The owner of the Los Angeles Angels paid $60 million for an office campus behind his Phoenix mansion to prevent a parking garage from being redeveloped into luxury apartments.
Arte Moreno, owner of the MLB franchise in Anaheim, bought the 200,000-square-foot office campus at 2710, 2720, 2730 and 2850 East Camelback Road, the Phoenix Business Journal reported. The seller was Florida-based Mainstreet Capital Partners.
The deal for the 12-acre Camelback Lakes complex east of Biltmore Fashion Park works out to $300 per square foot.
But to Moreno, the property was apparently more valuable for what won’t be, rather than what it could become. This summer, the city had rezoned an acre with the garage for 60 high-end apartments behind his 20,500-square-foot mansion, with construction expected to start in June.
Moreno, along with two neighbors, had hired zoning attorneys to oppose the project. Mainstreet Capital had initially planned to build 75 units, but agreed to trim it to 56 feet and 60 units.
The developer even hired a drone pilot to fly at a height equivalent to a 6’2″ man standing on the tallest section of the future building facing Moreno’s mansion at 60 Biltmore Estates Drive.
“Then we shared those images,” Jason Barclay Morris, a zoning attorney for Withey Morris Baugh, who represented Mainstreet Capital Partners on a rezoning of the property for redevelopment, told the Business Journal. “All you see are trees.”
“It’s the ultimate Not in My Backyard move,” Morris said of the sale. “We all wished we had the ability to be that kind of NIMBY.”
As far as Morris knows, Moreno has no plans to build anything on the office complex site.
Last year, Forbes named Moreno as the richest person in Arizona, with an estimated worth of $4.8 billion. He was superseded in March by used car magnate Ernest Garcia II, with an estimated worth of $8 billion.
Moreno, who made his fortune on roadway billboards, bought the Angels in 2003 for $184 million.
The L.A. Angel’s owner is now embroiled in a legal battle after he and his wife backed out of buying a New York penthouse for $34 million.
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Last summer, the former mayor of Anaheim pleaded guilty to a public corruption scandal that led to his resignation and killed the city’s $320 million sale of Angel Stadium to Moreno. The mayor stepped down after an FBI probe for pay-to-play corruption tied him to the stadium deal.
Moreno and his firm, SRB Management, had plans to develop the 150-acre site around the stadium into offices, shops, hotels, restaurants and more than 5,000 homes.
— Dana Bartholomew