By Eric Engelbert
A 41-acre site in Santa Ana just received approval for one of the largest mixed-use redevelopments in Orange County history. The Related Bristol project will replace the aging Metro Town Square shopping center with 3,750 apartment homes, 200 senior living units, a 250-room hotel, 350,000 square feet of retail and dining, and 13.1 acres of publicly accessible open space. The total development value is $2.9 billion. The Santa Ana City Council approved it 6-0 in October 2024. Construction is set to begin in 2026, with the full project completing in phases by 2036. If you own a home, rent an apartment, or are considering buying anywhere near the Bristol Street and Sunflower Avenue corridor, here is what you need to know about the project that will define this part of Orange County for the next generation. We also recently covered The Village Santa Ana, a second major redevelopment directly adjacent to this site, adding another 1,583 homes just to the south.
Metro Town Square: A 50-Year-Old Mall That Time Left Behind
Metro Town Square opened in the 1970s on a 41-acre block bounded by Bristol Street to the east, Plaza Drive to the west, Sunflower Avenue to the south, and MacArthur Boulevard to the north. For decades it served the surrounding community as a functional neighborhood retail center, home to nearly 100 tenants ranging from restaurants and service businesses to clothing and grocery. But like many suburban malls built in that era, it struggled to adapt to changing retail patterns and experienced a gradual decline in traffic and tenancy over the past 20 years.
What triggered the redevelopment was not a developer swooping in to force out tenants. The families who had owned the property for generations reached out to Related California themselves, because all of the retail leases at Metro Town Square were expiring in 2025. With a mass lease expiration on the horizon and no compelling case for a conventional retail renovation, the ownership decided to pursue something transformational. That origin story matters: Related was brought in by the landowners, not the other way around.
For now, the nearly 100 existing tenants remain open for business while Related secures project financing ahead of the 2026 construction start. Phased construction will begin at the southern end of the site and move northward, meaning tenants in the northern portion of Metro Town Square will operate longer before their portion of the site is cleared. Related has not announced a formal tenant relocation program publicly, but the phased approach gives businesses in the northern zone additional time to prepare.
Related California: The Firm Behind Hudson Yards, Now Betting Big on Santa Ana
Related California is a subsidiary of Related Companies, one of the largest privately held real estate firms in the United States. The parent company is best known for developing Hudson Yards in Manhattan, a $25 billion mixed-use complex on the far west side of New York City that stands as the largest private real estate development in American history. Related Companies operates at the top of the institutional development market, and its involvement signals the level of capital and long-term commitment this project represents.
Related California was founded in 1989 and has spent more than three decades building across the state, with a portfolio of more than 20,700 residential units completed or under construction. Its work spans the full spectrum from luxury high-rise residential to affordable housing redevelopment, making it unusual among large-scale developers for its genuine range across income levels and product types. Related California is frequently cited as the largest developer of mixed-income housing in California.
Their Orange County footprint already includes work in Santa Ana. The Crossroads at Washington, an affordable community in Santa Ana's Logan neighborhood, provided 85 apartments for extremely low-income families and people experiencing homelessness. Related Bristol is a different scale and product entirely, but the existing OC presence means the developer is not learning this market from scratch. Their Newport Beach-area relationships and familiarity with OC entitlement processes were evident in the relatively smooth path to a 6-0 council approval.
The Design Team: Robert A.M. Stern, Gehl, RIOS, and Elkus Manfredi
The architecture and planning team assembled for Related Bristol is one of the most credentialed groups ever brought to an Orange County project. Understanding who these firms are gives a real sense of the ambition behind the design.
Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) is the lead architect. RAMSA is a New York firm founded by Robert A.M. Stern, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture and one of the most respected architects in the world. The firm is known for buildings that blend traditional American architectural character with contemporary program requirements, including residential towers at 15 Central Park West in New York and new residential colleges at Yale and Princeton. The choice of RAMSA signals that Related wants Related Bristol to feel rooted and permanent rather than trend-driven.
Elkus Manfredi Architects is a Boston firm with deep expertise in mixed-use urban design, particularly retail and entertainment districts. Their work includes major mixed-use projects across the country and they are specifically known for designing ground-level environments that activate streets and draw pedestrian activity.
RIOS is the landscape architecture and urban design lead, responsible for the 13.1 acres of publicly accessible open space, including parks, plazas, streetscapes, and pedestrian pathways. RIOS is also the landscape architect on The Village Santa Ana directly to the south, which creates an unusual opportunity for design continuity between the two projects.
Gehl is the urban planning consultant. Gehl is a Copenhagen-based firm with a global reputation for human-scale city design, focused on making urban spaces walkable, bikeable, and genuinely inviting for everyday life rather than just impressive in renderings. Their involvement points to a serious commitment to the pedestrian experience throughout the 41-acre site.
3,750 Homes, a Hotel, Senior Living, and Three Phases Over Ten Years
Related Bristol will be built in three sequential phases, none of which will overlap, starting from the southern portion of the site and progressing northward. The full project is projected to complete by 2036. Here is the full scope:
3,750 residential apartments across the three phases, making this one of the largest single-site apartment developments ever approved in Orange County. 200 senior living units, a component that directly addresses the needs of an aging Orange County population that is increasingly priced out of the assisted living and senior housing market. A 250-room hotel, which will serve both business travelers working in the South Coast Metro employment district and visitors to the nearby Segerstrom Center for the Arts and South Coast Plaza. 350,000 square feet of retail and dining, roughly three times the footprint of the retail component at The Village Santa Ana next door, intended to create a genuine commercial district rather than ground-floor amenity space. And 13.1 acres of open space, all of it publicly accessible, including parks, plazas, and pedestrian pathways connecting through the site.
The site will also include 6,520 onsite parking spaces, a number that reflects both the density of the project and the reality that Central OC residents will not be abandoning their cars anytime soon, regardless of how walkable the new neighborhood is designed to be.
No on-site affordable units are included in the plan. Related California will instead pay $18 million in affordable housing in-lieu fees to the city, which can direct those funds toward affordable housing elsewhere in Santa Ana.
$544 Million in Community Benefits and 16,800 Jobs: The Deal Santa Ana Made
The City of Santa Ana approved Related Bristol with what it described as an unprecedented community benefits package valued at $544 million. That figure encompasses direct payments, public infrastructure, open space commitments, job creation, and projected tax revenue over the life of the project.
The direct payments to the city include a $22 million Community Benefit Fund, which the council has discretion to allocate toward fire and life safety improvements, a multi-use community center or library, affordable housing, public art, or other community priorities. This is in addition to the $18 million in affordable housing in-lieu fees. The city projects the development will generate $500 million in new net tax revenue to Santa Ana over the first 30 years, which is critical context given the city's current fiscal pressures. Santa Ana is currently facing a budget deficit of approximately $19 million as of 2026, with the expiration of Measure X sales tax revenues threatening to deepen that gap in the years ahead. A project that generates $500 million in new city revenue over three decades is not optional. It is structural.
On employment, the project is projected to generate 16,834 one-time construction jobs and between 1,215 and 5,529 permanent ongoing jobs, with first-source local hiring commitments focused on Santa Ana and Orange County residents. The path to that approval was not entirely smooth: representatives from the LA/OC Building Trades Council and IBEW Local 441 raised concerns in the weeks before the council vote that Related California had not yet reached a formal community labor workforce agreement with local unions, which would have ensured Santa Ana residents had priority for construction employment. The council ultimately voted 6-0 to approve without that agreement in place, a decision that drew some criticism from organized labor. Whether Related California reaches a broader workforce agreement as financing is finalized will be worth watching before construction begins.
What 5,000 New Market-Rate Homes Mean for a Working-Class City
Related Bristol and The Village Santa Ana, taken together, represent more than 5,300 new homes being added to a single stretch of South Santa Ana over the next 10 to 20 years. None of those units are on-site affordable. Both projects pay in-lieu fees instead. That is the honest math, and it deserves direct discussion.
Santa Ana is a majority-Latino city with some of the highest population densities in California. It is a city where working families have been getting priced out of their own neighborhoods for years, and where the word "gentrification" is not an abstraction but a lived daily experience for many residents. Bringing nearly $6 billion in combined development investment to this corridor will change the character of the surrounding neighborhoods. Higher-end retail, new restaurants, premium apartment buildings, and increased foot traffic from a hotel and office workers will shift what this part of Santa Ana looks and feels like. That is not inherently good or bad. It depends entirely on whether existing residents benefit from those changes or are displaced by them.
The $22 million community benefit fund and the $18 million in affordable housing fees create tools the city council can use to mitigate displacement and invest in existing residents. Whether those tools are deployed effectively is a policy question that will unfold over the next decade. The jobs component, particularly the first-source hiring commitment, is potentially the most meaningful economic lever for current Santa Ana residents if it is enforced with specificity rather than left as a general aspiration.
What Nearby Homeowners Should Expect from Two Simultaneous Mega-Projects
If you own a home within a mile or two of Bristol Street and Sunflower Avenue, you are not tracking one major construction project. You are tracking two. Related Bristol and The Village Santa Ana are both projected to break ground in 2026. While neither project will be simultaneously active across its full footprint, there will be periods during the next decade when both sites have active construction phases running at the same time. The cumulative impact on traffic, noise, and daily life in the surrounding neighborhood will be more significant than either project in isolation.
Bristol Street, Sunflower Avenue, Plaza Drive, and MacArthur Boulevard will all carry elevated construction traffic over an extended period. The 55 Freeway on-ramps serving this area will also see increased congestion during peak construction phases. Homeowners who commute through this corridor should plan for meaningful delays and consider alternate routes during the heaviest periods of each phase.
The long-term value story is considerably stronger. The combined effect of nearly $6 billion in institutional development investment, backed by some of the most capable firms in the country, is a generational improvement in the desirability of this corridor. New parks, activated retail streets, a hotel, office employment, and well-designed public spaces all improve the neighborhood context that surrounding homeowners live in and that buyers evaluate when making purchase decisions. The tax revenue generated by both projects will also improve city services and public infrastructure over time, which benefits every property owner in Santa Ana.
The practical advice for homeowners near the site is the same as for The Village Santa Ana: the next five years will bring disruption. The decade after that should bring appreciation. If your planning horizon is short, price accordingly. If you are holding long, the trajectory of this corridor is as clear as it has been in decades.
What This Means for Buyers and Renters in the South Coast Corridor Today
For renters, Related Bristol adds 3,750 market-rate units to the Central OC rental market over a ten-year period. The near-term effect on rents is minimal since the first units are years away. But the long-term addition of this volume of supply, combined with the 957 units at One Metro West in Costa Mesa and the 1,583 units at The Village Santa Ana, represents a meaningful increase in the total rental housing stock in this part of Orange County. More supply at the higher end of the market tends to create pricing pressure across the submarket over time, which benefits renters throughout the corridor.
For buyers, the corridor between South Coast Plaza and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts is undergoing a transformation that will take years to fully price into surrounding property values. Buyers who purchase in Santa Ana or the adjacent Costa Mesa neighborhoods today are entering before the most visible signs of that transformation are on the ground. That is historically when the best value is available.
Current market conditions in Santa Ana offer more negotiating room than buyers have had in several years. Homes are sitting longer, and sellers are more willing to negotiate on both price and terms than they were in 2021 or 2022. The fundamentals of a neighborhood in the early stages of a 20-year institutional redevelopment story are not yet reflected in asking prices for the majority of single-family homes in the area. That gap will close.
Related Bristol Is the Largest Redevelopment Project in Santa Ana History
$2.9 billion. 41 acres. 3,750 homes. A hotel, senior living, 13 acres of parks, and a design team that includes the architects of Hudson Yards and 15 Central Park West. This is not a speculative proposal. It is approved, financed, and breaking ground in 2026. The South Coast Metro corridor is being rebuilt from the ground up, and the decisions you make about buying, renting, or holding in this area in the next few years will be made in the shadow of that reality.
