Gravel crunches beneath car tires from the first turn into River Street Marketplace’s parking lot as the scent of barbecue wafts into the common areas of San Juan Capistrano’s newest retail center, which is located in California’s oldest neighborhood.
River Street Marketplace is Dan Almquist’s latest retail center and his most ambitious yet. His company, Almquist, which has a portfolio of about 750,000 square feet and growing, gritted its teeth through a decade to get the $70 million, 60,000-square-foot project done. The payoff: the chance to define a new segment of retail — call it specialty on steroids — and to join a stage starring prominent retail developers like Don Bren of the Irvine Company and Caruso’s Rick Caruso.
Shopping centers — both power centers, with big box stores, and smaller neighborhood strips — have long dominated Orange County’s retail landscape, though there are also trophy indoor shopping malls such as Irvine Company’s Fashion Island and the Segerstroms’ South Coast Plaza.
Almquist, still a relative unknown despite his rapid ascension in Southern California retail development, has a different vision.
“I really want our projects to have a soul,” Almquist said.
The gravel in River Street Marketplace’s parking lot, it turns out, is an auditory reference to the sound of rolling wagon wheels. An agrarian theme, complete with a petting zoo, aims to evoke the late 18th century when the Los Rios Historic District was just beginning to take shape here with its first adobe structures and Mission San Juan Capistrano.
Almquist, who lives here in San Juan Capistrano, wants you to close your eyes for a moment before you shop, to imagine a farmer with a barn living next door to River Street. Every good retail center needs a story, the developer would tell you.
“It’s creating this narrative,” Almquist said. “You’re not trying to fool people into thinking, ‘Hey, this is historic,’ but it does come across when there’s a common thread that you weave into these projects.”
The businesses don’t sell field hoes or adobe bricks, so the story eventually breaks down. The tenants make the place contemporary. Almquist has a philosophy about tenants: He signs one-third nationals, one-third regionals and one-third locals. At River Street Marketplace, nationals like Free People and Mendocino Farms co-exist with Seager, a surf and Western-inspired brand that has its first-ever store here. There’s organic food retailer Fermentation Farm, a meat market and flower stand, and the Rodeo-branded public market-meets-food hall that’s become the stamp of an Almquist project.
But can soul scale? Almquist’s development pipeline is moving fast. With his cowboy aesthetic, he’s avoided the smoothed-out, suited-up style of others in the game, but if Almquist ends up on autopilot, his product could simply add to the state’s aging inventory of bloated malls and uninspiring power centers.
Bigger and bigger
Almquist’s next beat will be the Canopy at Great Park in Irvine, like River Street but bigger: It’s 91,000 square feet, on the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, now a 1,300-acre park with sports facilities, an arts complex and events space that anchor a master-planned community. Groundbreaking is scheduled for this quarter.
Then there’s a 25,000-square-foot, restaurant-driven space (with a 200-stall parking structure) planned for downtown Fullerton, on Harbor Boulevard next to the Fox Theatre. That’s expected to come online in 2027. In Whittier, Almquist is adding a Rodeo 72 public market this month to an already bustling neighborhood center, bringing the combined retail there to over 151,000 square feet. (Like River Street, the Whittier project has a storied past, built on a portion of what was a 19th-century reform school for boys.)
In San Juan Capistrano, where Almquist moved 13 years ago, the company has roughly 25,000 square feet of completed projects outside of River Street. He isn’t done: There are plans for two mixed-use developments spanning nearly 150,000 combined square feet, in addition to the 72-room French Hotel that will include the preservation and reuse of two historic adobe buildings. Also proposed for the city is the mammoth, 65-acre Legacy Ranch, an agricultural, equestrian, event and recreation space.
It was never intentional to own and develop this much within the city, Almquist said. But he holds on to a strong desire “to do things right.”
Rockin’ the suburbs
A Japanese couple, Jimmy and Hiroko Ito, purchased the future River Street site in 1959 from the Oyharzabal family, who were some of San Juan Capistrano’s original Basque settlers. After being interned in Manzanar during World War II, the Itos wanted to settle into a community and get business going again. They turned their property into the community’s long-standing plant nursery.
Over the decades, offers came in to buy their land, and eventually their son Doug Ito and his wife Sheree Ito, decided to sell. They spent a year interviewing and researching buyers before landing on Almquist.
Still, they faced pushback in town over the sale to a developer.
“The final decision was not solely about money,” Sheree and Doug Ito wrote in a 2017 letter to the editor of the local Capistrano Dispatch newspaper. “Our hope was, after 58 years of ownership, we could leave a positive legacy for the Ito family.”
“You’re not trying to fool people into thinking, ‘Hey, this is historic,’ but it does come across when there’s a common thread that you weave into these projects.”
Naysayers didn’t think River Street Marketplace made sense for a city known mostly for its mission and the annual celebration to mark the return of the swallows from Argentina back to San Juan Capistrano.
Neither did brokers.
“We went into escrow in 2014, and retail at that time was a lot more conventional,” Almquist said of buying the land for River Street. “The first three brokers that we interviewed to take the assignment didn’t want to do it. They didn’t think it was a viable project. They thought San Juan was just a sleepy little market.”
They get it now.
Luxury residential broker Phillip Caruso (no relation to Rick Caruso) at Christie’s International Real Estate Southern California grew up in Orange County and sells real estate there.
In South County, there’s nothing comparable, Caruso said. Everything else is a “mass mall concept,” he said — “mid-rise buildings with underground parking in busy centers with a few anchor tenants, like a movie theater, chain restaurants and a few boutiques.”
“The only places to go [in the past] that offered an outdoor retail feeling were Laguna Beach or downtown San Clemente, along Del Mar,” he added.
For a long time, Orange County wasn’t cool, its neighbors to the north in Los Angeles would say — too homogenous. But River Street isn’t the first sign of change. Former Quiksilver Inc. President Shaheen Sadeghi’s developments, the Lab and the Camp, brought unique and hip to Costa Mesa in the ’90s. DJM’s redevelopment of Lido Marina Village beckoned upscale retailers and restaurants to Newport Beach in 2016.
The Runyon Group, developers behind the Post Montecito and Platform in Culver City, also believe retail’s future is in the suburbs and are looking in Laguna Beach and Newport Beach for future projects.
Joining the giants
The more attention Almquist projects attract, the more the comparisons fly, particularly in Orange County where the Irvine Company is synonymous across asset classes with its meticulous master planned communities and uniform wayfinding signage. Rick Caruso’s retail projects such as the Grove and Americana at Brand have long held court as the primer on how to do premium specialty retail.
But where Irvine and Caruso projects are controlled environments, led by CEOs in suits, Almquist is looser. That starts with Almquist himself, who was dressed in Wranglers and a cream-colored button-down from Poncho Outdoors during a recent visit to his company’s headquarters.
“We all owe Donald Bren a debt of gratitude in how he’s developed the Irvine Ranch,” Almquist said. “I would never want to have a contrast of us and the Irvine Company from the standpoint that I have the utmost respect for what they’ve done.”
He will allow that Almquist’s methods are different.
“I think what we’re doing are these really referential projects,” he said. (Meaning: the adobe. The farms. The onetime reform school.)
Development wasn’t an intentional career path for Almquist.
He worked in sales after graduating from the University of California San Diego and then got his MBA from the University of Southern California. Development offered Almquist something tangible for the “fruits of my labor,” he said. Born and raised in Orange County, mostly in Tustin, he got the dynamics of the markets he went on to develop.
Almquist, the company, originally began as Frontier Real Estate Investments and cut its teeth on single-tenant net lease retail deals.
But Almquist, the person, was also getting his hands in other businesses. He was one of the first franchisees of Dunkin’ Donuts when the chain expanded to Southern California in 2013, with Frontier striking a development deal for 18 locations in central Orange County and L. A. County’s South Bay.
So he sees the tenants’ perspectives, Almquist Vice President of Development Tom Carpenter, said.
“He’s the owner and CEO, yet he’s involved with what some might say are minute details on how things look or feel,” Carpenter said. “We’re notorious for making changes to projects while we’re building or designing them.”
Carpenter, a former leasing broker, joined Almquist to help find sites 12 years ago and watched the company’s transformation.
“We were going out and buying hard corners to do banks, drive-thrus, drugstores and then over time we started to do 2- to 3-acre sites and then that evolved into 10-acre sites,” Carpenter said.
But six or seven years ago, that changed.
“[Dan] didn’t want to be like a lot of other developers trying to tie up corners and lease to tenants,” Carpenter said. “He wanted to create these cool spaces and go after real estate that’s special — irreplaceable sites.”
Stanton’s rodeo
For decades, big box stores squeezed out mom and pops. Then came e-commerce, which kept hollowing out main streets.
In Orange County’s city of Stanton, things went the other way.
Almquist already had the site for what would become Rodeo 39, Almquist’s 41,000-square-foot public market, when he went to the International Council of Shopping Centers’ annual conference in 2018 with Carpenter. They already had two markets back out of a deal when they scheduled a meeting with an interested discount grocer at the retail conference.
But Almquist and Carpenter left the meeting unsatisfied — this wasn’t what they wanted.
They decided to DIY the food anchor tenant. They clocked time in nearby Little Saigon to understand the community, its large Vietnamese population and what the younger demographic might want.
They came up with the Rodeo concept: a hall of small vendors adorned with colorful murals.
In late 2020, Rodeo 39 opened, with lines around the center. The 30-or-so occupants are non-credit tenants selling everything from fresh donuts and pho; there’s a vintage retailer and tattoo parlor.
But then came more pandemic restrictions. Almquist had to figure out food delivery operations to stay afloat — and to make sure their vendors did.
Once restrictions were lifted, business took off. On a recent weekday afternoon, Phoholic and the Crawfish Hut were packed, with the lunch rush spilling out into the outdoor patio.
“It’s been an attraction for everybody in Orange County because we were the only game in town to have that conceptual center,” said Stanton Mayor Dave Shawver — a 55-year resident and 37-year City Council member. “It really inspired people to come in and shop and dine in Stanton, which of course helped our economy.”
Stanton is a little over 3 square miles, with State Route 39 running through it and seven surrounding cities. Until Almquist, its main attraction was the Adventure City theme park, which sits in the shadow of Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park and Disneyland in Anaheim.
Since Rodeo 39’s arrival, two upscale apartment communities have gone up. Bonanni Development completed the 300-unit VRV in 2023 and the 321-unit Cloud House this year.
“We’re the little engine that always thought it could,” Shawver said.
Rodeo 39 sets a high bar. A lot of developers want to engage in “placemaking,” to turn a brand new structure into a real place where people go. So far, Almquist seems to do this better than most.
“Every developer has some self-interest, but a lot of developers are in it for their own personal gain,” Shawver said. “Dan is a gentleman that kept his word. His word is his bond and I admire him for that.” Stanton, he said, had given Almquist a $2.3 million loan in the form of a sales tax revenue credit, and Almquist paid it back five years early.
Outside Almquist’s home, there is a bronze statue by the artist Bradford J. Williams. Two larger-than-lifesize cowboys, each atop a horse, shake hands. It’s called “Binding Contract.” He has a second, smaller version at his office.
The more Almquist develops, the more he confronts questions of what’s next, and where, and whether the successes of Rodeo 39 or River Street Marketplace can be replicated again and again.
Almquist shies away from numbers on the size of his real estate portfolio as a gauge of success or a way to forecast the future.
“I don’t want to be the biggest guy,” he said. “I just want to do really good projects.”