By Eric Engelbert
A Decade in the Making. Now 66 Seniors Have a Home.
Orchard View Gardens at 8300 Valley View Street in Buena Park did not happen quickly. The idea of building affordable senior housing on St. Joseph's Episcopal Church property was being discussed before 2016. City Council approval came in November 2020. The groundbreaking was August 2023. Residents finally moved in when the doors opened on March 12, 2025. That is the reality of how affordable housing in California gets built: slowly, through repeated funding applications, zoning changes, partnership agreements, and years of stubborn patience. The result at Valley View Street is 66 affordable apartment homes for low-income seniors in a city where one in four homeless residents is 55 or older. For the people who live there, the wait was worth it. See all new development projects across Orange County.
Church Land. Community Need. A Partnership That Took Years to Build.
St. Joseph's Episcopal Church has occupied its property on Valley View Street since 1957. For most of that time, the land adjacent to the church sat underutilized, which is not unusual for faith communities that own more property than their congregation can fill. What is unusual is what St. Joseph's did with it.
The idea of developing affordable housing on the church's land predates 2016, going back to when Bishop Ed Little was rector. When the Rev. Canon Mary Trainor succeeded him, she advanced the conversation and began formal discussions with National CORE about a potential development partnership. By the time the current rector, the Rev. Cindy Voien, took the helm, the vision was in motion but still years from reality.
Voien described the long process at the March 2025 opening as tending a dream "like a precious seed." There were discouraging periods, including at least one round of state funding applications where the project was narrowly passed over. It was only when a California budget surplus created an opportunity to fund projects that had nearly been selected in prior cycles that the financing came together. The city of Buena Park voted unanimously to approve the project on November 10, 2020, including a zoning change from single-family to multi-family residential. Construction finally began at a groundbreaking on August 15, 2023.
The completed development is the second affordable housing project created through a partnership between National CORE and the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Bishop John Harvey Taylor has set a goal of developing affordable housing on at least 25 percent of the diocese's 128 church campuses. Orchard View Gardens is a proof point that it can be done.
How It Was Funded
Orchard View Gardens was financed through five separate public funding sources, a typical structure for affordable housing built under the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. The confirmed financing stack includes the following.
The multi-layered financing is what makes 9% LIHTC projects so difficult to assemble and why they take so long to get off the ground. Each funding source has its own requirements, timelines, and competitive application processes. Getting all of them aligned on the same project in the same funding cycle requires repeated applications and years of persistence, which is exactly what the St. Joseph's and National CORE partnership experienced before the deal finally came together.
Who Is National CORE?
National CORE, formally National Community Renaissance, is one of the largest nonprofit affordable housing developers in California. Based in Rancho Cucamonga, the organization builds, owns, manages, and provides resident services across a portfolio of communities spread throughout Southern California and beyond. Unlike for-profit developers who balance affordable housing against market-rate work, National CORE is solely focused on affordable housing as its mission.
What sets National CORE apart from many developers is that they do not hand off their communities when construction is done. They serve as owner, developer, general contractor, and property manager on projects like Orchard View Gardens, maintaining long-term involvement in the communities they build. Their affiliated nonprofit, the Hope through Housing Foundation, provides resident services at their properties, including programs designed to help seniors maintain housing stability, stay connected, and age with dignity in their own homes.
National CORE has a specific practice of partnering with faith-based organizations to develop housing on underutilized church land. The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles relationship is one example of this model. It is a practical approach to a real problem: many churches in urban California own land they cannot develop on their own but are reluctant to sell, while developers need sites in established neighborhoods. The partnership unlocks land that might otherwise sit idle for decades.
What Was Built: Units, Layout, and Amenities
The 1.76-acre site holds 66 apartment homes spread across four structures. The primary building is a two- and three-story structure containing 57 of the units, arranged across three floors. Three smaller detached structures, called casitas, provide nine single-story units along the north and east property lines, where the project borders the existing single-family neighborhood. The casita format reduces the visual mass of the project along those edges, a design consideration that reflects the community context.
The unit mix is 62 one-bedroom apartments and four two-bedroom apartments, plus one manager's unit. Units range in size to accommodate seniors living alone or with a spouse or partner. The architecture is California Mission style, which National CORE chose to complement the character of St. Joseph's Church and the surrounding neighborhood.
Amenities at Orchard View Gardens include a 3,000-square-foot community room for events, services, and programs; a computer and technology room; a fitness room; private patios and balconies; outdoor lounge and recreational areas with barbecues; and laundry facilities on each floor. A solar panel system provides energy for heating and cooling. The community is pet-friendly, which matters more than it might sound to seniors for whom a pet may be their primary companion.
Resident services are provided on-site by the Hope through Housing Foundation, the Orange County Health Care Agency's Mental Health and Recovery Services division, and Episcopal Communities & Services. These services include case management, peer support, crisis counseling, and assistance with medical and mental health benefits, all oriented toward helping residents maintain their physical and mental health so they can continue to live independently.
Who Lives There: Income Limits and Special Populations
All 66 homes at Orchard View Gardens are income-restricted and available only to seniors age 62 and older who earn below 60% of the area median income. In Orange County, that income limit covers a significant portion of the senior population, including retirees living on Social Security, seniors who worked in lower-wage service industries throughout their careers, and people whose savings were not sufficient to weather the cost of living in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
Thirteen of the 66 homes are specifically reserved for seniors who have experienced homelessness. That designation matters in Orange County, where approximately one in four homeless residents is 55 or older, a proportion that has continued to rise. Senior homelessness in the county is driven by a combination of factors: retirement without adequate savings, fixed incomes that cannot keep pace with rent increases, health events that deplete reserves, and a near-total absence of affordable rental housing at the income levels where seniors actually land. The 13 reserved units at Orchard View Gardens represent a direct intervention for that population, providing stable housing with the on-site services needed to help residents maintain it long-term.
The project's waitlist has filled. By the time of the March 2025 opening, move-ins were already scheduled for all 66 units. That level of immediate occupancy is consistent with every affordable senior project that has opened in Orange County in recent years: demand is not the question. Supply is.
The Opening: What It Meant to the People Who Were There
The March 12, 2025 ribbon cutting brought together an unusually broad coalition for a housing project. All five Buena Park City Council members attended. Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Doug Chaffee was present. Mayor Joyce Ahn spoke. Bishop John Harvey Taylor of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles delivered remarks. National CORE's Chief Development Officer Alexa Washburn represented the developer. The sheer number of officials who showed up reflects how long the project had been in the works and how many partners had a stake in its completion.
The Rev. Michael Bell, who helps congregations in the Episcopal Diocese navigate the affordable housing development process, spoke about his own father who had faced potential homelessness late in his life before finding affordable senior housing. "I have to imagine he, in spirit, is really pleased with what we all, you all, have accomplished here," Bell said, "because it will have an impact on people like him and families like ours that we will never meet."
For the Rev. Cindy Voien and the St. Joseph's congregation, the opening represented the fulfillment of something they had been working toward for years without any guarantee it would happen. State funding came through narrowly, after at least one near-miss in prior application rounds. The patience required to keep a vision alive through that kind of uncertainty is not the kind of thing that shows up in a press release, but it is what affordable housing in California actually requires. The fact that 66 seniors now have stable, affordable homes on Valley View Street is the direct result of people at St. Joseph's who refused to let the idea die. You can see other active development projects across Orange County on the OC New Developments page.
Questions About Buena Park Real Estate?
Orchard View Gardens is one of four new housing projects that have recently opened or broken ground in Buena Park, from affordable senior rentals to for-sale townhomes. If you want to understand what is happening in the Buena Park market, or anywhere in North Orange County, we can walk you through it.
