Shopoff OK to Build Homes and Hotel in Huntington Beach

Shopoff Realty Investments got the nod to build 250 homes and a 215-room boutique hotel atop a former oil tank farm in Huntington Beach.

The Irvine-based developer led by Bill Shopoff was approved by the City Council to construct the 29-acre project on the former Magnolia Tank Farm west of Magnolia Street and north of the Huntington Beach Channel, the Orange County Register reported.

The approval comes after an approval by the California Coastal Commission in July, with certain stipulations.

The project, just north of the Magnolia Marsh some 2,000 feet from the beach, was approved by the council in 2021. But it needed new council approval because of the commission changes.

Plans now call for 200 for-sale homes, a 50-unit affordable apartment complex, a 215-room boutique lodge, 19,000 square feet of shops and restaurants and a 4-acre park.

The apartment complex will set aside half its units for hotel workers, according to a request by the Coastal Commission. The hotel would also rent a quarter of its rooms at affordable rates.

Shopoff said in July that the earliest homes could finish construction is 2027. A cost and timeline for the rest of the project was not disclosed.

Shopoff bought the Magnolia Tank Farm north of Pacific Coast Highway in 2016 for $26.5 million, or $913,793 an acre.

Next to the project site is the former Ascon landfill, which until 1984 took in industrial, oil field and construction waste, now undergoing an environmental cleanup. State toxic regulators deemed the development safe from contamination from the former private dump.

The former oil tank farm is gone, the site remediated in recent years of soil contamination.

A coalition of environmental groups had opposed the project, saying the former wetland should be restored. They also said the housing and hotel development, if built atop a site raised to prevent flooding, would divert flood waters into nearby neighborhoods.

“We have some of the strictest environmental safety laws in the world here in California,” Councilman Tony Strickland said. “If this passed state muster, you can be assured that it is safe.”

Shopoff Realty Investments, founded by Bill Shopoff in 1992, had $3 billion in assets under management at the end of last year with $477 million in property sales and financing, up from $160 million in 2022, according to the Orange County Business Journal.

— Dana Bartholomew