By Eric Engelbert
Uptown Newport Beach: The Airport Area's Quiet Transformation
In the early 2000s, roughly 30 percent of the world's construction cranes were operating in Berlin as Germany's reunified capital rebuilt itself in a compressed window of time. The result was one of the most visible urban transformations in modern history, visible from virtually every vantage point in the city.
Newport Beach is writing a smaller but structurally similar story. In Newport Center, luxury residential towers are rising to 270 feet and above. In the Airport Area, a different kind of transformation is underway: the quiet conversion of underperforming office campuses into what city planners have started calling "Uptown Newport Beach."
Fourteen housing projects totaling nearly 3,000 units are at various stages of approval and development in the airport area as of early 2026. The newest addition is a unanimous Planning Commission vote in April 2026 to approve Lincoln Property Company's plan to tear down an 86,000-square-foot office tower at 1500 Quail Street and replace it with 100 for-sale townhomes.
This is not a luxury high-rise. It is something Newport Beach has rarely seen in recent development cycles: a ground-up, for-sale neighborhood of family-sized homes, built by one of the country's largest real estate companies, on land that the developer already owns and has been quietly repositioning for years.
Lincoln Property Company: From Dallas to Newport Beach
Lincoln Property Company was founded in Dallas in 1965 and has grown into one of the largest diversified real estate firms in the United States, with operations spanning development, investment, and property management across commercial and residential asset classes. The company operates a dedicated West Coast platform, LPC West, which handles its California development pipeline including the 1500 Quail project.
Lincoln Property acquired the office tower at 1500 Quail Street in 2018 for $32 million. At the time, the seven-story, 86,000-square-foot building was an income-producing office asset. The Airport Area surrounding John Wayne International Airport had long been one of the denser office submarkets in Orange County, attracting professional services firms, tech companies, and corporate back-office operations drawn by proximity to the airport and major freeways.
What changed was the office market itself. The post-pandemic shift toward remote and hybrid work hit suburban office buildings across Orange County harder than almost any other category of real estate. By the mid-2020s, many Airport Area office buildings were carrying significant vacancy, and the economics of repositioning to residential had become increasingly attractive, particularly given Newport Beach's state-mandated housing obligation and the new entitlement frameworks that came with it.
Lincoln Property did not chase this trend. The company had owned the site for years, and the conversion to residential was a deliberate reposition of an underperforming asset into a product category with deep demand in one of California's most desirable cities.
The Residences at 1500 Quail: Project Snapshot
The Residences at 1500 Quail Street will replace the existing seven-story office building with a ground-up townhome community spread across 4.8 acres. The project includes 24 individual townhome buildings containing a total of 100 for-sale condominiums.
Every unit offers three or four bedrooms, ranging in size from 1,591 to 1,876 square feet. Total project square footage is 236,408. Building heights are capped at 39 feet. Each home comes with a two-car garage, a detail that distinguishes this project from the apartment developments going up elsewhere in Newport Beach's housing pipeline.
The site will include outdoor dining areas with barbecues and pizza ovens, a lawn designed for casual games and gatherings, and open spaces with seating and fountains. A dedicated pedestrian walkway will connect the community to Lincoln Property's adjacent development at 1300 Dove Street, a 132-townhome project with three- and four-bedroom units spread across three to four stories.
The two projects together would create a contiguous neighborhood of more than 230 for-sale homes on former office land within walking distance of John Wayne Airport, a cluster of major employment centers, and the retail and restaurant corridor along Bristol Street.
| Detail | 1500 Quail Street |
|---|---|
| Developer | Lincoln Property Company (via Quail Newport Owner LLC) |
| Site | 4.8 acres, Airport Area near John Wayne International Airport |
| What's being demolished | 86,000 sq ft, 7-story office building + surface parking lot |
| Office building acquired | 2018 by Lincoln Property for $32 million |
| Units | 100 for-sale condominiums (market-rate only) |
| Buildings | 24 townhome buildings, max 39 feet |
| Unit sizes | 1,591 to 1,876 sq ft, 3 or 4 bedrooms, 2-car garage each |
| Total project sq ft | 236,408 sq ft |
| Planned community | Newport Place Planned Community |
| Planning Commission vote | Unanimous approval, early April 2026 |
| Adjacent project | 1300 Dove St. (also Lincoln Property): 132 townhomes, 3-4 stories, connected by dedicated walkway |
The "Uptown Newport Beach" Context
The Residences at 1500 Quail does not exist in isolation. City planners have been quietly building a narrative around the Airport Area housing wave, calling it "Uptown Newport Beach" and framing the cluster of new developments as a deliberate reimagining of a job-dense but underhoused district.
The anchor project in the airport area was Uptown Newport, a 1,244-unit mixed-use development approved by the city in 2013 and developed by Shopoff Realty Investments and the Picerne Group. The first phase of Uptown Newport was completed in 2021 and gave the area its first significant infusion of residential density near John Wayne Airport.
Since then, the pipeline has expanded dramatically. As of early 2026, 14 housing projects totaling approximately 3,000 units are at various stages of approval and construction in the airport area. The Irvine Company alone is adding 700 units at MacArthur Court near the airport (approved December 2025, 49 affordable units required off-site, $3.3 million toward MacArthur Boulevard improvements). Lincoln Property's two projects together contribute more than 230 for-sale homes to that pipeline.
What the city's planning staff emphasized in the staff report for 1500 Quail is the location's employment proximity. Future residents at 1500 Quail Street will live within short driving or biking distance of some of Orange County's largest employer clusters, including the financial, tech, and professional services firms concentrated along the Bristol Street and MacArthur Boulevard corridor. "This is exactly the type of infill development the state is pushing cities toward," staff wrote.
Parke Miller, Executive Vice President at Lincoln Property, spoke to the Planning Commission directly. "Our team has taken a lot of time to put together a really thoughtful development that we're really proud of," he said.
What Makes This Project Different
The defining characteristic of The Residences at 1500 Quail is that it is not apartments. Almost every other major project in Newport Beach's current housing pipeline, from the Irvine Company's Block 100 to Villas Fashion Island Phase 2 to MacArthur Court, consists of rental apartments. Related California's towers at the Edwards Big Newport site will be for-sale condominiums, but those are a very different product: luxury units priced well above $5 million in a high-rise format.
The 1500 Quail townhomes occupy a different part of the Newport Beach housing market. At 1,591 to 1,876 square feet with three or four bedrooms and a two-car garage in each unit, these are homes designed for households that need more space than a one- or two-bedroom apartment but are priced out of the single-family detached market in Newport Beach, where median prices routinely exceed $3 million.
For families who work in the Airport Area or Newport Center and want to own rather than rent in Newport Beach, this project represents a product type that has been largely absent from the new construction pipeline for years. The combination of family-sized floor plans, for-sale ownership, two-car garages, and a walkable community connection to the adjacent 1300 Dove Street project gives the development a neighborhood feel that sets it apart from the more urban apartment towers being built elsewhere in the city.
The 39-foot height cap also matters. In a city where new projects in Newport Center are pushing toward 300 feet, the low-rise profile of 1500 Quail is deliberately suburban in character, designed to blend with the surrounding Airport Area rather than transform the skyline.
The Affordable Housing Debate
The unanimous Planning Commission vote obscured a real tension in the public hearing. The Residences at 1500 Quail contains zero affordable units. In a city that carries a state-mandated obligation for 4,845 new housing units through 2029, with approximately 71 percent of those units, or roughly 3,436, required to be affordable to lower- and moderate-income households, a 100-unit market-rate project with no income-restricted homes is a legitimate planning question.
One resident who spoke at the public hearing put it directly: "That puts the requirement higher of how much affordable housing will have to be developed in the rest of those 8,174, quite a few of which we've already assigned. This is contributing to that problem, which I think will come back to bite us."
Newport Beach's planning manager Ben Zdeba pushed back. "We do have an adequate buffer, even considering the possible approval before you today," he said. City staff noted that the 1500 Quail project satisfies the state's "no net loss" provision because other designated sites across Newport Beach are set aside to provide the required affordable units, and the Community Development Department's records show enough space remaining to meet the state's requirements even with this market-rate approval in the mix.
The tension is genuine and not going away. Newport Beach faces a clock on its affordable housing obligations, and each market-rate approval without affordable components increases the density of affordable housing that must be delivered on the remaining sites. The city's position is that it has a plan and the buffer to execute it. Whether that buffer proves adequate as the 2029 deadline approaches is a question that will be answered one approval at a time.
Pricing, Property Tax, and Financial Impact
Lincoln Property has not publicly released pricing for The Residences at 1500 Quail Street. The project will be sold as for-sale condominiums, with pricing determined closer to completion. For context, comparable new construction townhomes in Newport Beach's Airport Area have recently traded in the $1.4 million to $2 million range. Given the 1500 Quail product's size (up to 1,876 sq ft, 4 bedrooms, 2-car garage), brand-new construction quality, and Newport Beach address, pricing in the $1.5 million to $2.5 million range per unit is a reasonable estimate, though the market at delivery will ultimately determine final pricing.
At a $2 million average sales price, the 100-unit project would generate a total sellout of approximately $200 million. Property taxes on for-sale condominiums work straightforwardly under Proposition 13: each unit is assessed at its individual sale price at the time of purchase. At 1 percent of assessed value, a $2 million unit generates $20,000 per year in property taxes. Newport Beach retains approximately 16 percent of property tax revenue collected within the city.
If all 100 units sell in the $1.5 million to $2.5 million range, the project's contribution to Newport Beach's annual property tax revenue would be approximately $240,000 to $400,000 per year, growing modestly as units appreciate and the 2 percent annual cap under Proposition 13 applies. When units eventually resell at higher prices, the tax base resets upward to the new purchase price, making the long-term revenue contribution higher than the initial years suggest.
Beyond direct property taxes, 100 for-sale homeowners in the Airport Area contribute to the local economy through HOA fees, retail spending, and service purchases in a way that long-term rental households do as well, but with the additional benefit of stable, owner-occupant presence in the community.
Affordable Housing and AMI
Because The Residences at 1500 Quail contains no income-restricted units, the AMI discussion here is brief but worth noting for buyers evaluating the broader Newport Beach housing market.
Newport Beach uses Orange County Area Median Income for any affordability calculations, not city-level or statewide income figures. Orange County's 2025 AMI for a family of four was $169,200. A unit priced at 80 percent AMI (Low Income) would carry a maximum purchase price far below what the market will bear at 1500 Quail. A unit affordable at 120 percent AMI would still be priced well below the estimated market-rate range for this project.
In practical terms, the 1500 Quail townhomes are not affordable housing and are not designed to be. They are market-rate, for-sale homes in one of the most desirable cities in Southern California. The affordability story for Newport Beach plays out on other sites, other projects, and other entitlements. What 1500 Quail offers is ownership in a city where ownership has become increasingly rare in new construction. That is a different kind of value proposition than affordability, but it is one that will resonate with a meaningful segment of Newport Beach's housing market.
What Comes Next
With Planning Commission approval secured, Lincoln Property's next step is construction. No groundbreaking date has been officially announced, but the typical timeline from unanimous Planning Commission approval through demolition, grading, and construction suggests the first homes at The Residences at 1500 Quail Street could be available for purchase sometime in 2028 or 2029, depending on the pace of demolition of the existing office building and the construction schedule for 24 separate townhome structures.
The adjacent 1300 Dove Street project, also by Lincoln Property and connected by the planned pedestrian walkway, is a separate entitlement that will move on its own schedule. If both projects reach construction at roughly the same time, the combined 232-unit community could open as a contiguous neighborhood rather than two separate development phases arriving at different times.
The Airport Area housing wave is not slowing down. The Irvine Company's MacArthur Court, Uptown Newport's ongoing phases, and the 14-project pipeline confirmed in early 2026 suggest that "Uptown Newport Beach" will look considerably different by 2030 than it does today. Lincoln Property's 1500 Quail project is one significant piece of that transformation, and it brings a product type, family-sized for-sale townhomes with two-car garages, that has been missing from the new construction conversation in Newport Beach for years.
