Ground Lease to Help Brea Project : Retailing Project is Component of Private/Public Development
Construction begins later this month on Brea Market Place, a 125,000-square-foot multi-use facility that is the latest milestone in a $150-million commercial development in Brea.
Brea Market Place will house an Irvine Ranch Farmers Market and an eight-screen United Artists Cinema. The complex will also include two freestanding restaurants.
The complex is part of the new, 55-acre Brea Place development at the corner of Birch Street and State College Boulevard in Brea, a suburban community of 33,000 people about 32 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Brea Place will provide more than 1.2 million square feet of office space, the retail center, six new restaurants and a hotel when it is completed in 1995.
Four of the buildings at Brea Place have already been completed, two more are under construction, and at least six more--including Brea Market Place--will eventually be built.
Brea Place wasn’t originally such an ambitious project.
Several years ago, the Brea-Olinda Unified School District began looking for a developer willing to pay for refurbishing a high school on the site in exchange for the right to build on a small portion of the school’s land. But the school district later decided it would be a better idea to relocate the school completely and develop the entire 55-acre parcel.
After three years of negotiations, Brentwood-based Lowe Development Corp. beat out 13 competitors to win the right to develop the property, said Robert F. MacLeod, president of Lowe’s commercial properties division. Boston-based New England Mutual Life is Lowe’s joint-venture partner in most of the project.
Brea Place is unusual because it is believed to mark the first time a community has been able to build a new school with funds generated by commercial development without receiving a dime from the state or the school district’s general fund.
In a complex deal, the $25.5 million needed to build the school will come from ground-lease payments Lowe and New England Mutual will make to the school district, proceeds from the land the district actually sells to the two firms and from the increased tax revenue generated by the development.
Demolition of the present high school won’t begin until the new school is opened on a nearby hilltop in September, 1988.
After the existing school is razed, the site will become the home of the Brea Civic Plaza. The plaza, which will include some of the 1.2 million square feet of office space as well as the planned hotel, will mark the final phase of the development of Brea Place.
The architectural firm for Brea Place is Andrews/Rothenburger of Santa Ana. Principal Ross Andrews said most of the individual buildings in the development will have alternating bands of panelized material and glass, and the structures will be situated to “link them with pedestrian connections, creating a campus-like atmosphere.”
