Bill Witte is patient, not one to celebrate early.
He brushes aside the suggestion that his company’s $3 billion mixed-use development project — Related Bristol, recently approved by the city of Santa Ana in Orange Country — will be the crown jewel for Related California, the Irvine-based partner of New York-based developer Related Companies.
Jewel or not, it will be the biggest mixed-use development, if the next decade goes according to plan. On a recent walkthrough of the site, Witte sizes up the work: pulling together financing and then building, in phases, 3,700 residential rental units, 350,000 square feet of retail, 200 senior living units in a high rise, a 250-room hotel and 13 acres of open space with underground parking.
The development is in an aging shopping center, but it sits across from the top mall in the United States in terms of sales volume, the South Coast Plaza. The whole place used to be lima bean farm country. Related signed a 99-year lease for the prime real estate directly with the Callens family, who had been harvesting legumes since the early 1900s — though they had long since redeveloped the land into retail. And, the timing is right: All current tenant leases in the 1960s retail center end in 2025.
“We just got it approved, so I don’t want to overstate…” Witte said. He seemed to find some descriptors. The team was “remarkable,” he noted. He called the city approval process “the most ambitious and active community outreach project we’ve ever been involved in.”
It is quintessential Witte: Methodical. Deliberate. Contemplative. But his moderation makes sense. In California, environmental regulation is stringent, local zoning standards get deployed to stop a lot of new development and political systems give local electeds power over change to their tiny kingdoms. Developing anything is an act of patience and deliberation: No one in their right mind pops the champagne before residents and businesses move in — especially if there’s an affordable component.
Witte once tried to explain the complexity to a group of L.A. City Councilmembers. “It’s very hard in L.A. when you don’t know how long it’s going to take and you’re committing to an affordable percentage when you have no idea what the economics are going to be when you get there,” he told them.
He spent 14 years in the public sector before going into private development. In the Golden State, he’s built affordable and market-rate, turning Related California into one of the state’s largest developers, turning out important landmarks, such as the $1 billion Grand Avenue development designed by Frank Gehry in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 2022.
“I like the action. I get up every day.”
So while he knows there will be bureaucracy and community complaints he can’t get around, he probably also knows he can reach the end point — because the only way to build anything in California is to be like Bill Witte.
Related California has a development portfolio of 20,700-plus residential units completed or under construction, according to the company, including 16,900 affordable units, 2,715 completed market-rate rentals and 1,050 market-rate rentals under construction, and over 415 condominiums.
With this track record, onlookers might feel certain that he’ll get to celebrate the Bristol someday, too.
While he’s proud of his team’s work that went into getting approval from the city, Witte will hold off toasting. “We’ll have to see how it goes,” Witte said.
City planner
When Witte was 8 years old, his great aunt would take him on the New York City subway to the school in the Bronx where she taught. His father was a civil engineer from the Bronx who worked as a general contractor until Witte was 11; his mother grew up in Brooklyn.
“I just had a lot of exposure to cities,” Witte said.
For his 16th birthday, Witte asked his dad to drive him through the old industrial inner cities of Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut.
“What are they doing in this neighborhood?” Witte wondered as they passed through.
He earned a master’s in city planning and a bachelor’s in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania — “I only wanted to go to college in a city,” he said. He held housing-related positions in Philadelphia and became director of housing and economic development in San Francisco for eight years under then-mayor Dianne Feinstein. He was deputy mayor for housing and neighborhoods under Feinstein’s successor, Art Agnos.
Witte was establishing his personal life in San Francisco too. He met his wife, Keiko Sakamoto, in the mid-1980s when she was a rising associate at a top boutique law firm in San Francisco and he was working for Feinstein. Feinstein’s staff had been taking “sister city” trips to Asia, and someone at Sakamoto’s office pointed out Witte should meet people at the firm who work with Japan, their next destination.
At a group lunch, Sakamoto did all the talking, “and that was fun,” Witte said. She then invited Witte to a Japanese American Chamber of Commerce dinner in San Francisco.
“So, I’m sitting with her, and I shouldn’t say this, but I’m old, so I can get away with it. At the first meeting, [she had] her suit on and her hair’s up in a bun. This time, she got a sleeveless black dress and her hair down to her waist. And I was no longer interested in Japan,” he said, smiling.
Then, in the late 1980s, Witte met Steve Ross through his brother, Matt, who was developing office properties in California. Matt’s firm and Related New York decided to work on a San Francisco office project at 680 Mission Street together.
With the office market stumbling, the building appeared ripe for housing instead.
Ross, despite his background as a developer and syndicator of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, had not yet breached the California affordable housing market, and he mentioned this to Matt, who thought to connect Ross with Bill. After a decade-plus in government, Bill Witte formed a financial partnership with Steve Ross’s Related to develop affordable housing, creating Related California in 1989.
The brand-new firm converted 680 Mission into a luxury residential high-rise called the Paramount, which opened in 1999. From there, over the next decade, affordable and market-rate divisions began to take shape.
“He’s a very rare guy, coming out of planning. Not a lot of developers come out of planning. He’s been able to educate people in the public sector what the private sector needs and vice versa because he understands the motivations of both.”
The combination became Related’s advantage, what Witte calls “an ability in-house to develop everything.”
It has rarely been easy, even with the wire to Ross’s accounts. In 2004, Related won the right to redevelop a key parcel in downtown L.A.’s Grand Avenue, modeled after Time Warner Center, which had just opened in New York. Ross spent $50 million in advance to upgrade a park, in exchange for hoped-for special zoning for the development. Still, regulatory and financial problems hounded the Grand for nearly two decades.
“Not once have I gotten a call from another developer saying, ‘I am happy to step into your shoes.’ Not once,” Witte told Urbanize LA in a 2019 interview.
“He’s a very rare guy, coming out of planning,” Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, said. “Not a lot of developers come out of planning. He’s been able to educate people in the public sector [on] what the private sector needs and vice versa because he understands the motivations of both.”
“He’s been able to thread the needle to actually get affordable housing built in California,” Green said. “When he says he’s going to do something, he does it.”
That has earned him a lot of trust with both the development community and the government. “There really are very few [like Witte],” Carol Galante, founder of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “When there’s an issue on housing and affordability at the state level, the first person any legislators in Sacramento would call to get a view is Bill.”
Hill of beans
A street named Callens Common bisects the two city blocks of the Bristol project at Santa Ana’s southernmost tip, and on a recent tour of the site, Witte gestured to the area where the Bristol redevelopment — housing, outdoor space, and retail, a facsimile of a city block — will materialize over the next decade. South Coast Plaza stands to the south and Segerstrom Performing Arts Center and the Orange County Museum of Art area to the southeast of the project location.
“So, you have the cultural core, you have the retail core and now you have a residential core,” he said.
When Witte was holding public hearings for L.A.’s the Grand, all over the city, he found that he wasn’t the only Californian with a penchant for the classic urban density of New York City.
“We’d ask people about that, what’s your favorite public space? They’d say, ‘We don’t want New York. We’re L.A.,’” he told Urbanize LA.
But when you pinned them down, he said, “inevitably, they’d tell me a space in New York.” Closer to home, they liked old town Pasadena.
You can’t recreate Soho from scratch, but you also can’t dismiss people’s preferences, Witte mgiht tell you. He will hear anyone out — it’s how he gets these complex projects built.
“The sheer scale of the project, initially, some people are going to be spooked by that,” Witte said. “You have to talk to your opponents.”
And then you have to do what they want, to a point.
“What I’ve found over many years … if you incorporate something that you heard, people appreciate it,” he said.
The Related Bristol plans originally did not call for a police substation on site but the company agreed to it after feedback.
“Good idea,” Witte said.
It’s hard to find critics of Witte and his firm.
When “you do big projects in a very public-oriented environment like we find in California, people are going to poke at you,” he said. He said his reputation is his armor. “They still might not support our project, but we’ve done so much affordable housing, it’d be very difficult to criticize Related as just this behemoth developer that doesn’t care about anything.” As part of the development agreement at Bristol, Related will pay an estimated $18 million in in-lieu fees to Santa Ana, which must be spent on affordable housing (the company has previously built two affordable projects in Santa Ana). Related will also pay a $22 million public benefit fee to be used at the discretion of the Santa Ana City Council.
Coast to coast
Related New York serves as the financial partner and guarantor for Related California and its other affiliates on the market-rate developments. It provides the financial guarantees required by lenders and investors and advances capital as needed for any of the projects, particularly in the pre-development phase.
Related New York then continues to remain a financial backer for each phase of large projects, which generally have individual debt and equity structures as the phases are developed. When equity partners step in on other phases, New York still puts in 10 percent. Witte said Related participates “significantly” as the financial partner but didn’t specify how any profits might be split.
On the affordable housing development side, the vast majority of the predevelopment capital is provided by various lines of credit obtained in California with Related New York serving as a guarantor of those lines of credit.
Witte learned how to navigate affordable housing at one of the first public housing redevelopment projects on the West Coast, in the Harbor City area of Los Angeles. Related redeveloped a wartime-era housing project then called Normont Terrace, now named Harbor Village. Related took 400 barrack-style public housing units on a 35-acre site on Pacific Coast Highway and Vermont and turned them into 400 replacement low-income units and 224 for-sale condominiums. The condos have a 99-year lease from the housing authority.
“We had to relocate the tenants. We had to do the demolition of the public housing. We were in our infancy, and I can tell you now … had that project not gone forward, there would be no Related California today.”
The grandfather
When Witte, now 73, was trying to build the Grand, he criss-crossed the city for public hearings. For the Bristol he is no longer the guy running the construction, “but I am sometimes the guy who’s thinking about what new projects or areas are we going to be in for the next three years. I like the action. I get up every day.”
Like Steve Ross, who is spending his golden years developing in South Florida (see page 28), he believes that “age is just a number.”
“I still, as much as I don’t want to spend as much time as I used to – I have a growing family, just became a grandfather. I am trying to slow down and spend more time with my family, but other things matter too,” he said.
He is doing some succession planning and pursuing outside interests — though not golf. He and his wife are involved in several philanthropic efforts, including managing the Witte-Sakamoto Family Foundation, which supports various charitable causes.
He also thinks about housing policy.
“I like devoting time to discussing and advancing the creative policies that – they may help our business, too – but they’re of interest to me.”
The future Bristol is today home to a complex of wood frame and stucco buildings and lots of parking, plus several big box stores, a few smaller stores, restaurants and banks. “Look at how much of this site is open,” Witte mused on a recent visit, pointing to the unused parking spaces.
With the city approvals in hand, Witte now has to complete financing and phase out the work, which he expects to begin in 2026. There will be three phases: the part closest to South Coast Plaza will go in first, followed by phases #2 and 3 on the northern half of the site, which preserves two-thirds of the existing retail tenants for as long as possible.
The response from potential equity partners was very strong, he said, and as long as interest rates come down a little, he’s not worried about securing financing.
When it’s done — when Orange County has an urban center, when the people move in — he’ll celebrate.