The developer behind the South Coast Collection shopping center in Costa Mesa is gearing up to break ground on a hip retail project near Long Beach Airport.
Newport Beach-based Burnham USA and its Burnham-Ward Properties affiliate last month got approval from Long Beach’s planning commission to move ahead on the Long Beach Exchange.
The 266,000-square-foot retail project—about six miles from Seal Beach and Orange County—will be the main retail component of Douglas Park. The business park alongside Long Beach Airport covers 260 acres previously used by Chicago-based Boeing Co. for aircraft manufacturing.
It will be the first sizeable retail project built in Long Beach since the recession.
Burnham-Ward bought a 26.6-acre portion of the land at Douglas Park from Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group, the current master developer of the business park, last year.
It’s been working over the past 18 months to create “one of the most exciting projects in Southern California,” said Bryon Ward, a partner in Burnham-Ward Properties. “We hope it becomes a lot more than just a retail project.”
The planning commission’s recent approval has the developer aiming to break ground in about a month, Ward said.
The goal is to have the project open by the end of next year.
“We’re moving fast,” he said.
Irvine-based Snyder Langston is acting as the general contractor.
Nod to Past
Plans filed with the city show the company will construct 11 buildings at the project, which will include six anchor tenants occupying between 18,000 square feet and 40,000 square feet.
The centerpiece of the food-focused project is a roughly 17,000-square-foot building modeled on a 1940s-era airplane hangar that will hold about 15 smaller retail and food tenants.
The area around the hangar will also incorporate a large amount of community gathering space, the developer said.
The design at Long Beach Exchange has echoes of Burnham’s work at the South Coast Collection shopping center, a similarly sized retail project just off the San Diego (405) Freeway in Costa Mesa (see Shopping Centers list, page 16).
SOCO is anchored by the OC Mix, an indoor collection of boutique retailers and food offerings.
SOCO in general, and the OC Mix in particular, have become a template of sorts for other redesigned malls in the area in recent years, with an emphasis on hip food vendors as core elements of their design.
Online shopping continues to nip away at sales at traditional malls, so developers have to do “a much better job of creating an experience,” Ward said. Food vendors, in particular, “are a great way to get people to interact” at the centers, he said.
The Long Beach Exchange also is expected to include elements such as a farmers market and lots of outdoor entertainment, although there will be some new elements, including repurposed shipping containers, which, like the plane hangar, are a nod to the area’s history.
“If you don’t pay homage to the past, you’re being irresponsible,” Ward said.
Burnham-Ward Properties sold a majority stake in SOCO a year ago to Rockwood Capital LLC, a Los Angeles-based real estate investor, in a deal reported to be worth $120 million.
Rockwood is also acting as a financial partner in the new Long Beach project, according to the developers.
Burnham-Ward acquired the Costa Mesa project—then known as South Coast Home Furnishings Center— in 2009 for about $35 million. It spent millions more redesigning the property, which at the time was largely vacant.
Burnham still owns an unspecified stake in the retail center, which was ranked No. 26 center in Orange County last year, based on taxable sales, according to this week’s list of shopping centers (see related story, page 1; list, page 21).
SOCO showed the biggest year-over-year increase in taxable sales of any center on the list, with a 35% increase to $82.7 million.
Whole Foods Concept
Ward told Long Beach city officials last month that his company is in active talks with tenants to take up a bulk of the space, although no specific retailers or food vendors have been confirmed by the developer.
Signs point to at least one noteworthy grocer taking up an anchor position at the center.
The website for 365 by Whole Foods Market, a new grocery store concept by the Austin, Texas-based grocer, lists the Long Beach location among its first batch of Southern California stores.
A recent statement from 365 by Whole Foods Market describes its stores as “a streamlined, quality-meets-value shopping experience” with cheaper prices than the traditional Whole Foods brand.
The first slate of 365 by Whole Foods stores that have opened across the U.S. have averaged about 30,000 square feet, or roughly 50% smaller than regular Whole Foods locations.
The first Orange County 365 by Whole Foods Market is expected to be a Los Alamitos site on Katella Avenue that now holds an industrial building.
A timeframe for the opening of the site—next to Los Alamitos City Hall—hasn’t been disclosed.
Ward says he’s hoping his company’s new project will draw customers from OC, as well as the greater Long Beach area. “We think it’s going to be a destination center,” much like SOCO, he said.
Other developers at Douglas Park spoke in favor of the project at last month’s city hearing. The project will supplement a bevy of new hotels, industrial buildings and medical offices that are moving ahead there or have been recently built.
“They will do whatever it takes” to make the project successful, said Cory Alder, president of Santa Ana-based developer Nexus Cos., which has built one hotel at Douglas Park and has another one—a dual Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites hotel—under way.
The “center will be a much-needed and popular amenity for its corporate neighbors, including Mercedes-Benz, Virgin Galactic and Boeing; for guests of the two adjacent hotels; and for the community as a whole,” said Sares-Regis senior vice president Larry Lukanish in a statement.
