitely, the city decided to dismantle the docks and redevelop the land for housing instead, which is the decision that eventually became the Monarch Bay Shoreline project now sitting in bankruptcy court. The land itself has a longer history than that. It's the aboriginal homeland of the Lisjan Ohlone people, in the territory of Huchiun, and it was known for its oyster production until the 1906 earthquake released oil deposits that polluted the beds. The shoreline spent the 1920s and 1930s as a dump before it became a marina at all.
None of that history explains why the fitness court is opening on time this fall. It does explain why the bigger project, the one tied to the golf course and 500 housing units, has always been a heavier lift than a park amenity ever was. One track answers to a city budget cycle. The other answers to a federal bankruptcy docket.
What's still genuinely undecided
The city also secured a $1.09 million EPA grant, through the advocacy of U.S. Representative Lateefah Simon, to fund clean water infrastructure improvements in the shoreline development area. As of the most recent city update, staff was still refining the project scope and waiting on the formal grant agreement from the EPA, which means that money hasn't started moving yet either. It's a public grant, but it's tied to the same footprint as the stalled private development, so its timeline is somewhere between the fitness court's and the golf course's.
The eastside single-family homes and townhomes are still, technically, part of an active bankruptcy estate that the city is trying to steer toward a sale. Nothing about that process has a fixed date the way the library does. If you've been watching for updates and haven't seen much change since last year, that's an accurate read of where things actually stand, not something you missed.
The version that's actually true right now
If your daily use of the shoreline is the fitness court, the dog park, the boat launch, or the two miles of Bay Trail that run past the whale mural, none of that is waiting on a bankruptcy judge. That part of the shoreline runs on the city's clock, and the city's clock has been keeping its dates. The golf course, the hotel, and the 500 new homes are a different story, tied to a developer working through Chapter 11 and two buyers who didn't make it to closing. Both of those things are true on the same 75 acres, at the same time, and they'll probably keep being true for a while longer.
If you're curious how any of this shoreline activity could shape values on that side of town, or just want a straight read on what's actually moving versus what's stuck, Teri Carlisle & Alexandra Dierkx are always glad to talk it through.
