Old Town’s Perry’s Cafe, the highway-side diner that opened in 1985, is giving way to a seven-story, 223-unit apartment building that will keep a small slice of the past on-site. A portion of the original restaurant will be preserved and reused as the project’s leasing office.
The development spans roughly 1.75 acres at 4620 Pacific Highway and is planned to stack five residential floors above a two-story podium with a partial below-grade parking level. City filings keep the count at 33 set-aside affordable units, with 20 reserved for very-low-income households and 13 for moderate-income households. Construction activity has already begun on the transit-oriented site.
What the plans call for
Documents on the state CEQAnet portal describe the “Viewpoint Old Town” neighborhood development permit and related addendum, outlining a seven-story building with 223 multifamily units, roughly 239,887 square feet of gross building area, amenity spaces and detailed parking provisions. According to the CEQAnet filing, the design retains portions of Perry’s Cafe, including its Googie-style roofline, and uses density-bonus incentives to reach the higher unit count.
Ownership and timeline
Commercial real-estate reporting shows the 1.74-acre parcel sold to Viewpoint Development for about $9 million in 2024, with the firm pursuing design approvals at city hall; ConnectCRE details the transaction. Local coverage by NBC 7 San Diego reported that the cafe announced its final service in August 2024 and quoted a city spokesman saying the applicant has three years to use the Neighborhood Development Permit and apply for construction permits.
Construction and contractors
Industry trackers and local project pages show work mobilized in 2025 as the site shifted from entitlement to construction staging. BuildSD and other local reports note the project is being built under general-contractor oversight, and contractor social posts pointed to a November 19, 2025 ground-breaking. Later contractor updates described crews at work and declared that “Perry’s Apartments is rising.”
A developer with a bigger footprint
The firm now associated with the project also figures prominently in a larger Midway redevelopment plan. Zephyr, which lists the Perry’s project in its portfolio, is a partner in the multi-billion-dollar Midway Rising proposal to redevelop the Sports Arena area with thousands of homes and a new arena. The developer says the Old Town site will be highly walkable to Old Town Transit Center and, over time, to the Midway Rising neighborhood, as outlined in Zephyr’s project materials and city documents on the larger scheme.
Neighbors and the appeal
During public review, neighbors raised concerns about the project’s scale, traffic, noise and air quality, and opposition groups filed an appeal during the entitlement process. Reporting from community outlets and local news captured those debates and the cafe owner’s comments about preserving the building’s character. The appeal was ultimately declined during the city’s review process, and the Notice of Determination and related permit documents are available on the CEQAnet record.
Permits and what’s next
The formal CEQA and neighborhood-development approvals remain the controlling documents for what builders can construct and where mitigation is required, and the CEQAnet filing lists mitigation measures and conditions tied to the project’s approval. With construction underway and no final completion date posted, the project is set to move forward under the conditions in the city’s record and through standard building-permit reviews.
For Old Town residents, the site that once served thousands of breakfasts weekly will soon be a dense, transit-adjacent housing block. Whether the new development helps ease local housing pressure or stirs up more debate about scale and neighborhood character will unfold as units come online and the city monitors those mitigation commitments.
