For a decade, if you asked anyone involved in Santa Clara city planning where the next great gathering place would be, the answer was always the same word: Franklin. Franklin Street, the old commercial spine that ran past the Historic Depot and up toward Santa Clara University, was supposed to become the walkable heart the city lost when 1950s and '60s urban renewal bulldozed its Victorian storefronts. City-run planning sessions back in 2015 sketched out a pedestrian mall stretching from El Camino Real to Lafayette Street, with patios and courtyards and reasons to linger. A resident group called Reclaiming Our Downtown later found that 87 percent of the people they surveyed wanted that project prioritized over almost anything else the city could spend money on. Last year, that same group was still pushing to move city hall back downtown, arguing it was the missing piece. As of this summer, coverage of the effort still describes it as slow to start.
Meanwhile, if you wanted to find the actual walkable, food-forward, stay-out-late version of Santa Clara this year, you'd have needed to walk three blocks past Franklin, or drive out toward the stadium.
The city built a temporary downtown at 900 Lafayette Street
This was Santa Clara's landmark year on paper before a single fork hit a plate. The city ran its own branding push around it, calling 2026 "Where the Mission Meets the Moment," timed to Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium this past February and six FIFA World Cup matches hosted there over the summer. In between those two headline events, the city partnered with San José Made and Moveable Feast to launch something Santa Clara hadn't really had before: a recurring outdoor night market, built from scratch at 900 Lafayette Street, a block removed from the Franklin corridor everyone had spent a decade planning around.
It ran three separate weekends this year, each a two-day event: May 1 and 2, June 5 and 6, and July 17 through 19. Each one packed in more than 110 makers, artists, and food vendors, with free admission and live music. It's worth sitting with the geography here. The city didn't need Franklin Street's storefronts to be finished, or a pedestrian mall to be built, or a decade of planning documents to resolve. It needed a parking lot, some vendor tents, and a weekend. That's the version of downtown energy Santa Clara actually got in 2026, and it showed up faster and in a different spot than the official plan ever promised.
The other half of the story is happening next to the stadium
If Lafayette Street solved the "somewhere to walk on a Friday night" problem temporarily, the more permanent shift is happening even farther from Franklin, out near Levi's Stadium itself. Back in those same 2015 planning sessions, someone on the city's own working group made a point of separating the two ideas: the stadium area was described as destination commercial, not downtown. Whether or not that distinction still holds, it's where the money went.
Ensemble Investments has spent the past year building out Clara District, a walkable retail and residential corridor anchored by AVE Santa Clara, an apartment community with a food and beverage garden called Clara's Junction, sitting across from a separate residential project from Related called The Clara Residences. The district's first signature restaurant, an Italian steakhouse from Hero Ranch Kitchen Group, the team behind Hero Ranch Kitchen and Flowers Saratoga, opened at nearly 5,000 square feet with both indoor and outdoor seating, timed deliberately to open ahead of Super Bowl LX. That's not a coincidence. It's the same instinct that built the Lafayette Street night market: use a mega-event deadline to force something into existence that a normal planning timeline wouldn't have delivered this fast.
None of this is on Franklin Street. It's a separate node entirely, closer to the corporate campuses and the stadium than to the historic core, connected by its own mix of Amtrak-ACE Rail, VTA light rail, Caltrain, and BART access rather than by anything resembling a downtown grid.
The mall picked up its own separate wave
Then there's a third node, and this one has nothing to do with either downtown or the stadium district. Westfield Valley Fair spent 2026 adding two major dining concepts that have little precedent in the mall's existing lineup. Asia Live, a 13,000 square foot restaurant, market, and bar from the team behind San Francisco's China Live, was slated to open there this spring, built around sushi and robata stations, tandoori ovens, and an Indonesian rice table. Tai Er, a Sichuan chain founded in Guangzhou in 2015 that has since grown past 650 locations worldwide, is also landing at Valley Fair this year, known for a sauerkraut fish dish poached in pork bone broth. Both are joining Mastro's Steakhouse, which has anchored that part of the mall for years.
A few miles out on El Camino Real, the pattern kept going. Randy's Donuts confirmed a Santa Clara location for early 2026, though city sign regulations mean this outpost won't get the chain's famous 32-foot rooftop doughnut, just a smaller version of the sculpture. Chubby Cattle BBQ, a yakiniku concept known for tabletop grilling and robot servers, announced plans for a spot at 3775 East El Camino Real, though as of this summer no opening date has been confirmed.
Add it up and you get three separate clusters of new energy in one year, none of them on the street the city spent a decade trying to fix.
What this actually changes if you already live here
If you've been waiting for Franklin Street itself to feel different, the honest answer is that it mostly doesn't yet. The pedestrian mall concept from those 2015 meetings hasn't been built. The push to relocate city hall downtown is still just a push. If your mental map of Santa Clara has Franklin Street as the future town square, that map is still accurate as a plan and inaccurate as a description of where people are actually spending their Friday nights this year.
What's changed is that you now have two other places doing that job instead, and they behave differently. The Lafayette Street night market was built to be temporary and event-driven. Nothing confirms it returns next spring in the same form, so treat this year's three weekends as exactly that, a one-year experiment tied to a landmark civic calendar, not a permanent fixture you can count on for next summer. Clara District is the opposite kind of bet. AVE Santa Clara, Clara's Junction, and the new steakhouse are built structures, not pop-ups, and they're likely to keep drawing people toward the stadium side of the city regardless of what Franklin Street does next. The mall's new tenants sit somewhere in between, permanent additions to a commercial center that was never trying to be a downtown in the first place.
For a resident deciding where to actually go this fall, that's the useful takeaway. The stadium district and the mall are the bets that stick. The historic core is still the plan on paper. And the gap between those two things tells you more about how Santa Clara actually grows than any single restaurant opening does on its own.
If you're curious how these shifts ripple into what a Santa Clara home is worth or where the next wave of interest is likely to land, that's the kind of on-the-ground read Karin Freiman tracks block by block, not just listing by listing. Reach out whenever you're ready to talk through it.
