As cities throughout Orange County grapple with building enough housing, local officials are increasingly looking at redeveloping underperforming retail centers.
Now, another commercial center in Santa Ana near South Coast Plaza could be redeveloped into nearly 1,600 homes, restaurants, retail stores, office space as well as bikeways and acres of open space accessible to the public.
It’s one of the latest proposed conversions of an aging mall or underused commercial plaza into a mix of retail and homes as cities across Southern California struggle to meet the state’s substantial housing mandates…