Japanese Plan Santa Ana Project : Real Estate: The $400-million Main Street venture includes a 32-story office tower, shops, a hotel and housing.

A Japanese developer said Tuesday that it will build $400 million in office towers, shops, a hotel and housing north of Santa Ana’s downtown in one of the largest real estate developments in the city. The complex will include a 32-story office building that would be Orange County’s tallest.

The project forges another link in the massive redevelopment of Santa Ana’s aging Main Street, which runs from the southern edge of the city to its northern boundary.

Shimizu America Corp. will build the project--tentatively called Main Street Concourse--for the landowner, Orient Corp. Orient is Japan’s largest consumer finance company.

In addition to the 32-story building, a second, 20-story tower is planned. The project also includes residential, retail and entertainment facilities. In addition, a monorail station is part of the tentative plan for the project, which Mayor Daniel H. Young said brings the city’s ambitious plans for a monorail line up Main Street a step closer to reality.

“We envision it as a place to bring people back to the central city after work hours, a place where people want to stay,” said Steven W. Spillman, a vice president at the Laguna Niguel developer Birtcher, which is advising Shimizu on the project. “The idea is it’ll be a 16-hour community, instead of just a place to work.”

This is Orient’s first project on the U.S. mainland. Shimizu has built office parks and hotels around the Southwest.

The project represents a major shift in Japanese real estate investment in Orange County, real estate experts said. Until now, most Japanese real estate investors merely bought buildings in the county rather than building their own.

The property is across North Main Street from the MainPlace/Santa Ana mall, a few blocks from the Santa Ana and Garden Grove freeways in central Orange County.

Shimuzu doesn’t have approval to build the project, which is larger than all but a few real estate developments in this city of 237,000 residents.

City officials and the developer, however, say they expect that Concourse will be approved much as the developer presented it Tuesday to the press, although that could take as long as 18 months.

Nevertheless, Shimuzu said it expects to complete by 1993 the construction of 32-story office tower, 150,000 square feet of shops, 32,000 square feet of cafe, exhibit space and meeting space, six movie theaters, two restaurants, a 3,000-space parking garage and 264 condominiums.

The second phase includes a second, 20-story office tower, 1,200 more spaces in the eight-story parking garage, a 350-room hotel, a 16-story tower with 192 condominiums and another 40,000 square feet or so of stores and restaurants.

Three stories of shops, meeting and exhibit space will front on Main Street, separated from the two office towers and the parking garage by a pedestrian concourse. Behind the offices will be the two towers of the hotel, and behind that at the far end of the 18-acre lot will be the housing.

Concourse also marks a shifting of the center of Santa Ana from its historic downtown to further north along Main Street, said Scott Perley of commercial real estate broker Cushman & Wakefield. There’s the big MainPlace mall across North Main Street, where developer C. J. Segerstrom & Sons also plans three office towers, including one of 31 stories. There are the two freeways. And there are also plans to redevelop the sprawling Town and Country Center just across the city line in Orange, an area of one-story stores.

“This is becoming Santa Ana’s new downtown, and Orange’s too for that matter,” said Perley.

So dense is development becoming along North Main Street that a monorail or some other form of transportation may be necessary lest the area choke on traffic, said Mayor Young, one of the monorail’s most ardent supporters.

“The monorail is critical to achieving buildout along Main Street, because developments like Concourse are going to increase traffic,” he said. “But if it’s successful, we’ll have a way to move people through central Orange County far more efficiently.”

Santa Ana ordered a study late last year of a monorail system that could eventually stretch from Fullerton, in the northern end of the county, down through the thickly populated cities of Anaheim and Santa Ana to the booming office neighborhood around John Wayne Airport.

If developers build the terminals, which are one-third the cost of building a monorail system, said Young, a private company might be able to build and run the system at a profit and without public funds. Should that not prove feasible, Young concedes that he doesn’t know where public funds would come from for such a system.

Since the mid-1980s, Orange County’s biggest developers--and developers from elsewhere too--have begun building office towers in the county’s central cities.

The new office towers went up first around Anaheim Stadium and have spread through neighborhoods that, in some cases, were until recently seedy industrial neighborhoods or--in the case of Concourse--land that had always been vacant.

It amounts to a long-awaited payoff for struggling redevelopment programs in the county’s older cities like Anaheim and Santa Ana.

Anaheim on Tuesday gave final approval to sell 16 acres of vacant downtown land to Koll Co. for $2 million. Koll will build offices, a hotel and a movie theater on the property.