Garden Grove Finally Approved the Nickelodeon Hotel. Here Is What Took So Long and What Comes Next.

Twenty-Four Years Later, the Nickelodeon Hotel Is Finally Happening

On June 24, 2026, the Garden Grove City Council voted 7-0 to approve the final ordinance for the Nickelodeon Resort Hotel, a 23-story, 500-room themed resort on Harbor Boulevard. The vote followed years of approvals, a lawsuit, a court-ordered environmental review, and another round of approvals. The project first entered city planning documents in 2002. That is a long road for a hotel, and understanding it tells you a lot about how development works in Garden Grove’s resort district and why major projects take so long to get off the ground.

The Nickelodeon Hotel matters beyond the novelty of SpongeBob SquarePants showing up in Orange County. It is a $277 million private investment in Garden Grove’s Harbor Boulevard corridor at a moment when the city is under enormous state pressure to develop. It will add significant tax revenue to a city budget that is trying to fund its own housing and infrastructure commitments. And it is a signal that the resort district’s position as Disneyland’s second front door is not going away.

What the Hotel Will Look Like

The project sits on a 3.72-acre site at the northwest corner of Harbor Boulevard and Twintree Avenue, immediately south of the existing Sheraton Hotel on Harbor’s west side. The developer is Kam Sang Company through its entity Newage Garden Grove II LLC, the same team behind Brookhurst Place, Garden Grove’s largest housing development in Koreatown.

The hotel program is designed for families with children, consistent with the Nickelodeon brand. Key features approved in the final entitlement include:

• 500 guest rooms across 23 stories
• Themed pool complex with waterslides, splash zones, and a lazy river
• Nick Studio, a working studio hall for producing and broadcasting Nickelodeon television programming including shows such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Paw Patrol
• Restaurants seating up to 600 guests across multiple venues
• 17,715 square feet of ballroom and meeting room space
• 7,000-square-foot arcade
• 8,532 square feet of retail and spa
• Five-level parking structure

The Nickelodeon brand is owned by Paramount, which is itself owned by Skydance Corporation following Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount. The working production studio in the hotel creates a unique hook that no other Disneyland-adjacent hotel in the region can offer: guests may be able to watch actual show production happening while staying at the resort.

Why This Took 24 Years

The city’s original land disposition agreement for this site goes back to 2002. The original Nickelodeon deal was structured years before construction began anywhere. Several factors slowed the project over the intervening years, including the 2008 financial crisis, changes in entertainment industry ownership at Paramount and Nickelodeon, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively halted hotel financing across the country from 2020 to 2022.

In 2022, the Garden Grove City Council gave the project a major green light, approving the sale of the 3.72-acre Harbor Boulevard site to the developer and clearing the original environmental review. That looked like the finish line. It was not.

Neighboring residents, represented by plaintiff Marlene Perez and others, challenged the 2022 approval in Orange County Superior Court. The court agreed that the project required a more thorough environmental review than the original analysis provided and issued a Writ of Mandate ordering the city to prepare a Supplemental Environmental Impact Report before any final action.

The supplemental EIR took until 2026 to complete. The Garden Grove Planning Commission reviewed the completed report and recommended approval in May 2026. The City Council then heard the second reading and adopted the final ordinance approving the Planned Unit Development on June 24, 2026. The 7-0 vote left no doubt about where the council stands.

What This Means for the Harbor Boulevard Corridor

Garden Grove’s Harbor Boulevard resort district runs south of Disneyland and has historically attracted family-oriented hotel demand that spills over from Anaheim. The corridor has roughly 8,000 to 10,000 hotel rooms across multiple properties, and it has competed for decades to capture guests who want to be near the park but at a lower price point than the on-site Disney hotels.

The Nickelodeon Hotel changes the calculus for Harbor Boulevard in one significant way: it is the first property on the corridor that can claim a branded, park-like experience of its own rather than just proximity to Disneyland. A working TV studio, an immersive themed pool, and the Nickelodeon IP give guests a reason to choose this property specifically rather than just this price range. That kind of destination hotel is different from a flag-branded business hotel, and it competes in a different way.

For existing hotels on the corridor, the competitive impact is real but not necessarily negative. A destination property that draws families specifically to Garden Grove creates ancillary demand for the entire resort area. Restaurants, retail, and neighboring hotels have benefited from comparable anchor resort openings in other tourism corridors across the country.

The projected $3.5 million per year in transient occupancy tax revenue is also significant for Garden Grove’s city budget. TOT is one of the few revenue sources that grows naturally with tourism without requiring new bond issuances or development fees, and a major addition at the luxury-family segment adds to that base in a way that standard mid-tier hotels do not.

700 Construction Jobs and What Comes Next

The project is expected to create approximately 700 construction jobs during the build phase and as many as 600 permanent hotel jobs once open. The 2022 disposition agreement included a preference for hiring local union construction workers and local residents for hotel positions, which was an important piece of community benefit that helped move the original approval forward.

With the City Council approval now final, the developer can proceed to building permit applications. A 23-story, 500-room hotel with a complex amenity program is a significant construction undertaking. A realistic construction timeline from permit to opening is approximately 30 to 36 months once shovels go in the ground. If permitting moves efficiently, groundbreaking could realistically happen in late 2026 or early 2027, with an opening in 2029 or 2030.

Garden Grove in Context

We wrote separately about Garden Grove’s 19,168-unit housing mandate and the challenges the city faces in meeting it. The Nickelodeon Hotel is not a housing project, but it is relevant to the housing story in one specific way: a stronger resort economy means a stronger city tax base, which funds the public services and infrastructure that make residential development viable. A city that is building its hospitality sector while simultaneously adding housing is in a better position than one that is only doing one or the other.

Garden Grove has real assets in its resort corridor, its cultural districts, and its central OC location. The Nickelodeon approval demonstrates that major private capital will commit to the city when the path is clear. Getting that same clarity for the housing mandate is the city’s larger and harder challenge.