Rush Is On to Build Office Developments Near Anaheim Stadium

Baseball and football fans know that Anaheim Stadium is a great place to view professional sports, munch a hot dog, root for the home team--and then go home.

City officials want to change that picture and make the Anaheim Stadium surroundings a place for work as well as play. They envision tall office towers dotting the stadium area, a prime target for development because of its accessibility to freeways, a large labor pool and proximity to lower-cost housing, according to a recent city-commissioned study.

Conversion Planned

Anaheim officials are looking to convert the vacant or low-rise industrial land to “intense commercial office development” in an area called the Anaheim Stadium Business Center, bordered by the Southern California Edison easement north of Katella Avenue on the north, the Anaheim city limits on the south, the Santa Ana River channel on the east and the Santa Ana Freeway on the west.

But as consultants from Phillips Brandt Reddick of Irvine pointed out in their report, Anaheim is not the only city privy to the advantages afforded by the nearby freeways. Competition won’t be coming from areas such as South Coast Plaza or Newport Beach, with its many office structures, but from Aneheim’s next-door neighbors, officials said. Looking to attract “labor-intensive” white-collar businesses such as insurance companies are several surrounding cities--most notably Orange.

Last week, Orange took its first step toward conducting a study similar to one undertaken in Anaheim, whose officials earlier this month gave final approval to interim development fees in the area.

Meanwhile, at least 10 multimillion-dollar, high-rise office developments are under construction or in the planning stages in the key Anaheim-Orange area surrounding the freeways.

“That whole area around the intersection of Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Orange freeways is going to be a very dynamic area for businesses,” said Orange Economic Development Director Ron Thompson, who until recently was Anaheim’s economic development manager and helped initiate the stadium study.

‘Location, Location, Location’

Why now and why there?

“When you’re looking at this kind of development, it’s the same thing they taught me in business school: It’s location, location, location,” Thompson said.

A location near the freeways is attractive to companies with a need for a large labor pool and affordable housing for those employees, Joel Fick, Anaheim’s assistant planning director, said. Office developments in the South Coast Plaza and John Wayne Airport areas are closer to more expensive, executive-type housing and better suited for smaller management-intensive office users, the study said.

“I don’t think we’ll be competing with the South County but complementing it,” Fick said. The north-central cities may be competing among themselves, however, as they scramble to build office towers in primarily an area with a five-mile radius surrounding Anaheim Stadium, the study said. Bounded by Ball Road, Glassell Street, 17th Street and Harbor Boulevard, the area encompasses portions of Anaheim, Orange, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.

In Orange, “you might well anticipate two to three million square feet in the not too distant future. And that’s a lot,” Fick said. Thompson declined to specify tentative construction projects that may begin in Orange but said there are at least two strong possibilities in addition to three already in the works. Three developers contacted recently confirmed the following projects for Orange:

- The Koll Co., based in Newport Beach, plans two 24-story buildings with 552,000 square foot each, two parking structures and two restaurants on the southwest corner of State College Boulevard and Orangewood Avenue, a Koll development project manager said.

- Los Angeles-based Tishman West Management Corp., in a joint venture with Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., plans to build a 466,000-square-foot, 20-story office building to add to The City’s seven-building complex, which Tishman developed and manages. Construction on the $65-million project at 333 City Blvd. W. is scheduled to begin by early next year, spokeswoman Nadine Bristow said.

- Newport Beach-based Nexus Development Corp., which is completing development of a three-building Nexus Financial Center off the Garden Grove Freeway, plans to construct a Nexus City Square two exits away at the site of an old Treasury store. The project, which is planned to get under way next year, will include one eight-story building and two four-story office buildings totaling 365,000 square feet and a five-story, 200-room hotel and a restaurant on 20.14 acres, Nexus project coordinator Bruce Bear said.

In Anaheim, the largest project, planned for the stadium parking lot itself, has been on hold pending litigation with the California Angels, whose two-year-old lawsuit is in Orange County Superior Court.

Part of Deal for Rams

Angels officials have said they will take their team elsewhere if office towers replace parking spaces on part of the stadium’s lot. Anaheim officials said they will increase, not decrease, the total number of parking spaces once parking structures are built.

The city committed itself to the parking lot development as part of its campaign to bring the Los Angeles Rams to Anaheim Stadium in 1978. That year, the city leased 68 acres of the lot to Anaheim Stadium Associates, a partnership of the Boston-based development firm of Cabot, Cabot & Forbes and RAMCO, a trust for the heirs of the late Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom.

The Orangewood project would add 2,118,489 square feet of office development on 20 acres of the stadium parking lot. The second phase of development, which has yet to be specified, is scheduled for another 48 acres on State College, between Orangewood and Katella.

The stadium development is one of many plans for the area. Recent approvals include:

- State College Plaza, on 3.8 acres on the northeast corner of Orangewood and State College, where the first of a three-phase project already is under way: a six-story commercial office building with 126,000 square feet. Phases 2 and 3--10- and 12-story buildings--have already received city approval.

- Three Metroplex-Business Properties developments, north of the stadium property. Phase 1, on 2.8 acres immediately west of the Malibu Grand Prix raceway, consists of a four-story commercial office complex with 69,111 square feet already completed. Phase 2 is on 3.9 acres on the north side of Katella and consists of a six-story, 107,250-square-foot commercial office complex now under construction. Phase 3 will be on 10.7 acres of the Malibu Grand Prix property and include a 12- to 15-story, 540,000-square-foot commercial office complex with two parking structures and an 11-story, 227-room hotel with 156,545 square feet.

- Bay Corporate Center, on the northeast corner of Orangewood and Anaheim Boulevard, which is completed. It features two three-story, 64,938-square-foot commercial office buildings on 6.6 acres.

- Cabot, Cabot & Forbes’ plans for a three-story, 84,400-square-foot office complex on the north side of Orangewood, west of the Anaheim Stadium Center project.

Katella-Lewis Properties’ plans for a three-story, 39,864-square-foot commercial office building on the northwest corner of Katella and Lewis Street.

- Hanover Real Estate Associates’ plans to raze its existing 236,000-square-foot Golden West business park and Hanover industrial park on Katella Avenue and replace it with two seven-story and three 15-story buildings totaling 1,320,000 square feet.

Some officials and developers said the market they are striving for and the advantages available in the Anaheim-Orange vicinity are different from those in the Newport Beach-Irvine area and therefore do not pit the north county against the south in a development war.

‘Kind of Glamorous’

“South County is kind of glamorous. But if you have to live in Corona and work there (South County), it’s disastrous,” Thompson said.

Others disagree and said developers in the north county may end up competing against themselves, as well as those in the south county. And Anaheim and Orange are not the only cities in the market.

“We definitely have a lot of competition . . . (among) the north county area versus the airport or South Coast Plaza,” said Fred Price, a project coordinator with Plaza Properties, which is building the Plaza Alicante in Garden Grove. “North Orange County is an expanding market. North county especially is a booming area.”

After completing the 16-story hotel, which will be connected with an adjacent office tower by a glass atrium, Plaza Properties plans to build 1.5 million square feet of office space with an additional five or six buildings at the Garden Grove site, Price said.

In Orange, the biggest development now in the planning stages--The Koll Center, with 1,104,000 square feet in two proposed office buildings--is largely designed to accommodate the type of tenants who are seeking what the north county has to offer, Bruce Bear said. With large floors geared to accommodate larger, labor-intensive tenants such as mortgage and insurance firms, Koll’s project contrasts with the smaller office, executive-professional businesses that the south county attracts, Bear said.