In California, there’s Irvine Company, owned by the country’s richest developer, and there’s everyone else.
But calling FivePoint Holdings an also-ran doesn’t convey the importance of what the land developer has done — or could do — in the state. The coastal California master-planned communities developer, connected to deep-pocketed Lennar, has delivered thousands of homes in a state that is underbuilt by millions, and managed to turn a profit.
New megadevelopments are rare in sought-after parts of the Golden State, but the company has three: one in Orange County, one in Los Angeles County and a third in San Francisco, with 12,500 homesites completed so far. All together, they plan to deliver 40,000 homes and 23 million square feet of commercial space. FivePoint began to develop the first two, Great Park Neighborhoods and Valencia, under singularly difficult conditions, including lender bankruptcies, municipal bait-and-switches, community resistance and — this being California — battles over native fish and carbon emissions.
Nonetheless, the developer has recently sold sites at Great Park, the Orange County community, for about $10 million an acre, much more than their pre-2020 price.
But if Great Park and Valencia, the L.A. community, seemed feasible only to the kind of developer who could pull off the hardest stuff, the difficulty of developing FivePoint’s San Francisco project, called Candlestick and The San Francisco Shipyard, veered toward impossible.
In 1999, San Francisco named Lennar the master developer of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, which the Navy had used to decontaminate ships after nuclear tests. A decade earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency declared the area a Superfund site, and the Navy hired a firm called Tetra Tech to investigate, test and remediate much of the land in advance of handing it over to the developer. In the meantime, two things happened: In 2006, Lennar won development rights to the nearby Candlestick, once home to the San Francisco 49ers and Giants, and in 2009, Lennar spun out FivePoint to make the latter a focused land developer (or perhaps to satisfy a promising executive who may have wanted his own domain). Little went as planned. In 2014, it came out that Tetra Tech employees had falsified soil samples, swapping in clean dirt for contaminated in tests. Criminal and civil lawsuits dogged the remediator, and the development site, for years. Several, including one with FivePoint, are still winding their way through the courts. Two Tetra Tech employees were sentenced to federal prison in 2018 after pleading guilty.
The saga seemed to change FivePoint, which in 2022 installed a tight-lipped, Irvine Company-trained operator named Daniel Hedigan in place of its original chief executive, Emile Haddad, known industry-wide as a creative visionary not overly concerned with stock prices. The macro environment was changing too. Interest rates shot up, making financing more difficult, even as California’s politicians finally came around to the idea that the state had to build more places to live. Per a state requirement, San Francisco is supposed to add 82,000 new homes by 2031. Together, FivePoint’s Candlestick and Shipyard — neighboring peninsulas jutting out into the San Francisco Bay — could deliver 12,000, or 15 percent.
“What’s there to do? Nothing really.”
In late 2024 came a sign that development could proceed.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors granted approvals to transfer approximately 2 million square feet of the Shipyard’s entitlements to Candlestick for research and development and office space. While this doesn’t solve the problem of the Shipyard or its soil, it does mean that FivePoint will be able to develop land for a little more than half the housing it originally planned — about 7,000 homes — if it can find the funding after all this time.
The San Francisco project could cost “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to develop,” according to Walker & Dunlop analyst Alan Ratner. And that’s if the company can nab a partner at attractive terms.
If not, “the asset becomes worthless,” Ratner said.
FivePoint declined to make Hedigan or Haddad available for an interview. Lennar declined to participate.
Done it before
Great Park Neighborhoods, in Irvine, is among the best master-planned communities in the country, according to John Burns, who runs a research and consulting firm. Homes are modern and very uniform; residents report on Reddit that kids run around and families like the amenities, though some say landscaping is more sterile than in other Irvine developments. Either way, there are few other choices for buyers who want new builds. Valencia, in the Santa Clarita Valley, is the kind of place that began to do well during the pandemic as millennials simultaneously had kids and secured hybrid jobs that made the hourlong commute down the 5 freeway to L.A. proper tolerable. Valencia sells them angular townhomes, duplexes and single-family homes with model names like “Wren” and “Skylar” for upwards of $800,000.
Great Park came into being after Lennar won an auction to buy the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Irvine in 2005, paying $650 million for the ex-military base. In 2008, its lender, Lehman Brothers, declared bankruptcy, kicking off the global financial crisis. Development stalled until FivePoint, post-Lennar spin-off, landed fresh financing three years later.
Here, too, there was contamination from the military, but after a Navy cleanup, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took the majority of El Toro off the Superfund site list in 2014.
There were other problems. When Lennar purchased the land, it had transferred more than 1,000 acres to the city of Irvine and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in development fees. The idea was that the city would build a world-class park, and the development’s homes and businesses would surround it. But the city spent most of the $200 million Lennar paid without making much progress. By the time FivePoint took over the project, it had to figure out how to extend a private-public partnership and wrangle an agreement allowing the company to develop a scaled-back park and to double the number of homes planned.
FivePoint made its first land sales that year, but a battle over a cemetery tempered the victory. The city promised a veterans cemetery in the park, but Haddad, concerned about how a cemetery would be perceived by million-dollar buyers, proposed another location. The back and forth went on for a decade.
But development continued, and 9,400 homesites have now been sold to builders, including Lennar, as of September 2025. The homebuilders have sold 7,300 homes, and FivePoint is eyeing entitlements for more sites.
The road to Valencia wasn’t any easier. A 2015 California Supreme Court decision required an amended analysis of the development’s greenhouse gas emissions and measures to protect the unarmored threespine stickleback fish, following uproar from environmental groups. In 2016, FivePoint filed an updated environmental review for the Santa Clarita Valley development, then called Newhall Ranch, which deemed the development net zero — no emissions ever. A year later, the developer reached a settlement to provide $25 million for conservation efforts and received reapprovals from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Builders have picked up about 3,100 homesites and sold nearly 1,800 to buyers as of the third quarter of 2025, according to quarterly filings.
But land sales have slowed while builders wait for buyers to be able to afford new homes and interest rates to ease. FivePoint has not sold any land at Valencia in about a year but said in its most recent quarterly report that it is “working with builders on two residential land sales that are expected to close in 2026.”
The missing element
Fifteen years ago, Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, wearing a suit and signature blue tie, his hair only beginning to grey, held a press conference.
He signed 12 pieces of legislation to greenlight the second phase of what he said would be the largest redevelopment project in San Francisco’s history — the future Shipyard and Candlestick.
He pitched the project well enough for at least one member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Sophie Maxwell, to actually thank the private homebuilder at the press conference.
“I know that’s the boogeyman,” Maxwell said, “but I still want to thank Lennar for hanging in there with us.”
Newsom continued to beat the housing drum, and when he campaigned for governor in 2017, he promised to shepherd the addition of 3.5 million homes.
It made sense that Lennar and FivePoint, firms able to turn less-than-desirable land into thousands of homes, would be allies of politicians with even a slightly YIMBY bent. That’s especially true in San Francisco, which is now so short of housing goals that the state could invoke a punishment called builder’s remedy.
Instead of its mandated 82,000 new units by 2031, the city’s Family Zoning Plan is likely to deliver only half that, and in twice the time, according to a recent report by local economist Ted Egan. A group called the California Housing Defense Fund, which sues municipalities over noncompliant zoning, has already threatened legal action against the City of San Francisco, which could force the issue.
“This is a pure play California strategy.”
If triggered, builder’s remedy would automatically allow some development proposals, even if they surpass local height limits or threaten rent-controlled units, essentially neutering local zoning power.
Meanwhile, Newsom’s second and final term is near an end, and there are nowhere near 3.5 million new places to live. (In 2022, running for reelection, he walked the number back to 2.5 million by 2030.) Just 650,000 new homes were permitted in the state between 2019, when he took office, and 2023, according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s late 2024 reporting.
In the same period, many developers and investors left rather than take on the feat that is building in California. That includes the country’s fourth-largest apartment developer, Wood Partners, which in 2024 announced it was no longer pursuing new development projects in the state.
A new leader
But FivePoint pushes on in California, thanks to two sharply different personalities who have led the way through the development gauntlet.
The first was Emile Haddad, who came to the United States from Lebanon at age 27, following the civil war.
The war “left a scar — a scar of seeing communities being torn apart, families torn apart, friends torn apart,” he once told a group of University of Southern California students. “I started realizing that really what I have is a passion for building communities.”
He started at Lennar in 1996.
Haddad looked to Lennar CEO and executive chairman Stuart Miller as a mentor, a person familiar with the company said. Miller, who is also executive chairman at FivePoint, took a chance on Haddad, who rose through the ranks to chief investment officer. The two had an almost father-son relationship, though they sometimes clashed, the source said.
At $14, FivePoint’s opening share price was below the expected range. On the first day of trading, Lennar purchased $100 million worth of shares. Lennar still owns a 40 percent share in its spin-off.
But FivePoint wasn’t trying to be a national leader like Lennar, and Haddad’s calling appeared to be on the ground in California, building alliances, wooing the press and bolstering his defenses against naysayers. Lennar’s Miller may have seen that as an opportunity.
“This is a pure play California strategy,” Miller said the day of the IPO.
And Haddad was all in from the start. “We’re thrilled,” he said when Lennar outbid others on what would become Great Park. In 2011, he got financing for the stalled development in a tight lending environment. “It is very unusual in today’s world to be talking about a project of this magnitude as one that is moving forward,” Haddad said at a press conference then. He innovated on marketing, selling a lifestyle “before it was a thing,” a source familiar with the firm said.
After the city of Irvine spent the Lennar money meant for a new park, Haddad had to win over the five-person city council on a new plan. FivePoint would develop the park in exchange for the right to sell more homesites. During a 10-minute break before the vote, in 2013, he walked to a private council room to offer some last-minute concessions, the OC Register reported. The vote, at 1:48 a.m., gave FivePoint most of what it needed. Haddad felt “excited and relieved,” he said, “and now I just want to go get some sleep.”
Still, over time FivePoint’s board soured on Haddad. They felt he cared more about vision rather than selling land at a premium, the person familiar with the company said. In came Hedigan, an Irvine Company alum and an attorney, though Haddad remained on the board and is an advisor.
Hedigan oversaw the crucial shift of entitlements from Shipyard to Candlestick, beginning in 2023 when he said on an earnings call that the company had initiated the process to “obtain an approvable plan that rebalances the current development entitlements,” or the right to keep going on Candlestick while while the Shipyard remains stalled.
Candlestick would become a “standalone development,” he said, later adding in a 2024 earnings call that the approvals would serve “as a catalyst for advancing conversations” with potential partners. The approvals came November that year. Still, the company’s shares are trading at about $6 lately, compared to about $15 at the end of the day it went public, and shareholders have all but written off the San Francisco project.
The parcel that could
There was one piece of the Shipyard whose remediation went smoothly, about 70 acres on the tip of Hunters Point. The Navy had handed it to San Francisco all the way back in 2004, before the project’s troubles began. In 2005, San Francisco conveyed the parcel, known as Parcel A, to Lennar, who fought its usual fight — securing approvals, negotiating land deals, and battling complaints and concerns about gentrification— before breaking ground in 2013.
Lennar never transferred Parcel A to FivePoint and itself built hundreds of homes. “It will be the next full neighborhood in San Francisco,” a Lennar executive said in 2014. “Almost a city within a city.”
The first 88 townhomes sold out in early 2015, a sign that even once-toxic sites could spur demand if they could get to the finish line.
All the while, Candlestick was undergoing demolition — and in Southern California, Great Park was beginning to bloom, and Valencia was getting closer to take-off.
But at the Shipyard, everything outside of Parcel A was frozen. Though Lennar eventually delivered 450 townhomes and condos, the skeleton crew who moved in never felt like they lived in a flourishing master-planned urban community (there’s not even a grocery store yet), though they were grateful for the neighborhood’s affordability.
“What’s there to do? Nothing really,” one resident told the San Francisco Standard in 2024, conceding that he wasn’t bothered by the quiet.
“It’s not very walkable,” another said to the same reporter. “If you want to go out to dinner, you’re driving.”
Homes still for sale at Lennar’s Shipyard are asking for as low as $400,000. Listings describe them as in a prime location directly on the San Francisco Bay. Four are move-in ready, two are labeled “future release.”
Staying relevant
Candlestick could finally break ground this year, though on the adjacent peninsula. FivePoint now has to solidify its financing in a very different world.
San Francisco’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure head told the San Francisco Business Times in 2024 that FivePoint informed him it had the funds on hand to break ground. The company does have $350 million cash on its balance sheet and access to another $217.5 million revolving credit facility, according to filings. That, plus Great Park Neighborhoods revenues could fund early development of Candlestick, and perhaps the firm can pace itself there until it has more clarity on when it’ll actually get some or all of Shipyard from the Navy, according to Robert Rulla, a Fitch Ratings analyst.
When it does need more capital, a pipeline of sites at Candlestick could provide more collateral to a lender. During recent earnings calls, Hedigan has changed his wording from saying the company continues to “explore opportunities to bring in a strategic partner or other capital sources” to a slightly looser phrasing: The company “remains engaged with potential capital sources to advance development,” he said in the latest earnings call in October, reporting third-quarter 2025 results. Other firms on the West Coast that already have entitlements can’t finance them, a knowledgeable insider said.
There will be plenty of time to engage lenders. Although cases concerning the botched cleanup could finally head to trial early this year, the Navy doesn’t expect to transfer the Shipyard land until at least 2036, according to an agreement between San Francisco and the developer.
Will California have solved the housing crisis by then? Will demand for San Francisco living persuade homebuyers to try these twin peninsulas?
If FivePoint finishes Candlestick and Shipyard, it may owe its success to Hedigan, who’s kept the developer’s reputation for doing hard things, even if the market doesn’t have the patience for his timeline. But to bring them to life, the company could do well to heed the advice from its ex-CEO’s 2012 TED Talk, about relevance.
“We cannot survive unless we’re relevant,” Haddad said.