A tunnel boring machine will never break ground on Stradella Road. But the fight over whether one should has already cost a Bel-Air homeowner close to a million dollars, and it isn't close to over. That's the piece of this neighborhood's 2026 that doesn't show up when you drive through it. At street level, gates are still gates, hedges are still hedges, and the one thing that visibly changed is a restaurant sign. Underneath that calm, three separate institutions, Metro, the Getty, and the neighborhood's own homeowners association, are in the middle of decisions that will shape what Bel-Air looks and feels like for the next several years.
The Fight Over What's 90 Feet Down
In January 2026, the Metro board unanimously approved a heavy rail route for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, the long-studied project meant to connect the San Fernando Valley to the Westside through the Sepulveda Pass. The approved alignment runs underground, beneath Bel-Air, rather than as an elevated monorail alongside the 405. None of the route options on the table included a station inside Bel-Air itself. The neighborhood would carry the disruption without getting a stop.
Opposition has been organized and well-funded since before the vote. Bel-Air resident Fred Rosen, the former Ticketmaster CEO, leads a group called Keep Bel Air Beautiful that has pushed for the monorail alternative instead, arguing that a tunnel means construction noise, vibration, and ventilation infrastructure under residential lots for years. Bel-Air Association president Jamie Meyer has publicly described the tunnel plan as "mind boggling expensive and potentially dangerous," language that gives a sense of how seriously the neighborhood's own governing association has taken this.
The numbers on each side don't agree, and that gap is worth sitting with.
| Metro's position | Rosen / Keep Bel Air Beautiful | |
|---|---|---|
| Total project cost | $24.2 billion | Roughly $40 billion by completion |
| Completion date | Not fixed publicly | 2050 |
| Underground travel time (Valley to Westside) | About 18 minutes | Same figure, cited as too slow to justify the cost |
| Bel-Air population affected | Fewer than 10,000 residents | Same figure, cited as too few to justify a station-less tunnel |
What a Lawsuit Buys You in Delay
Rosen has spent close to $1 million on legal action against the project since the board's approval, arguing that Metro's cost estimate will balloon well past $24.2 billion and that a subway finished around 2050 will be outdated technology by the time anyone rides it. Whether that argument holds up in court is a separate question from what it does to the calendar. The Sepulveda Corridor's second phase, the section that would eventually extend south toward LAX, isn't scheduled to break ground until 2048. The first phase, the section running under Bel-Air, is the one currently being litigated.
For a neighborhood whose Architectural Review Committee already flags construction parking and soil removal on ordinary home remodels, a multi-year legal fight over a subway alignment is not background noise. It is the single largest civic question in front of the Bel-Air Association right now, ahead of anything related to a specific property.
The Getty Is Also Shrinking, on Its Own Schedule
Bel-Air's most visited neighbor is going through its own version of this. The Getty Center is in the middle of what it calls the most significant modernization since the museum opened in 1997, and the first phase is already underway. Several galleries are closed right now for the work, including the South Pavilion's galleries 102 and 206, the East Pavilion's plaza-level galleries, and the North Pavilion. This week alone, the Center closed early, at 5:30pm on September 27, and the Getty Villa is set to close early at 2pm on September 30.
At the same time, new exhibitions keep opening. A show opened September 1 running through January 3, 2027. A collection highlight built around Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Mai opened September 15 and runs through March 2027. Another exhibition opens September 22 and runs into January 2027. The Getty is adding programming and losing square footage in the same month, which is an odd position for a cultural institution to be in, and it isn't temporary in the way a single gallery renovation usually is. The full Getty Center campus is scheduled to close to the public entirely from spring 2027 through spring 2028. During that closure, the Getty Villa stays open with expanded offerings, including a new gallery showing paintings normally housed at the Center, and the museum plans to open a separate programming space in a building it's renovating on Sepulveda Boulevard, across the street from the Center itself.
For anyone in Bel-Air who treats the Getty as a default weekend option or a landmark for giving directions, the next eighteen months look different than the last eighteen did.
The Only New Storefront This Fall
Bel-Air's commercial footprint has always been small on purpose, a handful of addresses rather than a corridor. The building at 662 North Sepulveda Boulevard sat closed for a stretch after years as the Bel-Air Bar & Grill and later simply the Bel-Air Restaurant. This year it reopened as Umberto Bar & Grill, now serving lunch and dinner Tuesday through Saturday, with a daily happy hour from 4 to 6pm and a kitchen that stays open until 10.
That single reopening is real news specifically because so little else moves. The neighborhood's dining scene, as counted by OpenTable earlier this year, sits at six restaurants total. The names diners return to most are:
- Il Segreto
- SHU (Sushi House Unico)
- Ava Kro
- Umberto Bar & Grill
Up at the Hotel Bel-Air, the kitchen has settled into a post-Wolfgang Puck identity under culinary director Joe Garcia, a French Laundry alumnus who built his reputation at Manzke, working alongside pastry chef Christophe Rull. The hotel also brings back its mid-September grilling event on the front lawn and gardens this year, with food from chefs including Evan Funke and Jackson Kalb alongside wine and spirits from around the city. It's a one-weekend event, not a new fixture, but it's the kind of detail that tells you the hotel's food program is still actively curated rather than coasting.
The Same Owner, a Different Kind of Concern
The building that now houses Umberto Bar & Grill comes with a second, less celebratory story attached. Business owners along Sepulveda Pass, including Umberto's building owner Jessica Kamron, have raised concerns in recent weeks about an encampment behind a strip mall on the 800 block of Sepulveda Boulevard, near Moraga Drive. Kamron has said her priority is helping people find housing while also addressing fire, sanitation, and safety concerns tied to the site, and that she has reported the situation to the city three times without seeing it resolved. A nearby pet-grooming business owner has said the same encampment has been there for years, and that an outreach organization has previously visited to offer water and assistance.
The concern has sharpened following a recent 25-acre fire near the 405 and the Getty Center. Investigators have not linked the encampment to that fire, and there's no confirmed connection between the two. The comparison people keep making is to the 2017 Skirball Fire, which burned 422 acres and was traced to an illegal cooking fire at an encampment nearby, though that's a historical reference point, not evidence about the current situation. What's clear is that the same stretch of Sepulveda now holds both Bel-Air's newest restaurant and one of its more persistent unresolved municipal concerns, reported by the same business owner.
Bel-Air's whole design has always been about controlling what's visible from the street and what isn't. This fall, the things that actually moved were mostly the ones nobody can see from a car window: a tunnel alignment under legal challenge, a museum's gallery footprint shrinking on a construction schedule measured in years, and a strip of Sepulveda Boulevard where one new kitchen opened and one old problem didn't go anywhere.
If you're trying to make sense of what any of this means for a specific property, an association fight, or a listing near Sepulveda Pass, LA Realty Concierge tracks these threads as they develop. Schedule your concierge consultation to talk through what's actually changing in Bel-Air and what it means for your address.
