What Has Happened to Our Marketplace?

Last March 2023, the town was looking forward to the newly remodeled Marketplace. With new restaurants, a plant shop, a meat market, a grocery store, a coffee and loose leaf tea shop, and wine tasting galore.
Inside the building there were so many towns people one could barely get the door open to see what all the fuss was about.
Having lived in Castro Valley since 1997, buying our first home my husband and I were over the moon with all the activity promised from the opening of the long over due remodeled “Marketplace”.
To date, one year later as my husband and I wandered through the Marketplace; we looked at each other and began to tear up. What has happened? No hustle, nor bustle not nearly a person in sight. Countless stores were closed. Down stairs the wine shop welcomes you with iron gates. The upstairs floor a ghost town. Completely cleared out, baren. On the first floor there is a proposed pizza parlor still waiting to be open. And yet the only thing open was the floor space. Empty cement floors with holes in the walls, and empty boxes spread about.
One small (sweet) shop owners stated, “she was promised activity when she moved in and suddenly found herself working in a warehouse”.
Please help me understand, what my friends and neighbors has happened to our Marketplace commerce?

–Vallorie Kalos, Castro Valley