Two equestrians rode the new trail for the first time at the ribbon cutting on August 19, 2026, walking their horses along a strip of decomposed granite and native grasses where an open concrete drainage channel used to run. For as long as most current Agoura Hills residents can remember, that channel sat directly behind Whizin Market Square, the collection of restaurants and boutiques along Roadside Drive that functions as the closest thing the city has to a downtown. You could eat at Basta, browse the antique mall, catch the Saturday farmers market, and never once walk anywhere except back to your car, because there was nowhere else to go. The channel saw to that.
The Ladyface Greenway changes what that block is for. It is worth being precise about what actually opened, because the difference between a park and a parking lot upgrade is the whole story here.
What Got Built, And What It Replaced
The greenway runs about 700 feet along Agoura Road, from the Whizin Market Square driveway to Cornell Road, on land that belonged to the LA County Flood Control District. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. Before construction could start, the city needed a land-use agreement with the county, since most of the project footprint sat on county flood-control property rather than city land. The council approved that agreement back in 2023, a milestone that then-Public Works Director Jessica Forte described as the final piece needed to secure permits, since a straightforward park project had spent years tied up in an interagency easement question most residents never saw.
What the county eventually released is now a landscaped corridor with native plantings, seating, and separate paths for pedestrians, cyclists, and equestrians, built on top of a capped drainage channel. The engineering underneath is not decorative. A system of bioswales, channels lined with soil, stone, and vegetation, filters roughly 1,100 cubic feet of stormwater before it reaches the flood control system, according to the city's own project page. Utility and communication lines along Agoura and Cornell roads were also moved underground as part of the work, a fire-risk reduction detail that will matter more to residents than the native grasses will, given the canyon terrain immediately south.
The name itself is not marketing. City staff pulled it from the same subcommittee that oversaw the design, and the choice was unanimous, according to former Public Works Director Forte's remarks to the council. Ladyface Mountain has anchored the skyline south of the 101 for as long as there has been a city here, and a historical marker at its trailhead off Kanan Road credits the Chumash with naming it, seeing the shape of a woman's face turned toward the sky in its ridgeline. At the August dedication, Tataviam and Chumash elder Alan Salazar connected the greenway to a broader revitalization of Native American culture in the area, and Mayor Jeremy Wolf framed the project at the dedication as an homage to the people who stewarded this land long before the city existed, carried out through native plantings along a channel that had been bare concrete for decades.
The Irony Whizin's Own Owner Pointed Out
Bill Tucker, president of Tucker Investment Group, has owned Whizin Market Square since 2006. In comments to The Acorn as the greenway neared completion, he described his approach to retail as building pedestrian-friendly environments, then acknowledged the obvious catch: Whizin has always been reached almost entirely by car. That is not a knock on the center. It is a fair description of a shopping square that backed onto a drainage ditch instead of a park for its entire existence. You cannot build a walkable feel next to a flood channel. You can only fake it with landscaping and hope people don't look too closely at what's on the other side of the fence.
Tucker is already trying to close that gap from his end. He has been drawing up plans to add storefronts along the south side of the center that would give tenants direct access to greenway foot traffic, rather than forcing every visitor through the main parking lot entrance. As of the reporting in August, that work was still moving through the entitlements and building-permit process, so it has not broken ground. But the direction is clear: after almost twenty years of ownership, the arrival of an actual park next door is prompting the first real reconfiguration of how people enter the property.
In the meantime, the dining lineup at Whizin gives a resident plenty of reason to make the walk anyway. Basta has held down Italian for years. Sunrose California Eatery, open since 2023, does all-day brunch with a patio that will now open onto green space instead of a service road. Bastina, Plata Taqueria & Cantina, Wood Ranch, Two Doughs Pizza Co., Blue Table Wine and Cheese Bar, and Noi Due Trattoria round out a strip that already had more range than its footprint suggests. The Saturday farmers market, which runs in the Whizin parking lot, is now a short walk from an actual place to sit afterward that isn't a curb.
What's Rising Across Cornell Road
The greenway is not the only thing changing on that stretch of Agoura Road. Directly across Cornell Road, on the site of the city's last movie theater, the Regency Center is under construction and expected to bring 278 apartments to the neighborhood, with occupancy anticipated in August 2027. The four-story building will include about 1,000 square feet of commercial space slated for a coffee shop, and the former FedEx building on the same site is expected to house two restaurants.
That is close to 300 new households landing within a short walk of both the greenway and Whizin inside the next year, in a city whose entire public park inventory south of the 101 freeway consisted of nothing until this past month. Whether or not those specific residents ever set foot in a real estate office, the arithmetic is straightforward: the one stretch of Agoura Hills that is quietly becoming walkable is also the stretch absorbing the next wave of new housing. That is not a coincidence the city planned by accident. Forte told the council in 2023 that the greenway would serve a larger share of residents as more affordable housing gets built nearby, and the Regency project is the first test of that math.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
For seventy years, Whizin Market Square has been Agoura Hills' downtown in every sense except the one that usually defines a downtown: you couldn't walk between the things in it. The businesses were good. The connective tissue was a flood channel. That is the specific thing that changed on August 19, not the abstract idea of "green space" that shows up in every city press release. If you already eat at Basta or hit the Saturday market, the practical difference is a corridor you can walk, bike, or ride a horse along that didn't exist a month ago, running the length of the block you already know. If you live near Cornell Road, the more relevant fact is that the empty lot across the street from Whizin is turning into nearly 300 apartments over the next year, which will change the foot traffic and parking dynamics on that corner well before anyone moves in.
Neither of those things requires you to be thinking about your house's value. But they are the kind of block-level shifts that tend to matter later, when a buyer or a neighbor asks what's changed nearby, and the honest answer turns out to be more specific than "it's grown a lot."
If you're weighing what a shift like this means for your own property, or you're simply trying to keep a clear picture of what's changing in the neighborhoods Michael Bloom Homes covers, Michael Bloom has spent his career tracking exactly this kind of local detail across Agoura Hills, Calabasas, and the West Valley. Schedule a confidential consultation whenever you're ready for a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the listing photos show.
