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The Dirt at One Broadway

One Broadway Plaza, the long proposed 37-story Santa Ana office tower that would be Orange County’s tallest building, is slated to approach nearly 500 feet when it’s built.

It’s about 25 feet underground right now.

That qualifies as progress, according to Mike Harrah, the project’s developer.

“We’re making history,” he said last week, showing off a flurry of groundwork taking place at the construction site of One Broadway, which sits next to the headquarters of his Caribou Industries and across the street from Orange County School of the Arts.

Construction crews were moving dirt last week in preparation for foundation work that’s scheduled to kick off this year.

Harrah puts a 28-month timeline on the work. Getting the base of the structure prepared to go vertical should take about a year, he said.

A more formal groundbreaking ceremony is planned in about six months.

Harrah said the early-stage work to finish the foundation will cost close to $35 million and that he’s already spent more than $50 million on the land, planning and entitlement work for the project, which he first envisioned nearly 20 years ago.

He estimates the nearly 600,000-square-foot tower’s total cost at $380 million. He said lenders backing his project have removed requirements that the building be at least 50% preleased before kicking off construction, a concession that prompted the beginning of work.

No tenants have been announced, but that doesn’t appear to faze the always optimistic Harrah, who has owned about 4 million square feet of office and retail space in Santa Ana over the years.

He said he’s in late-stage negotiations with a pair of technology companies that could take most or all the building, which would likely fill any remaining space with the law firms that serve nearby courthouses.

At least one of the technology tenants is interested in using Harrah’s office and land holdings at the nearby Grand Avenue property that currently holds the operations of the Orange County Register, with the idea of taking it for additional space and potentially housing, he said.

The two properties would be linked by a new streetcar system that will run through portions of Santa Ana and is scheduled to be built in about two years.

The Register announced last month that it plans to move its headquarters next year to a building in Anaheim that’s part of the recently renovated Axis creative-office campus. A lease for a likely 40,000 square feet there hadn’t been completed as of late last month, real estate sources told the Business Journal.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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