Anaheim's Major League Housing Debacle
- Josh Stephens
- Jun 17, 2022
- 5 min read
Baseball usually supplies good metaphors for just about any occasion. But, what's gone down in Anaheim over the past few weeks exceeds anything that the diamond might offer up. It's more like Wrestlemania than the National Pastime.
The short version is this: Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) owner Arte Moreno has been wanting to redevelop the roughly 140 acres currently occupied by Angel Stadium (formerly Anaheim Stadium and a few other things) and its vast expanse of parking lots that is bigger than Disneyland. Even if you don't like baseball, or team owners, this is probably a bona fide Good Thing. We'll get to the reasons in a moment.
The team and the city worked out a complex deal in which the city would sell the stadium and parking lots to a Moreno-owned subsidiary for $320 million. The development proposal called for over 5,000 units of housing, 2.7 million square feet of office space, and 1.1 million square feet of retail, restaurant, and hotel space – plus some public amenities such as a park. Meanwhile, the city was going to credit Moreno with $124 million to build 466 units of affordable housing onsite. The city referred to the plan as "The Big A: 2050."
The deal got momentarily hung up by the Surplus Land Act, which requires public agencies to prioritize the development of affordable housing on publicly owned parcels. As CP&DR reported a few months ago, the act, while well intentioned, has flummoxed many a public agency and frustrated many a developer. Whatever the state might assume about the need for affordable housing, those assumptions don't necessarily match up with what a city wants or what can pencil out for a developer.
