A dog park, live music venue, contemporary single-family townhomes, hotel and pharmacy may be en route to Westminster, as preliminary proposals for the Westminster Mall’s redevelopment indicate that the nearly-abandoned mall will be a one-stop shop for all of those amenities and more.
Ground will break on large-scale development in Westminster within the next several years, including a complete revamp of the area, a large triangular property off the 405 Freeway at Bolsa Avenue and Edwards Street, meant to create a downtown feel for visitors and the community alike with places for thousands to live.
Four companies control parcels that make up the 100-acre mall property: Shopoff Realty, True Life Companies, Washington Prime Group and Kaiser Permanente, and so far, only two, Shopoff and True Life, have submitted draft proposals of what they’re looking to build on their chunk of land.
These early plans show how the mall will transform into a mixed-use walkable community with up to 3,000 residential units and at least 600,000 square feet of retail throughout the property. They detail how the city’s vision for new office and medical buildings, homes and park space will come to life.
In December 2022, city leaders approved rules and guidelines for everything from how tall buildings can be to how much park space has to be included, as well as how the land can be used and where traffic should be directed. Those guidelines are used to evaluate proposals from the property owners and ensure their plans are cohesive.
But it’s unclear yet when plans will be finalized and work will get underway.
The four companies don’t have a deadline to submit their draft proposals, and they could always sell their portion of land, said Westminster’s city manager, Christine Cordon. That means redevelopment on the parcel of land owned by a company that doesn’t submit a draft proposal to the city could come to a standstill, to some extent.
But Cordon said it’s not in an owner’s best interest to stay stagnant when the rest of the mall is moving along.
“We hope it can remain a collaborative effort because there are shared components within the property such as traffic flow in and out of the property,” she said.
The city is still deep in the planning and review phase of the development, Cordon said. She said she expects the review process to see more rapid movement in the next couple of months and she hopes there would be some dirt moving within the next five years or so, although Shopoff anticipates breaking ground sometime next year.
“Malls take a lot to develop,” she said. “This is a work in progress, this is about getting the owners through the planning process, which takes a while.”
The draft proposals are not being made available to the public, Cordon said, but some companies have publicized their plans. Here’s a brief look at what we know is being proposed for the Westminster Mall.
Shopoff Realty
Irvine-based developer Shopoff Realty owns two parcels of land: the Macy’s building, the shuttered Sears building and the surrounding parking lots.
It has proposed 25,000 square feet of retail and food, a 175-room hotel off of Bolsa Avenue, 1,065 contemporary-style rental units and 102 three-story, single-family townhomes for sale on its 26-acre share of the mall.
If approved, Shopoff’s proposal, dubbed “Bolsa Pacific,” would also place a 2.5-acre park near the townhomes, within it a dog park, pickleball courts, an amphitheater and a water feature like a fountain, pond or waterfall.
According to its project website, Shopoff anticipates breaking ground on Bolsa Pacific in 2025.
Aside from the website, there’s no further information about the company’s plans, said Bill Shopoff, its president and CEO.
“We continue to work with the city of Westminster on the redevelopment of the Westminster Mall, and as we are still refining specific plans for the project amenities, we do not have any new updates to provide at this time,” Shopoff said.
True Life Companies
True Life Companies, a real estate investment firm headquartered in Denver with several offices in California, submitted an application for housing units on and surrounding the former Babies R Us property, Cordon said.
If the plan is approved, a five-story, multi-family structure will be built on 3.6 acres of that retail property, separate from the Shopoff housing. Cordon said the city is also in the review process for True Life and its draft proposal.
True Life representatives did not respond to requests for comment. (Real estate broker Connie Sillen’s family trust, represented by True Life, owns the parcel of land planned for the housing units, Cordon said.)
Kaiser Permanente and Washington Prime Group
Kaiser Permanente, which owns 10 acres of land on the north side, mainly where Best Buy is located, and Washington Prime Group, which owns the largest chunk of Westminster Mall’s buildings and land, have not submitted proposals to the city.
For Kaiser, there’s no definitive timing of when the company might submit its draft proposal because of new leadership in the Southern California region and continued reassessment of business post-pandemic, said its OC-based planner, Tony Smale. Still, the company hopes to break ground in a few years on its portion of the project, Smale said.
Smale said Kaiser plans to develop a big, multi-specialty medical office building on its parcel of land. It will have both primary and specialty care, he said, and built in several phases.
“The first phase is going to be roughly on 85,000 square feet, and it will include 16 doctors’ offices for primary care and 32 offices for specialty care,” he said. “We’ll have ancillary services like lab, pharmacy and X-ray to support that.”
Future phases are still fluid with less definition than around the first phase, he said.
“I can’t really be more specific than that because there are a lot of variables, and that decision is not made just locally,” said Smale.
Melissa Gomes, the general manager of the mall and a spokesperson for Washington Prime Group, declined to comment regarding when it will submit a proposal or what it might propose.
Cordon said she expects Washington Prime Group’s plans to be a mixture of residential and retail as well.
What’s open now?
The mall, which opened in 1974, these days resembles something closer to a ghost town. Even on a recent Friday afternoon, the mall — where rolling security doors in front of shuttered stores and liquidation sale signs are easy to spot — is nearly empty.
Once the second most popular shopping center in Orange County, it joins a growing number of aging shopping centers in Orange County and beyond that are being converted into mixed-use development.
While many stores have not renewed their leases, hence the shuttered storefronts and liquidation sale signs, four of the larger stores that are part of the mall area — Best Buy, Macy’s, JC Penney and Target — are still open as well as many stores and temporary pop-ups, such as the Pumpkin Factory, a pumpkin patch that opens during the Halloween season.
The existing Target is expected to anchor the “Bolsa Pacific” area while Macy’s will be torn down, according to Shopoff.
Cordon pointed to the shuttered stores as the attrition process of “clearing out the stores for potential construction.”
But people are still welcome to shop at Westminster Mall, open seven days a week, said Gomes.
“The mall is still open for business. Nothing will change until corporate (Washington Prime Group) notifies us otherwise,” she said.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that real estate broker Connie Sillen's family trust, represented by True Life, owns one parcel of the redevelopment area.
