Anaheim’s City Council voted 6-1 on Tuesday to set a July 31, 2027 deadline for the developer behind the long-stalled A-Town housing project to fix its compliance problems or risk losing its development agreement altogether. The vote came after city staff concluded the developer, PT Metro, LLC, had fallen behind on a key construction milestone tied to the sprawling mixed-use project along Katella Avenue in the city’s Platinum Triangle district.
According to the Daily Titan, Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken was the lone no vote, pushing back against giving the developer more runway given what she described as a history of inaction on the project. The council held a required public hearing before setting the termination date, and city staff — Heather Allen, Lisandro Orozco and Leonie Mulvihill — presented the recommendation that led to the deadline, the Daily Titan reported.
A-Town was first approved back in October 2005 as a multifamily residential community and mixed-use project, and it has since become one of the more closely watched developments in the Platinum Triangle, the area around Angel Stadium that also includes the Honda Center and the Grove of Anaheim, per the Daily Titan’s reporting. City records describe the roughly 43.1-acre site, located at 1404 East Katella Avenue, as sitting west of State College Boulevard between Katella Avenue and Gene Autry Way, according to City of Anaheim meeting minutes from October 2015.
A Decade of Redesigns and Missed Deadlines
Anaheim revised A-Town’s development plan in October 2015 to allow for up to 1,746 residential units, 50,000 square feet of commercial space and two public parks, the Daily Titan reported. The same city minutes note that the applicant at the time cited changes in the housing market and economic conditions as the reason for scaling back density from an earlier approval that had called for high-rise residential towers, and that the revised plan included public park space and a reconfigured connector-street network…