Shopoff Plans Urban Retail Village for Orange County Mall With 1,200 Homes

Shopoff Realty Investments has announced plans to convert the Westminster Mall in Orange County to an urban retail village with more than 1,200 new homes.

Plans filed in Orange County by the Irvine-based developer envision the redevelopment of 26 acres on either side of the mall, which is in Westminster, according to a report in Urbanize Los Angeles.

Residential buildings will replace a shuttered Macy’s and a vacant Sears store at the mall. Shopoff bought the site of the former Sears store for $46M in July.

When it opened nearly 50 years ago in 1974, the mall adjacent to the 405 Freeway at Bolsa Avenue and Edwards Street encompassed 90 acres, including 1.3M in retail space that when it opened was anchored by Macy’s, JCPenney and Target.

The development planned by Shopoff, to be known as Bolsa Pacific at Westminster, will include three, six-story apartment buildings with 1,056 residential units, plus 102 townhomes.

The project also will include a 175-room hotel, 25K of ground-floor shops and restaurants, including a food hall, and a 2.5-acre park, with paths and connections to bicycle paths. An amphitheater, outdoor dining, a dog park and a garden also are planned.

Shopoff is aiming to break ground in 2025.

Mall REIT Simon Property Group is embracing experiential strategies creating retail villages infused with residential developments, with a growing expectation that these mixed-use communities will be the next generation of post-pandemic malls.

The largest mall REIT announced earlier this year a project to convert a parking structure into a 360-unit, five-and-one-half story residential campus at Stoneridge Shopping Center in the East Bay city of Pleasanton.

The 618K SF apartment building will replace a 700-vehicle parking facility that will be demolished. Simon is planning to build a new 383K SF parking garage that can hold 473 cars—inside the new apartment building.

According to the plans, the apartment units at Stoneridge will be “wrapped” around an internal, five-level parking structure. Residents will have access to two ground-level outdoor courtyard spaces, including a mix of common use outdoor space and recreational space. The building also will have a common rooftop deck area.

The project will be built on six acres located between the mall and a new 10X Genomics campus across Stonebridge Mall Road. Although the parcel was not included as part of Pleasanton’s current sixth Housing Element plan, it was one of nine sites that were zoned for high-density multifamily development in 2012 in order to meet the state’s target in a previous planning cycle.

Therefore, the city already has a completed environmental impact review for the site, expediting the Simon conversion project, Pleasanton officials told the Livermore Vine.

According to the newspaper report, Simon originally was going to build 500 apartment units at the site but scaled the building down to create more open space, as suggested by city planners.

“The applicant has [added] usable open space and landscaped areas within the project, as well as areas for circulation and gathering, that will improve the connectivity and functionality for that portion of the mall and make better use of an underutilized parking field,” Eric Luchini, Pleasanton’s senior city planner, told the Vine.

In January, Simon unveiled an experiential mall project in Los Angeles, an Urban-Retail Village with 380 apartment units, outdoor shops and restaurants that will replace a former Sears complex at Brea Mall.

Urban-Retail Village is a rapidly emerging post-pandemic model for the redevelopment of malls into experiential communities, where people can stroll out of their apartments into a neighborhood filled with outdoor shops, restaurants and, of course, a fitness center so the local foot traffic is brisk.

According to plans the mall REIT submitted to the city late last year—which were approved by the Brea Planning Commission in December—Simon is planning this kind of transformation at the Brea Mall, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

The plans call for the redevelopment of 16 acres of the 74-acre mall, a vacant 162K wing formerly occupied by a Sears department store and a Sears Auto Center, which is a separate building in a 7.5-acre parking lot.