The developer of The Source, Buena Park’s largest commercial real estate development in over a decade, now has its eyes on residential development in the city.
M&D Properties, which opened a 460,000-square-foot retail and office portion of The Source late last year, is in talks with Buena Park to add a five-story residential project on land near the commercial development, according to city documents.
It’s also proposed a more ambitious 16-story tower that would be Buena Park’s tallest residential building, but that appears to be further down the line.
M&D filed a concept design to turn a roughly half-acre site just south of the Santa Ana (5) Freeway on Beach Boulevard into a 34-unit residential building, according to city filings.
The project, at 6555 Beach Blvd., would be 55 feet tall and include a mix of studio units, one-bedroom units of about 678 square feet on average, and two-bedroom units averaging 948 square feet.
M&D, which had been based in Lynwood but now calls Buena Park home, bought the site for the residential project in 2015 for about $1.3 million, according to property records. The property has an older retail structure on it and is about two miles north of Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park.
It’s also about three blocks north of The Source, which is at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Orangethorpe Avenue, and was Orange County’s largest commercial project to open last year.
The Source includes a 400,000-square-foot retail and entertainment center that’s still in the process of being leased out, and a seven-story retail and office building with 60,000 square feet of office space. It’s the tallest office in the city.
A seven-story 178-room Hilton Hotel is being built on the eastern side of The Source and scheduled to open late this year.
The residential project would have a small gym among its amenities. There would also be some ground-floor retail space.
Renderings of the five-story residential project also show the development would include a larger advertising sign for the commercial project at The Source, which would be visible from the 5 Freeway.
Luis Valenzuela, M&D Properties’ executive vice president, told the Business Journal at the time The Source opened that his firm had entitlements for more than 1,000 homes, either for-sale units or apartments, on land in the area.
The company was in the process of assembling additional nearby parcels in the city to build residential projects in future phases of development, he said then.
Tower in Works?
The firm has proposed at least one other larger residential project in the vicinity: a 16-story tower whose modern design would be among the most unique housing projects in OC.
The project would include 300 for-sale units, according to details listed this month on M&D’s website. By late last week, following a report on the project by real estate development news blog LA OC Development Buzz, those plans had been removed from the site.
Other details on the residential project, including its location and time frame, weren’t given. There’s been no record of the proposed project listed with Buena Park’s planning division.
No for-sale residential project taller than 10 stories has opened in OC in about eight years.
The proposed tower’s height would appear to be roughly the same as another new addition coming soon to Buena Park’s skyline, a 150-foot-tall roller coaster called HangTime, which is about to be built at Knott’s Berry Farm.
The theme park announced plans last week for the new ride, its first new roller coaster in over a decade. It should open next summer and will be “the only dive coaster on the West Coast,” according to Knott’s Berry Farm.
